Review
Journal of Semitic Studies What Bran is working on, whether he’s an historian of ideas or a literary historian, are texts in Arabic and in Hebrew that were written in Spain. In that culture, poetry was the social currency of the age. If you were a cultured man then you wrote poetry or at least you were the patron of poets. And of course the Muslim poets wrote in Arabic and imitated the style of the Koran. So as we’ve said, the Jews were part of this culture, and they had the wine gardens and the little boys and little girls and all the rest of it like everybody else
