לפרשת ההתקבלות של הסונט העברי

The well known verse form of the sonnet has been popular in Hebrew poetry for the last several hundred years. As only few are aware, Hebrew poetry was the first to adopt the sonnet from its Italian origin. Emmanuel of Rome left in his Maḥbarot 38 beautifully composed Hebrew sonnets. Yet from the time of his death at about 1330 until as late as 1500 no Hebrew sonnet is known to have been written. Love sonnets were particularly neglected and are hardly found in Hebrew poetry until well into the 17th century. The decline of the Hebrew sonnet in the 15th century can be explained, in my opinion, by several factors: by lack of the thorough knowledge of the Hebrew language demanded by the complicated metrical system which had been established by Emmanual for the Hebrew sonnet; by a growing tendency in Italian Jewry of this period to restrict Hebrew poetry to religious matters, and above all by a rejection of Emmanuel's poetry which provided the sole existing model of a Hebrew sonnet. Hebrew culture after 1350 seems to have suffered from an 'Emmanuel Complex'. Emmanuel's poetry is both admired and denounced, imitated and scorned by scholars of the period. The bold eroticism which characterizes the maḥbarot made them hard to accept by the pious Jewish community. The sonnets were particularly problematical since love was their major theme and since a part of them was written in a highly realistic style borrowed from Italian contemporary burlesque. Another difficulty connected with the sonnets was the theological one arising from the fact that Emmanuel adopted the pious 'dolce stil nuovo' with its Christian connotations into his love sonnets. Emmanuel's work seems to have been censored and in fact banned after his death. Only towards 1500 did antagonism to his work lessen, as is evident from the fact that The Maḥbarot were published in 1492. The revival of the Hebrew sonnet about this time was not a coincidence. It came about as a part of a general renaissance of Emmanuel's poetics. However, attempts to reaffirm Emmanuel's excommunication were still made as is evident by a halachic ruling in the Shulḥan Aruch published in Venice in 1556. Hebrew sonneteers of the 16th century, eager to protect the renewed genre that bore so strongly its creator's impression confined their sonnets to non-controversial topics, refraining especially from the theme of love which was liable to evoke Emmanuel's 'obscenity'. The Hebrew love sonnet, however, also experienced a revival — at first, towards the end of the 16th century, in the wedding poem in which the theme of love was permissible, and then, in the 17th, in other poems as well. Thus, with the renewal of its most famous theme the genre of the sonnet achieved again its full realization in Hebrew.