On Wine, Wandering, and Wisdom: Musar and Adab in Medieval Sepharad

Abstract

This article focuses on three Hebrew narrative works written in medieval Sepharad: Yosef ibn Zabarah’s Sefer ša‘ašu‘im [The book of delights], Yehudah al-Ḥarizi’s Sefer taḥkemoni [The book of Taḥkemoni], and Mišle he-‘araḇ [The sayings of the Arabs], by one Yiṣḥaq ha-Qaṭan. It takes their chapters on wine, traveling, and wisdom as a point of departure for examining the genre of musar or traditional ethical literature. It also reveals the multifaceted nature and function that this Hebrew genre acquired in the medieval period thanks to its contact with the Arabic tradition and in the context of the wide geographic diffusion of adab literature.