A Note on the Style and Prosody of Miqdash me'at

Jacob Goldenthal established the text of his edition of Miqdash meʿat (Vienna, 1851) on the basis of three manuscripts that have not yet been definitively identified. Today, fifty-nine manuscripts, containing different parts of the text, are known to exist in various libraries. Of these, seventeen contain the entire extant text, i.e., the Ulam and the Hekhal. Six manuscripts include a commentary on part of the work. None contains Rieti's autograph. Of the extant portion of Miqdash meʿat, two cantos are presented here, permitting a view of Rieti's characteristic style, rhetoric, and prosody.¹

Rieti's style is characterized by complexity and variety, testifying to a rich spiritual life. On the one hand, there is its public voice. Rieti often speaks in the name of the Jewish people, employing the first-person pronoun. Like the early payyetanim, who were synagogue precentors, Rieti identifies his fate with that of the Jewish people. In the longing for intimacy with a God who hides His face, in the consciousness of the burden of exile, and in the longing for redemption, the identification of the individual speaker in Miqdash meʿat with the people at large is absolute. Rieti's relationship with the language of the piyyut finds expression in his use of textual ornamentation, acrostics, and biblical tags that were typical of ancient synagogue poetry. This was no empty pose, for Rieti saw himself as being charged with a task on behalf of the people.

On the other hand, Miqdash meʿat is a personal creation, steeped in delicate lyricism and introspection that is both humble and incisive. It reveals Rieti's spiritual world, his artistry, ideas, feelings, and moods, including such intimate moments as a conversation with his dead father (Hekhal, canto 4) or his personal prayers (Ulam, cantos 1-2). He speaks of such personal matters as the date of his birth (Ulam, canto 1, lines 109-17), his decision to write the book, and the difficulties in the way of his writing, alluding both to contemporary events and to his personal activities, spicing the work with a dash of concrete realism.

The strongest impression is made by the work's nonrealistic, mystical element—present both explicitly and implicitly—which here and there takes the shape of a report of an actual transcendental experience, and which enfolds the entire work in a halo of mystery. But Rieti is not only a payyetan, not only a personal poet writing against a specific background of time and place, and not only a merkavah mystic; he is also a philosophical poet. On top of an underlying Neoplatonism supporting kabbalistic traditions and mystical inclinations, Rieti maintains loyalty (a loyalty not free of apologetics) to Aristotle and especially to the Maimonidean tradition. This intellectual element imposes on his work order and method that are evident in his careful formulations and categorization, as well as in the clear criteria by which the material is organized, in the methodological preambles, and the like. This stylistic variety, within which Rieti moves freely, often takes the reader by surprise. To read Miqdash meʿat is like swimming in an unexpected ocean, where wave pursues wave; despite the introduction setting forth "exactly" the contents and order, it is hard to anticipate while examining one wave what the succeeding wave will be like and what subject will be borne on it. Nevertheless, Rieti's writing is concretized in a coherent message, and its various elements come together to make a single and distinctive statement.

Rieti declares openly his attitude toward his own poetry and poetry in general. Conscious that a large part of the treasures of Jewish learning had been lost, he devotes his poetry to restoring forgotten knowledge and to preventing future erosion. What advantage does he have over famous scholars who preceded him but failed? At the beginning of the book, he takes the modest attitude that his great predecessors received and transmitted actual knowledge, whereas he is only shaping the ancient truths in new words and in a new poetic form. But at the end of the second canto...