"After a while," concludes Joseph, "I said to him, 'I have sojourned long
enough in this city, the ways of which please me not. Ignorance prevails,
and poetry is unknown; the law is despised; the young are set over the old;
they slander and are impudent. Let me go home after my many years of
wandering in a strange land. Fain would I seek the place where dwells the
great prince, Rabbi Sheshet Benveniste, of whom Wisdom says, Thou art my
teacher, and Faith, Thou art my friend.' 'What qualitie,' asked Enan,
'brought him to this lofty place of righteousness and power?' 'His
simplicity and humility, his uprightness and saintliness.'"
And with this eulogy of the aged Rabbi of Barcelona, the poem somewhat
inconsequently ends. It may be that the author left the work without
putting in the finishing touches. This would account for the extra stories,
which, as was seen above, may belong to the book, though not incorporated
into it.
It will be thought, from the summary mode in which I have rendered these
stories, that I take Zabara to be rather a literary curiosity than a poet.
But Zabara's poetical merits are considerable. If I have refrained from
attempting a literal rendering, it is mainly because the rhymed-prose
_genre_ is so characteristically Oriental that its charm is incommunicable
in a Western language. Hence, to those who do not read Zabara in the
original, he is more easily appreciated as a _conteur_ than as an
imaginative writer. To the Hebraist, too, something of the same remark
applies. Rhymed prose is not much more consistent with the genius of Hebrew
than it is with the genius of English. Arabic and Persian seem the only
languages in which rhymed prose assumes a natural and melodious shape. In
the new-Hebrew, rhymed prose has always been an exotic, never quite a
native flower. The most skilful gardeners failed to acclimatize it
thoroughly in European soil. Yet Zabara's humor, his fluent simplicity, his
easy mastery over Hebrew, his invention, his occasional gleams of fancy,
his gift of satire, his unfailing charm, combine to give his poem some
right to the title by which he called it--"The Book of Delight."