In an interview on Jewish History

What Bran is working on, whether he’s an historian of ideas or a literary historian, are texts in Arabic and in Hebrew that were written in Spain. In that culture, poetry was the social currency of the age. If you were a cultured man then you wrote poetry or at least you were the patron of poets. And of course the Muslim poets wrote in Arabic and imitated the style of the Koran. So as we’ve said, the Jews were part of this culture, and they had the wine gardens and the little boys and little girls and all the rest of it like everybody else, but they were not Muslims. And of course they could not write in the style of this sacred book of somebody else. So they invent Hebrew poetry, in a certain way, imitating the metric patterns of the Arabic poetry, but in Hebrew and based on the style of the Bible, which for them, equally, was divine and perfect.

What does Bran make of all this?

Bran uses the word ‘compunctious’ to describe their state of mind. On the one hand they’re absolutely comfortable. On the other hand, they’re not. They’re not really the powers in the state. The greatest of the Hebrew poets was this man, Judah Halevi, who lived that life and eventually rejected it and said ‘you’re fooling yourselves – you’re just being used by these Muslim rulers. Your idea of a kind of Zion in Spain is a pipe dream….

So the poetry holds within it something of that uncomfortable, or compunctious relationship. But does the poetry survive?

No. It survives for a while in southern France, but eventually it fades away. And you don’t really get any more poetry until modern times.