Scheindlin the Poems of Raymond Schiendlin Deal

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 works of literature.

Raymond Schiendlin explains that the Jewish people accepted the Arab language in order to become part of that society (Wine 6). 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 to the history of the Jewish people. Such allusions are absolutely intentional and indicative of the cultural importance of religion to the poet.

Further the content of the poems themselves are heavily influenced by the teachings of the Torah as opposed to the Arabic culture. The concept of death that is presented in the poems is reflective of the Jewish tradition. In the Jewish faith, there is no Hell. There is a Heaven for those who have behaved well during their lifetime, but those who have committed acts of evil are doomed to punishment in being led to nothingness. This is shown in several of the poems which concern death such as when Samuel the Nagid talks about the corpse of a dead man and how others detest the dead body "with worms and maggots in its burial clothes" (Wine 165). Jewish people do believe in Heaven, a concept reflected in Samuel the Nagid's poem where he explains that those who are good-hearted will die and "at last the soul ascends to join the Soul" (Wine 173). This too is a far cry from the Arabic perception of the world as it pertains to life and death but only serves to strengthen the poem's ties to the Jewish faith and to the culture of those who practice it.