“To Breathe Life into the Past as a Means of Bringing New Blood to the Present”: The Instructional Poetry of Abraham Ibn Ezra

Abstract

Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092-1167), the renowned exegete and grammarian who was as well a mathematician and an astronomer, a liturgist and an author of secular Hebrew poetry left his mark on the pages of history as a consummate Renaissance man who greatly contributed to diverse knowledge areas. He was the first to introduce to Hebrew secular poetry the debate genre, realism, humor, and the instructional genre. All of these already existed in Arabic poetry, but they had not been adopted by the...