Little is known about Yedaya ha-Penini (ca. 1285–1340) except that he wrote several works of arcane religious poetry, following in the footsteps of his father Abraham of Béziers. Both were products of a Provençal Jewish culture that was heavily influenced by, but distinct from, that of nearby Spanish Jewry. Tamar Marvin reviews a recently published English translation of Penini’s poetic ethical discourse Sefer ha-Pardes, “The Book of the Orchard.”
Sefer ha-Pardes is surely a window into a lost world, with its late-medieval interest in the liberal arts, the didactic pleasure it takes in instructing its readers morally, and the linguistic play that clearly delights its seventeen-year-old author. Yedaya ha-Penini’s father . . . wrote, among other works, a poem called Elef Alefin (“A Thousand Alephs”), in which, as promised by the title, every word begins with the letter alef. Yedaya himself wrote a spin-off, Bakashat ha-Memim (“The Request of the Mems”), in which, yes, every word begins with a mem.
“The king fears two people: the doctor and the artist,” Yedaya opines. “Learning is like food, and stories arouse the appetite.” Sections of such pithy epigrams are interspersed with longer parables, all within the conceit of the request from Yedaya’s friend for “a memorial of universal principles on human moral attributes.”
Much of the pleasure of reading Sefer ha-Pardes, it must be said, resides in the Hebrew, rather uncomplicated by medieval belletristic standards, and therefore plausibly accessible to most readers of the language.
Read more on Lehrhaus: https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/lost-literary-worlds-a-review-of-david-torollos-edition-of-yedaya-ha-peninis-sefer-ha-pardes/