The Poet’s Rabbi

Why did eminent Victorian poet and playwright Robert Browning (1812-1889) name his famous poem on aging “Rabbi Ben Ezra?” The question is straightforward; the answer less so.

The poem—a dramatic monologue or soliloquy comprising 32 stanzas (sestets)—was published in the collection Dramatis Personae (1864), and begins with an optimistic exhortation to not only live life to the fullest, but to brave life’s duration, and embrace one’s golden age, with faith in the divine plan:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

The speaker is apparently meant to be the peripatetic medieval exegete, grammarian, and philosopher Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1089-1164 or 1092-1167), known colloquially among Jewry as “the Ibn Ezra,” because he was the preeminent exemplar of an illustrious dynasty; the audience is apparently a synagogal congregation (though some construe the listener as the speaker’s younger wife). The rabbi holds forth and espouses his deep-seated philosophy of life, advocating courage in the face of life’s sundry trials and travails:

Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!

He accents the importance of gratitude to God for granting one the opportunity to exist, grow, and gain experience—to make sense of life and the world through one’s senses and intellect:

Yet gifts should prove their use:
I own the Past profuse
Of power each side, perfection every turn:
Eyes, ears took in their dole,
Brain treasured up the whole;
Should not the heart beat once “How good to live and learn?”

Not once beat “Praise be Thine!
I see the whole design,
I, who saw power, see now love perfect too:
Perfect I call Thy plan:
Thanks that I was a man!
Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!”

From the sage’s perspective, old age is, in a sense, the guerdon for surmounting the myriad challenges inherent to youth:

Therefore I summon age
To grant youth’s heritage,
Life’s struggle having so far reached its term:
Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.

Indeed, the rabbi reminds his hearers that aging is akin to a purification process, that with senescence comes refinement, discernment, and wisdom:

Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.

Later, the sage adjures listeners to dispense with the dispiriting notions of transience and impermanence, and with the benighted Epicurean tenet of carpe diem, whose emphasis on the temporal distracts focus from the eternal, employing a famed biblical metaphor from the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah to make his point:

Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

The sage urges his fellow(s) to maintain a positive outlook and to transcend worldly concerns, for all beings have a purpose and form part of God’s grand design:

Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal,
The new wine’s foaming flow,
The Master’s lips a-glow!
Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what need’st thou with earth’s wheel?

The rabbi closes by addressing God directly as a creature appealing to his Creator to burnish his handiwork until achieving perfection in a preordained process that terminates in decease:

But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,Did I,—to the wheel of life
With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:

So, take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!

 Just as easily, Browning might have called the poem something along the lines of “An Elder Imparts Spiritual Advice” or even “The Jew’s Wisdom,” etc., but instead he gave it the specific title “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” although nothing in the poem reveals why.

What exactly is Robert Browning’s connection to, and preoccupation with, Ibn Ezra?

The mystery deepens further when we realize that this poem wasn’t the first in Browning’s oeuvre to feature Abraham ibn Ezra—but, in point of fact, the second.

*****

Almost a decade prior to the publication of “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” Browning published the poetry anthology Men and Women (1855), which included the poem “Holy-Cross Day”; judging by its overtly Christian title, one would be forgiven for not assuming that its verses featured a revered rabbi. This poem—also a soliloquy—is prefaced with a bracketed diary entry, ascribed to a Catholic bishop’s secretary and purportedly dating to 1600, regarding an annual conversionist sermon preached before the Jews of Rome, whose attendance was mandatory. But what the poem mainly limns is the defiant attitude of the Jews compelled to endure this despicable and deeply resented practice, a form of ecclesiastical persecution imposed on Roman Jewry and Jewish communities in the Papal States, that lasted until its abrogation by Pope Pius IX in 1846 (it was only briefly revived thereafter).

In “Holy-Cross Day,” while they are supposed to be a rapt audience attuning to the bishop’s homily, the Jews instead recite under their breath what Browning calls “Ben Ezra’s Song of Death”:

For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
Called sons and sons’ sons to his side,
And spoke, “This world has been harsh and strange;
“Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
“But what, or where? at the last or first?
“In one point only we sinned, at worst.

“The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
“And again in his border see Israel set.
“When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
“The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
“To Jacob’s House shall the Gentiles cleave.
“So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.

In this pair of stanzas can be seen the reason why this poem is highly problematic: it combines Jewish affirmation with supposed Jewish transgression and guilt regarding Jesus of Nazareth. Browning places in Ben Ezra’s mouth words that imply Jewry erred in not recognizing the divinity of Christ: “In one point only we sinned, at worst.” The poem suggests that Jews were given the divine word to safeguard, but only “Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.” And in one stanza, a contrite Ben Ezra addresses God directly:

“Thou! if thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
“By the starlight, naming a dubious name!
“And if, too heavy with sleep—too rash
“With fear—O Thou, if that martyr-gash
“Fell on Thee coming to take thine own,
“And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne—

“Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.

Indeed, Jews have been bruised and much more—not by the blemish of guilt or sin, however, but by misguided followers of Jesus who tormented them throughout the centuries. Browning has his Ben Ezra concede that Jewry’s denial of Christ was an outrage for which Jews have made amends through their oppression and persecution at the hands of the more numerous and dominant Christians, the heirs of Rome, over the millennia:

“By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
“By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
“By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
“By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
“By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
“And the summons to Christian fellowship,—

“Ben Ezra’s Song of Death,” and the poem itself, conclude, at least, by reaffirming Jewish pride and Jewry’s providential destiny to return to its ancestral homeland:

“We boast our proof that at least the Jew
“Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.
“Thy face took never so deep a shade
“But we fought them in it, God our aid!
“A trophy to bear, as we march, thy band,
“South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!”

“Holy-Cross Day,” per the late American literary critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom, “is not one of Browning’s masterworks.” Bloom was being diplomatic; the poem, which includes doggerel verses (e.g., “Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!” and “Bow, wow, wow—a bone for the dog!”), does not rise to the spiritual or philosophical plateaux of Browning’s later dramatic monologues. Of course, the historical Ibn Ezra never uttered such self-flagellating drivel as he is made to do in this poem, because he never thought it. Admittedly, the hypocritical Christians portrayed in the poem come off even worse than its Jews, but by ostensibly imposing on Jewry the burden of sin and guilt for Calvary, and thereby inadvertently justifying persecution of Jews in the centuries since, Browning did the Jewish people no favors. What he had intended as a satire on the misconduct of conversionist sermons nonetheless incorporates false charges of, and imputes a bogus sense of culpability for, deicide. Browning had meant to defend Jewry against the Catholic Church’s heavy-handedness, but the ham-handed manner wherein he did so contains offensive elements. Perhaps we may speculate that Browning, upon reflection and after receiving feedback from Jewish readers, recognized that in one point he had sinned, and was bruised thus. It would take him nine years—when he recast Ibn Ezra in a more fitting role in “Rabbi Ben Ezra”—to make amends.

Browning biographer C. H. Herford (Robert Browning, 1905) similarly suggests that the poet countered his earlier “Ben Ezra’s Song of Death” in “Holy-Cross Day” with the later poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” which is “a great song of life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative splendor, indistinguishably blend. It is not for nothing that Browning put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. Ben Ezra’s thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour for the pangs and throes of the fray.”

And yet, even if Browning’s second depiction of Ibn Ezra can be explained by his first, our original mystery remains unresolved: why did Browning connect specifically to the personage Abraham ibn Ezra in the first place?

Browning’s father had a library containing Hebraica, which may have included works by Ibn Ezra. Both Browning and Ibn Ezra were spiritually-minded poets; both sojourned in Lucca, Italy (Ibn Ezra in 1145, Browning in 1849, 1853, and 1857); both were residents of London (Browning for decades in his youth and again in his later years, Ibn Ezra in 1158-1159). Ibn Ezra is believed to have died in Calahorra (Spain), but a fanciful anecdote mentioned by Moses ben Hasdai Taku (fl. 1250-1290) in his partly extant polemical treatise Ketav Tamim (c. 1220) claims that Ibn Ezra died in England from an illness after encountering a pack of black dogs—which were, in fact, demons—standing and threatening him as he rode through a forest. The veracity of this anecdote aside, it is possible that Browning heard of this legend, which may have cemented Ibn Ezra as a figure in his consciousness.

There were, therefore, several affinities between the two men. According to later Browning biographer Clyde de L. Ryals (The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography, 1993), “Browning almost never wrote a poem that was not a vehicle for self-display.” Ibn Ezra, therefore, became Browning’s preferred surrogate when it came to imparting religious messages to his audience via dramatic monologues. And Browning may have admired his peripatetic forebear’s intrepid but pious lifestyle: “He was attracted to his Jewish characters for the same reason that he was attracted to his Orientals, Italians, Spaniards, or medieval alchemists. They all had something adventurous, strange, romantic and profound to offer. And the profundity lay always in the humanity,” according to David Goldstein, former curator of Hebrew books and manuscripts at the British Library (“Jews and Robert Browning: fiction and fact,” Jewish Historical Studies, 1987-1988).

Ultimately, absent the Victorian versifier himself, or any existent material disclosing the reason for his preoccupation with the medieval sage, we are left to conclude that Robert Browning must have felt himself a kindred spirit with Abraham ibn Ezra, regardless of the seven centuries separating them, such that he repeatedly enlisted him as his literary proxy—his mouthpiece for urging abiding faith despite persecution, his spokesman for advocating life-affirming hope.