This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature explores the ways Arabic, Jewish and Christian intellectuals in medieval Iberia (courtiers and clerics) adapt and transform the Andalusi go-between figure in order to represent their own role as cultural intermediaries. While these authors are of different religious, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, they use the go-between, an essential figure in the Andalusi courtly discourse of desire, to open up a secular, more tolerant intellectual space in the face of increasingly fundamentalist currents in their respective cultures. The way this study focuses on the hybrid discourses and identities of medieval Iberia as Muslim, Jewish and Christian responses to continual contact/conflict reflects a methodological approach based in Cultural and Translation Studies.

The triple aim of Hamadhání in this work, first translated into English in 1915, appears to have been to amuse, to interest and to instruct; and this explains why, in spite of the inherent difficulty of a work of this kind composed primarily with a view to the rhetorical effect upon the learned and the great, there is scarcely a dull chapter in the fifty-one maqámát or discourses. The author essayed, throughout these dramatic discourses, to illustrate the life and language both of the denizens of the desert and the dwellers in towns, and to give examples of the jargon and slang of thieves and robbers as well as the lucubrations of the learned and the conversations of the cultured.

When Christendom was groping amid the superstitions of the Dark Ages, and the Norsemen were ravaging the western part of Europe, and the princes of Islam were cutting each other's throats in the name of Allah and his Prophet, Abu'l-Ala'l-Ma'arri was waging his bloodless war against the follies and evils of his age. He attacked the superstitions and false traditions of law and religion, proclaiming the supremacy of the mind; he hurled his trenchant invectives at the tyranny, the bigotry, and the quackery of his times, asserting the supremacy of the soul; he held the standard of reason high above that of authority, fighting to the end the battle of the human intellect. An intransigeant with the exquisite mind of a sage and scholar, his weapons were never idle. But he was, above all, a poet; for when he stood before the eternal mystery of Life and Death, he sheathed his sword and murmured a prayer.

This translation and study extend our knowlege of the Arabic genre of the maq?ma by some years. If translations of the genre are lacking, literary critical studies of it are even rarer. Therefore, the work will be of interest to scholars of Arabic, Spanish, and other literatures, to comparativists, literary historians, critics, and theoreticians.