Qasmuna

Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil (Arabic: قسمونة بنت إسماعيل; fl. 11th or 12th century CE), sometimes called Xemone,[1][2] was an Iberian Jewish poet. She is the only female Arabic-language Jewish poet attested from medieval Andalusia, and, along with Sarah of Yemen and the anonymous wife of Dunash ben Labrat,[3][4] one of few known female Jewish poets throughout the Middle Ages.

Biography

Little is known about Qasmūna's life. Both surviving sources say that her father was Jewish and that he taught her the art of verse. Whereas al-Maqqari simply calls him Ismāʿil al-Yahudi, however, al-Suyuti calls him Ismāʿil ibn Bagdāla al-Yahudi, and says Qasmūna lived in the twelfth century CE.[5] It has been speculated that Qasmūna's father was Samuel ibn Naghrillah (d. c. 1056), or that Samuel was otherwise an ancestor, which would make Qasmuna an eleventh-century rather than a twelfth-century poet, but the foundations for these claims are shaky.[5]

Three poems by Qasmūna survive, due to being recorded by two later anthologists: Al-Suyuti, in his fifteenth-century Nuzhat al-julasāʼ fī ashʻār al-nisā, an anthology of women's verse, and Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari, in his seventeenth-century Nafḥ al-ṭīb.[6][5] Al-Suyuti, and conceivably also al-Maqqari, seems to have derived the material from an earlier anthology of Andalusian verse, the Kitāb al-Maghrib by Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi;[5] but it seems that the verses do not appear in surviving manuscripts of that work.

Works

Three poems by Qasmūna are known.[6]

1

One is part of a verse-capping challenge set by Qasmūna's father. As edited and translated by Nichols, he begins:

To which Qasmūna replies:

The missing word in this verse is assumed to be a word denoting a woman of some kind.[6]

2

The most famous of Qasmūna's poems, widely anthologised, is introduced by the comment that she looked in the mirror one day and saw that she was beautiful and had reached the time of marriage.[6] She then utters this verse:

3

The last of Qasmūna's known poems runs:

References
  1.  Gottheil, Richard; Montgomery, Mary W. (1904). "Ḳasmunah (sometimes called Xemone)". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 7. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. p. 451.
  2. Weinfeld, Eduardo (1948). Enciclopedia judaica castellana, el pueblo judio en el pasado y el presente; su historia, su religión, sus costumbres, su literatura, su arte, sus hombres, su situación en el mundo (in Spanish). Vol. 6. México: Enciclopedia judaica castellana. p. 201.
  3. Qasmuna bint Ismal'il (2007). "Ah, Gazelle". In Cole, Peter (ed.). The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Translated by Cole, Peter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 364.
  4. Taitz, Emily; Henry, Sondra; Tallan, Cheryl (2003). "Sarah of Yemen". The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E. to 1900 C.E. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. pp. 57–59.
  5. Gallego, María Ángeles (1999). "Approaches to the Study of Muslim and Jewish Women in Medieval Iberian Peninsula: The Poetess Qasmuna Bat Isma'il". MEAH. 48: 63–75.
  6. Nichols, James Mansfield (1981). "The Arabic Verses of Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil ibn Bagdālah". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 13: 155–158. doi:10.1017/S0020743800055264.
  7. Qasmuna bint Isma'il (2014). "Seeing Herself Beautiful and Nubile". In Hammond, Marlé (ed.). Arabic Poems: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Middleton, Christopher; Garza-Falcón, Leticia. New York: Everyman. pp. 130–131.
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