الصَّيد كرمز للظُّلم والصَّبر في عالم "تحكموني" ليهودا الحريزي وخلفيَّة هٰذِهِ الأوصاف في الشِّعر العربيِّ

Abstract

Not only have the volumes of literature treating on 'the Chase,' as well as the characters which figure therein – the hunter, his steed, the falcon, the hounds and, of course, the animals being stalked – been at the disposal of Alharizi who borrowed from Arabic verse in his Mahbereth Ha-Sayyād, whether from the jāhiliyya or the mukhadramūn poets, or from Abassid or Umayyad poetry, but also the ethical question centered around the hunting of animals and the fate of man. However, Alharizi's work is perhaps the best in this regard, both in his detailed account of 'the Chase' and in his thorough investigation into the question of God's justice, a discussion which he was far more adept to engage in than his Arab counterpart, seeing that he was raised upon religious and philosophical thought.

Keep in mind that Alḥarizi was not the first of the Spanish Jewish poets to migrate to the lands of the orient, but that Ibn Khalfūn, Ha-Levi, Yisḥaq Ibn Ezra and Moše Bar Šešet all came before him. Despite this, there are the marked influences of Arabic verse on his work – not only more than in the works of the forenamed writers who migrated to the orient, but even more than any Hebrew poet who hailed from Spain, including those of the Muslim epoch, that is to say, during the duration of time in which the Hebrew Spanish poets – from Menahem and Dunaš to Moše ibn Ezra and his contemporaries – produced works while living in Moslem kingdoms and within clear Arabic and Moslem cultural settings. This should be attributed to the fact that, in the latter part of his life, Alharizi spent his days in the lands of the orient and was exposed not only to contemporary Arabic verse, but also to ancient Arabic verse dating back to the jāhiliyya