With the demise of the Golden Age and the move northward into Christian Spain, Hebrew poetry lost its position at the apex of Hebrew creative writing to a completely new genre, the maqama, rhymed prose fiction, which Hebrew literature borrowed from Arabic. Maqama literature was produced in a social and culture climate that differed from that of the Golden Age. While the poetry of the latter was composed for an educated elite, the more popular character of the maqamas caused them to appeal to a broader audience, the educated and the common people alike. This literature created a variegated world in which every reader found something to his taste, whether realistic or fantastic, elitist or crude; it was filled with gnomic maxims as well as obscenities, virtue and sin, the amusing and the revolting, the charming and the offensive. However, as S.D. Goitein wrote (concerning the Arabic maqama), even more than its rich contents, “the maqama, by its very essence and purpose, is first-and-foremost a linguistic work of art, an ornamental composition of words and verbal embellishments”, and should be assessed “primarily as a most extreme expression of the cult of language”. In the course we shall read a number of Hebrew rhymed stories (by Shlomo Ibn Saqbal, Joseph Ben Meir Ibn Zabara, Yehuda Ibn Shabtay, Yehuda Alharizi and Immanuel Haromi) and discuss the genre’s poetics, focusing on the linguistic devices that serve the “cult of language” that is characteristic of the genre. Course requirements: Final examination.