Scheindlin The poems of Raymond Schiendlin deal with the viewpoints of life from the Jewish people. He claims that the poems written by Jewish people during the medieval times as secular, but this view ignores the very difficult position that Jewish people of the period were put in. In the early centuries AD, Jewish people were kicked out of several countries, including England. In most of the countries where they were allowed to live such as Italy, they were not considered citizens of that nation. Christian nation in particular took issue with Judaism and did everything in their power to punish Jewish people for supposed crimes and to expel them from their nations (Short 64). Schiendlin's position is based upon the assimilation of Jews into various cultures, such as the Muslims and this is certainly true. However, no amount of cultural assimilation could allow the Jewish people to completely remove their unique culture from their literature as indicated by the fact that all these centuries later there is still a unique Jewish identity in present...

Yet, this does not take into account the fact that they also retained their own individual Hebrew language as well (Wine 29). If they Jewish poets were indeed writing for a purely secular audience or if indeed the whole population had become secular in their views, then they would have universally adopted Arabic. The poems themselves are written in Hebrew showing that they were intended to be read not by the Arabs, but the people who spoke and read Hebrew.
Besides the historical and social inferences which show the adherence to Jewish life, there are other indications of religiousness in the poems themselves. In the first poem which Schiendlin writes about in the introduction to the book Wine, Women, and Death. The first sentence of that poem reads: "A full pool, like Solomon's basin" (Wine 7). Even the first line of this poem is a reference to the Old Testament and…