The Rabbis' Gay Love Poetry

A Journey into the Garden

So back in the day, before I would have been screamed at as a heretic and before gay people were villainized by the religious world, medieval rabbis were having fancy wine parties in the gardens of Al-Andulas and writing Hebrew poetry. A lot of this Hebrew poetry were love poems and a lot of those love poems were to other men. Here's a selection of a few homoerotic love poems written by Rishonim.

Here’s the first one I encountered:

In fact, I love that fawn,
cutting roses in your garden—
which is why I've earned your wrath.

If you could see him,
the others would never find you.

"Scrape me some honey
from your hive," he said.

"I'll have mine from your tongue."
I replied.

Then he bristled
and said to me, sullen:
"And sin before the living God?"

"The sin's on me," I answered, "my lord.

-Shmuel HaNagid or Samuel the Prince (993 CE - 1056?)

Here, the speaker is trying to seduce another man. When the man tells him “chas veshalom! It’s an aveirah!” the speaker reassures him that he’ll take the aveirah so don’t worry.

Well, Shmuel Hanaggid, who knows what he was up to? He’s not like a real rabbi. He was grand vizier to the muslims. They probably had a bad influence on him. A real gadol wouldn’t write this. Well, what about the Author of the influential Kuzari himself, Yehuda HaLevi?

That Day While I Had Him

”That day while I had him on my knees
he saw himself there in my eyes and tried
to trick me. He kissed them ever so lightly—
kissing himself, not me. . . .”
- Yehuda Halevi

This is all a mashal, you apikores! You think rishonim would write such things? It's like shir hashirim - a parable between Hashem and klal yisroel. Well, how about this poem where Yehuda Halevi wrote the name of the lover he was writing to?

To Ibn Al-Mu’allim

Gently, my hard-hearted, slender one,
be gentle with me and I’ll bow before you.
I’ve ravished you only in looking—
my heart is pure, but not my eyes:
They’d gather from your features
the roses and lilies mingled there.
I’d lift the fire from your cheeks
to put out fire with fire,
and then when I was thirsty,
it’s there I’d look for water.
I’d savor the lip that glows like ruby—
like coals in the tongs of my jaws.
My life hangs by scarlet threads;
my death is now concealed in dusk . . .
I find that nights have no end,
where once no dark divided my days:
For Time then was clay in my hands
and Fortune— the potter’s wheel.

The most explicit poem comes from Moshe Ibn Ezra, a cousin to the famous Abraham Ibn Ezra and writer of many piyutim we still say in davening today:

The Desire of My Heart

"Oh, come put me to the test!
He was enticed and we went to his mother’s house.
There he bent his back to my heavy yoke.
Night and day I alone was with him.
I took off his clothes and he took off mine.
I sucked at his lips and he suckled me.
But once his eyes stole my heart,
his hand fastened the yoke of my sin,
and he looked for grievances.
He raged against me and shouted in fury,
“Enough! Leave me alone!
Do not drive me to crime, do not lead me astray!
”Oh, do not be unrelenting in your anger, fawn.
Show me the wonders of your pleasure, my love.
Kiss your friend and fulfill his desire.
If you wish to revive me, then give life;
but if you would instead kill—then kill me."

My favorite poem comes from Rav Yehuda Alharizi, a Spanish rabbi and poet from the 12th and 13th century, who attributes the below poem to an unnamed man from Baghdad:

"Had Moses seen how my friend’s face

blushes when he is drunk,

and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands,

he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man."

(Translated by Jeffrey Gorsky, Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain)

In his book, Al-Harizi calls the poem "malei zimah v'tumah," full of lewdness and impurity, and he includes ten poetic responses to this poem saying how terrible this is and how the author will be punished for writing such a poem. Peter Cole in Dream of the Poem quotes some scholars that Al-Harizi actually wrote this poem himself and attributed it to an anonymous Baghdadi as a literary device, allowing Al-Harizi to publish the poem without backlash.

Now imagine if we found flowery love poetry from a Rosh yeshiva today?! It would be the scandal of the century. Yet, Yehuda Halevi and Shmuel Hanaggid were the gedolei hador of their time and not only wrote love poetry but gay love poetry! Perhaps this proves that the Jewish world didn't always look like we imagine it did. And the idea of an Orthodox Jewish history where everyone kept everything in the Torah from the times of Moshe Rabbeinu until the terrible haskala is nothing more than a myth.