Project Overview

The Judeo-Arabic Love Poems Project introduces nearly one hundred Arabic poems that circulated in and around the western Algerian port city of Oran in the seventeenth century. Written down in Hebrew script by members of the city’s Jewish community, these Arabic songs—some of them laments, others descriptions of nature, but most of them about worldly and divine love—were integrated into Jewish worship, where they were woven together with Hebrew para-liturgical texts to form long musical suites, each of them called a ṭarīq or path.

The project provides digital access to this unusual collection of Arabic texts, as well as transcriptions, translations, and commentary. These poems have much to teach us about musical and poetic repertoires among Arabic speakers of the region in the seventeenth century, Maghribi Jewish liturgical practice, Muslim-Jewish intimacy, and the porous boundary between Spanish-ruled Oran and its Muslim hinterlands.