Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was the poet of Jewish national rebirth and a leading light of cultural Zionism. To be more precise, he was a power station. Composing poems, writing essays, founding journals, raising up the sparks of Israel's past, Bialik became an essential source of energy for Jewish cultural revival.  

Among the pre-modern figures whom Bialik channeled and championed was Shmuel Hanagid (993–1056), Samuel the Prince: a Renaissance man who lived in southern Spain four centuries before the Florentine Renaissance. In the course of his life, Hanagid practically ruled the Muslim city-state of Granada as the kingdom's grand vizier, served as the Granadan army's chief of staff, and developed into one of the leading rabbinic figures of his generation. Nor were his prodigious talents limited to the realms of politics, war, and Jewish law. The prime minister, general, and rabbi was also a great poet.

Unlike many of his contemporaries in the "Golden Age" of medieval Hebrew literature, Hanagid never wrote explicitly liturgical verse. But religious convictions and feelings permeate his work—his exuberant celebrations of wine, beauty, friendship, and battle no less than his dark contemplations of loss, decay, and death. Scholars routinely group his poems in the category known as shirei hol, secular or profane verse; more accurately, they're profane songs written in the shadow of the divine.

The figure of Hanagid loomed large in the mind of Spanish Jews for generations. And then, for some reason that still hasn't been adequately explained, he disappeared from Jewish history—his unrivalled career forgotten, most of his matchless poems going underground. And that is where Bialik, whose enthusiasm for Golden Age poetry had been slow to kindle but quick to burn, re-enters the picture. In the 1920's, he was given access to a complete manuscript of Hanagid's poems and he was blown away, writing to friends in Tel Aviv, "This man is one of a kind. There's no one like him in our history." No mean commander himself, Bialik issued a visionary summons to redeem all of Golden Age poetry, a summons answered by successive generations of close researchers who prepared full critical editions of the major and minor figures.

Two years ago, Tel Aviv University Press issued a new edition of Hanagid's poetry, this one meant for general readers of Hebrew. As one of the editors writes, the book constitutes "a response to Bialik's passionate call . . . to restore [Golden Age poetry] to the living, developing current of modern Hebrew literature."

It couldn't happen at a better time, for Hanagid is blessedly untimely. Embracing, in Hillel Halkin's phrase, "the full range of human experience," his poetry like his persona cuts against the grain of our specializing age. It and his life also represent an implicit challenge to our attenuated, contemporary forms of religion. Hanagid regarded the full expression of our human powers as a religious duty; but he was also intimately familiar with the limitations of human power. His voice, "sealed and stored" for a thousand years, can still nourish

those who drink with excellent hearts
and hold their glasses wisely,
and keep the laws of Kohelet,
fearing death,
          and the fury to come.

This voice, with its capacity to unsettle and enliven Judaism's soul, is exactly what Bialik had in mind.

Further Reading:

• Grand Things to Write a Poem On, by Hillel Halkin,  Gefen.  An "autobiography" of Shmuel Hanagid in 64 poems, translated and introduced.

• Shmuel Hanagid, by Peter Cole,  Princeton University Press.  Selected poems, including the lines cited above, in translation.