החטיבה האחרונה בפיוטי האזור

The adoption of the Arabic form of the muwashshah to liturgical Hebrew poetry in the eleventh century was one of the most daring and decisive steps taken in the history of the Spanish Piyyut. Religious lyric was greatly enriched by exploiting the themes and especially the intrinsic lyrical nature of the secular muwashshah. This was done either by employing the formal general norms of muwashshah writing or by directly imitating a specific secular muwashshah. This paper concentrates on the similarities between the last segments of secular and liturgical muwashshahat. Whereas the process of ending the secular muwashshah was determined mostly by its final couplet (kharja), the process of ending the religious muwashshah was dictated primarily by the poem's eminent liturgical function (i.e., serving as a poetic introduction to prayer). In both cases, however, the penultimate segment is a function of the final segment. The poem is written, as it were, from the end back. Furthermore, in both the secular and the liturgical genre there exist fixed formulae of ending. The conventions and norms of the penultimate unit in the secular genre were widely discussed in my article in HaSifrut (1977), of which the present paper is a continuation and a complement.