Description
This book deals with the Hebrew liturgical poems from Spain known as “personal reshut”. Among students of Medieval Hebrew poetry these poems are considered to possess outstanding artistic merit and to stand at the apex of Spanish Jewish piyyut. In my study I have tried to identify the linguistic factors responsible for the poems’ powerful aesthetic effect, treating medieval liturgical poetry as works of literature, to be analyzed through modern poetic (structural and cognitive), linguistic (Ferdinand de Saussure) and philosophical (Immanuel Kant, William James, Rudolf Otto, Ludwig Wittgenstein) theories, and in light of conventional studies of Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain.