They were super frum and were being mekayem, b'hidur rav, the following dictum of Chazal: Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel summed up this thought in the words, "Man should not say, 'I do not want to eat meat together with milk; I do not want to wear clothes made of a mixture of wool and linen; I do not want to enter into an incestuous marriage', but he should say, 'I do indeed want to, yet I must not, for my father in Heaven has forbidden it'".
All kidding aside, it is fascinating just how much the times and cultures we live in affect our thoughts and behaviors.
To be fair, we are not lacking homosexual poetry from rabbis today, we are also lacking any erotic poetry, and we are also lacking any poetry about love of G-d. Essentially, we are living in a culture where most Rabbis have zero appreciation of beauty. (Rav Fruman, who was an outlier in a million ways, is an outlier in this as well.)
1) Who on earth says 'mishcav zachornik'? This sounds like a parody of what the autistic kid at YU who thinks he's Charedi because he has a black cappel would say.
2) There are 2 relevant concepts here. The first is the extreme misogyny of Islamic civilization, which naturally leads to an elevation of homosexual intercourse as superior. This is well known to be the case in Afghanistan and Iran (Isfahan was a favourite tourist spot for Victorian perverts). More specifically, it is pederastic intercourse that is elevated under such conditions (also well known in Afghanistan today), hence the references to 'fawns'.
3) The second is Spanish medieval Jewish culture was fully sold on the concept of the Torah being an exoteric veil for a higher form of culture. What exactly that was differed (the most popular version eventually became what we call 'kabbalah'). Not incidentally, this led to a devaluation of prohibitions people found for various reasons incommodious. A lot of Jews got a good Talmudic education because that was what you learned in school, but were really what we would call Conservative.
4) There is a certain parallel here to Chassidic society today. In yeshivos, it is well known that non-anal homosexual acts of various kinds are rife, even sometimes with systems of pimps in the more badly run yeshivos. Those who are caught will be disciplined, but not expelled as they would be if they were caught with a girl. This is tolerated on the grounds that with young marriage most of them will grow out of it, which they do, but everyone knows some don't, and hence there are certain mikvehs you shouldn't go to of an evening. Being strict about this kind of thing is Litvish, which is kind of representative of the difference between the two groups, for better and for worse.
5) Who claims that Yehuda heLevi was a gadol hador and on what basis would they make such a claim?
"In yeshivos, it is well known that non-anal homosexual acts of various kinds are rife, even sometimes with systems of pimps in the more badly run yeshivos." What in the heck are you talking about?
Look, I grew up yeshivish. No one ever said the word gay because that was considered a bad word. If they'd refer to it, they'd say mishkav zachar or mishkav zacharniks. Regarding YU, the only thing I heard about it was that they have a "mishkav zachar club".
Additionally, I heard rumors about gay activity in Ner Israel (which incidentally is a harryish yeshiva) but NEVER heard anything like you're describing. Maybe I was a naive innocent bochur but I think you're hallucinating.
'Litvish'. Just like how 'Litvish' get taught crude MO apologetics about שלא עשני אשה in school.
I'll give you most extreme story I know. A friend who who learned at Bobov, but wasn't chassidish himself, was told there was a certain room never to go to. He snuck in once, and two older bochurim were masturbating each other in front of an open Holocaust book depicting some camp survivors, because this was the only picture of women allowed in the yeshiva. But if you want some citations, go become friends with some chassidim and after a few years they'll tell you.
Interesting that y'all got sidetracked but this is the important part of the comment: "There are 2 relevant concepts here. The first is the extreme misogyny of Islamic civilization, which naturally leads to an elevation of homosexual intercourse as superior."
This is accurate.
Is there anything in the Talmud about what a bunch of weirdos men are sexually? Any discussion of what we would call paraphilias?
"The second is Spanish medieval Jewish culture was fully sold on the concept of the Torah being an exoteric veil for a higher form of culture. What exactly that was differed (the most popular version eventually became what we call 'kabbalah'). Not incidentally, this led to a devaluation of prohibitions people found for various reasons incommodious. A lot of Jews got a good Talmudic education because that was what you learned in school, but were really what we would call Conservative."
Very interesting. "Spanish" history is fascinating, almost too complicated to grasp. What we call "Spain" and what Jews in particular think of when they think of Spain is only the Muslim part but actually Christian (Catholic) kingdoms always existed in the north. There were Jewish communities there.
I bring this up because the fact is that by the 14th century Judaism collapsed. Many converted. After the Reconquista the majority of Jews stayed in Spain - as Catholics. Your observation explains some of that.
I don't understand the point of this. If it is to justify your own sexual preferences, as an atheist you wouldn't need that. And if it is to show that the rabbis used to me more tolerant of these preferences, these poems don't show that at all. It's just another example of the abysmal intellectual standards of reddit atheists.
And if Chaim Walder published his diaries for other sickos to read, that would tell you something about the rabbinic attitude towards adultery and molestation? Remember, these poems we are talking about are not just love poems but are (seemingly) homosexual and as Mascil Binah points out, most likely pederastic in nature, and you are trying to prove from them that the rabbinic attitude was that these things are ok? I don't think you need me to tell you how terrible that reasoning is.
Nowadays, our attitude is "there's nothing wrong with eating treif, but we don't because its assur". That was apparently their attitude to mishkav zachor.
I am absolutely fascinated by your reasoning here. Is this based on the premise that Rabbi Yehudah Halevi could not have done anything wrong, and therefore his gay pedophile love poems constitute the equivalent of a halachic teshuva or mussar sefer recommending that one is permitted to write gay pedophile love poems?
I’m genuinely curious, and I’m not trying to argue with you. Do you honestly not see how rabbinic figures writing and publishing homoerotic poetry one of which, in the case of Moshe Ibn Ezra, appears to graphically describe an actual homosexual encounter, and Yehuda Haleivi expressing attraction to specific men, with the first one by Shmuel HaNagid seemingly suggesting that the sin is worth the pleasure of indulging his homosexual urges, could be seen as indicative of a greater tolerance for such preferences?
Well, I am genuinely curious about your opinion also. Binyamin says he wrote this for fun, not to justify anything. I have my suspicions, but I will keep them to myself. But you seem to be taking this as a bit more than fun. So my question is, have you ever read the Kuzari? Does he seem like somebody who doesn't take the laws of the Torah seriously? Have you ever read Avraham Ibn Ezra's commentary on Tanach, where he quotes R' Yehudah HaLevi in numerous places? Does this seem like a friend who doesn't take the Torah seriously? So what do you think actually happened here? I think there are a few possibilities.
I honestly am not completely sure what to make of it. I’m also not an expert on the culture and times in which these men lived, so I don’t have a firm opinion. If I had to guess (which is not worth much), I’d say that it seems likely that religious imagery and language were used differently than they are today. For example, when someone today says, “I had the worst day ever,” they don’t mean it literally it’s just a way of expressing that they had a really bad day. I wonder if much of religious discourse in the past functioned in a similar way, using dramatic or poetic language that wasn’t always meant to be taken at face value. But again, I really don’t know much other then they seem to have been a lot more comfortable talking about their Homosexual urges and encounters then I’d think they would be based solely on their religious writings.
So you speculate that Rabbi Yehuda Halevi understood that the laws of the Torah (according to the Rabbinic interpretation) weren't mean to be taken at face value? After having read the Kuzari, do you think this is a plausible interpretation of his position?
Or maybe it's the other way around? Without being experts on the culture and times in which these men lived, perhaps a poem that seems homoerotic to us had more innocent connotations for them? I'm not saying that this is the explanation here, but it's something to consider. If I had to guess, I would say that these poems were written at a different stage of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi's life.
I’m not entirely sure. it can be a mix of both I think. These ideas can be taken at face value as necessary for identity and society, but in a way that’s different from how we typically understand them.
For example, I’m sympathetic to the idea that pornography should be illegal, not because I believe adults shouldn’t have the freedom to make their own choices, but because criminalizing it would allow the government to intervene whenever boundaries are pushed too far. It would provide a mechanism to shut it down if it began to degrade the overall quality of life in society.
If I lived in a time when everything was framed through the lens of God and religion, I might say something like, “God destroys societies because of pornography.” And I would absolutely mean it, just not in the way a traditionally religious person today would interpret it. My personal conduct might also reflect that difference.
I’m not making the claim that I am sure this is the case. Just guessing. The poems definitely seem Homoerotic I’m not sure how they could be anything other than that. It’s possible he lived on the edge for a while and did Tsuvah too. I’d need to know more about his biography and culture he lived in to have an opinion on that possibility
To be entirely fair, while the last poem I quoted is my favorite it's a little more complicated.
Rav Yehuda Alharizi, a Spanish rabbi and poet from the 12th and 13th century, quotes this as a poem from an unnamed man from Baghdad:
לו שר בנו עמרם פני דודי
מתאדמים העת שתות שכר
ויפי קווצותיו והודו יופיו
לא חק בתורתו ואת זכר
(Book of Tahkemoni, Gate 50)
Jeffrey Gorsky translates this poem quite beautifully as:
"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."
(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.
I edited the post to reflect the more complicated origins of the Al-harizi poem
Yes, what does this anonymous poem prove? If somebody wanted to kill his wife badly, and wrote a little poem about what a beautiful thing it would be, would that prove that killing one's wife is not a deviant act? This is your reasoning?
Stop getting all defensive. Nobody is proving anything. It's just a supremely fascinating find. (And it does bother me a bit. Not really sure what to make of it.)
Well, mr. Bpsb thought he was proving something. I guess whether it is supremely fascinating depends on whether the underlying issue speaks to somebody on personal level. Whatever.
There is a good amount of scholarship on the question of "What the **** is going on?!?!" vis a vis the homoerotic poetry of the rishonim. I'd recommend Dan Pagis' book, Moshe ibn Ezra u'Vnei Doro, as a perspective I personally find compelling. For what it's worth, the rabbis who wrote/compiled these poems do often claim that they are merely being metaphorical. To quote one example, Shmuel ha-Nagid writes (ben Tehillim no. 75) ידידי, תשמעו שירי ונפשי / כמו תדעו ליראת אל סמוכה // ולא פשר כפשר שיר שלמה בדודי צח ועין כברכה, implying that his poems are just like the book of שיר השירים is a metaphor. Shmuel haNagid's son Yehosef, who compiled his father's poetry, makes this exact disclaimer on the first page of the compilation, "even though I include poetry of desire, he intends to refer to כנסת ישראל and its partner." Moshe ibn Ezra writes similarly in his Kitaab al-Muhadhara. But either way, if a rosh yeshiva would write poetry like this today, they'd probably be fired anyway no matter what explanation they gave. (Also by the way, most historians believe Moshe ibn Ezra and Avraham ibn Ezra were not related; despite having the same family name and living in approximately the same time and place, those coincidences do happen)
This is somewhat known in Orthodox Jewish circles.
I recall Rabbi Wien saying that Yehuda Halevi wrote love poetry but later regretted it probably due to this content as "straight" love was still an acceptable topic in pre-yeshivish times.
But the Frum response will be that they are false attributions. R Moshe already did that with Yehuda Hachasid on Chumash (for not being fanatically anti-gay).
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Kh6tylBq29VMUsBOfWhqc?si=96097fc8db9f402a this and other episodes about paytanim from this excellent shiur on tefillah give greater historical context to these types of poems - poets who wanted to prove their capabilities were following set formats of andalusian poetry, later in life some regretted it and dedicated themselves only to religious poetry
They were super frum and were being mekayem, b'hidur rav, the following dictum of Chazal: Rabbi Simeon ben Gamaliel summed up this thought in the words, "Man should not say, 'I do not want to eat meat together with milk; I do not want to wear clothes made of a mixture of wool and linen; I do not want to enter into an incestuous marriage', but he should say, 'I do indeed want to, yet I must not, for my father in Heaven has forbidden it'".
All kidding aside, it is fascinating just how much the times and cultures we live in affect our thoughts and behaviors.
To be fair, we are not lacking homosexual poetry from rabbis today, we are also lacking any erotic poetry, and we are also lacking any poetry about love of G-d. Essentially, we are living in a culture where most Rabbis have zero appreciation of beauty. (Rav Fruman, who was an outlier in a million ways, is an outlier in this as well.)
The Ben Ish Chai wrote lots of new poems that are popular in Israeli-Sephardi siddurim IIRC.
1) Who on earth says 'mishcav zachornik'? This sounds like a parody of what the autistic kid at YU who thinks he's Charedi because he has a black cappel would say.
2) There are 2 relevant concepts here. The first is the extreme misogyny of Islamic civilization, which naturally leads to an elevation of homosexual intercourse as superior. This is well known to be the case in Afghanistan and Iran (Isfahan was a favourite tourist spot for Victorian perverts). More specifically, it is pederastic intercourse that is elevated under such conditions (also well known in Afghanistan today), hence the references to 'fawns'.
3) The second is Spanish medieval Jewish culture was fully sold on the concept of the Torah being an exoteric veil for a higher form of culture. What exactly that was differed (the most popular version eventually became what we call 'kabbalah'). Not incidentally, this led to a devaluation of prohibitions people found for various reasons incommodious. A lot of Jews got a good Talmudic education because that was what you learned in school, but were really what we would call Conservative.
4) There is a certain parallel here to Chassidic society today. In yeshivos, it is well known that non-anal homosexual acts of various kinds are rife, even sometimes with systems of pimps in the more badly run yeshivos. Those who are caught will be disciplined, but not expelled as they would be if they were caught with a girl. This is tolerated on the grounds that with young marriage most of them will grow out of it, which they do, but everyone knows some don't, and hence there are certain mikvehs you shouldn't go to of an evening. Being strict about this kind of thing is Litvish, which is kind of representative of the difference between the two groups, for better and for worse.
5) Who claims that Yehuda heLevi was a gadol hador and on what basis would they make such a claim?
"In yeshivos, it is well known that non-anal homosexual acts of various kinds are rife, even sometimes with systems of pimps in the more badly run yeshivos." What in the heck are you talking about?
Look, I grew up yeshivish. No one ever said the word gay because that was considered a bad word. If they'd refer to it, they'd say mishkav zachar or mishkav zacharniks. Regarding YU, the only thing I heard about it was that they have a "mishkav zachar club".
Additionally, I heard rumors about gay activity in Ner Israel (which incidentally is a harryish yeshiva) but NEVER heard anything like you're describing. Maybe I was a naive innocent bochur but I think you're hallucinating.
I was perfectly clear that I was talking about Chassidish yeshivos. Satmar are particularly famed for it, but it's more or less across the board.
Charedim say מנווול or פייגעלע.
I used the term I grew up with in litvish yeshivish circles. Citation needed for your crazy claim about yeshivas.
'Litvish'. Just like how 'Litvish' get taught crude MO apologetics about שלא עשני אשה in school.
I'll give you most extreme story I know. A friend who who learned at Bobov, but wasn't chassidish himself, was told there was a certain room never to go to. He snuck in once, and two older bochurim were masturbating each other in front of an open Holocaust book depicting some camp survivors, because this was the only picture of women allowed in the yeshiva. But if you want some citations, go become friends with some chassidim and after a few years they'll tell you.
To quote a wise man, "sounds like a parody of what the autistic kid at YU who thinks he's Charedi because he has a black cappel would say."
Interesting that y'all got sidetracked but this is the important part of the comment: "There are 2 relevant concepts here. The first is the extreme misogyny of Islamic civilization, which naturally leads to an elevation of homosexual intercourse as superior."
This is accurate.
Is there anything in the Talmud about what a bunch of weirdos men are sexually? Any discussion of what we would call paraphilias?
I've heard a Rebbe say it when he wanted to refer to Ed Koch.
"The second is Spanish medieval Jewish culture was fully sold on the concept of the Torah being an exoteric veil for a higher form of culture. What exactly that was differed (the most popular version eventually became what we call 'kabbalah'). Not incidentally, this led to a devaluation of prohibitions people found for various reasons incommodious. A lot of Jews got a good Talmudic education because that was what you learned in school, but were really what we would call Conservative."
Very interesting. "Spanish" history is fascinating, almost too complicated to grasp. What we call "Spain" and what Jews in particular think of when they think of Spain is only the Muslim part but actually Christian (Catholic) kingdoms always existed in the north. There were Jewish communities there.
I bring this up because the fact is that by the 14th century Judaism collapsed. Many converted. After the Reconquista the majority of Jews stayed in Spain - as Catholics. Your observation explains some of that.
I don't understand the point of this. If it is to justify your own sexual preferences, as an atheist you wouldn't need that. And if it is to show that the rabbis used to me more tolerant of these preferences, these poems don't show that at all. It's just another example of the abysmal intellectual standards of reddit atheists.
It's just interesting that rabbis wrote poems like these. It's not trying to justify or prove anything
That's all?
I think it's important to show that frum Jews attitudes to sexuality was different back then and has strongly changed (for the worse in my opinion)
While the issurim were the same, there wasn't a guilt complex and it wasn't spoken about only privately in the name of Tznius.
How do you see anything about "frum Jews"? That's like using Chaim Walder as a proof that frum Jews hold child molestation and adultery is ok.
R Yehuda Halevi was comparable to Chaim Walder?
And Chaim Walder never wrote anything like this at all for the public to read.
And if Chaim Walder published his diaries for other sickos to read, that would tell you something about the rabbinic attitude towards adultery and molestation? Remember, these poems we are talking about are not just love poems but are (seemingly) homosexual and as Mascil Binah points out, most likely pederastic in nature, and you are trying to prove from them that the rabbinic attitude was that these things are ok? I don't think you need me to tell you how terrible that reasoning is.
Girls were also married off at unacceptable ages back then. A bit disingenous to pretend that age is what bothers you about it.
Nowadays, our attitude is "there's nothing wrong with eating treif, but we don't because its assur". That was apparently their attitude to mishkav zachor.
Eh, perhaps not. Perhaps they had no problem with kissing and touching, but held the horses on the actual "key in the socket"
I am absolutely fascinated by your reasoning here. Is this based on the premise that Rabbi Yehudah Halevi could not have done anything wrong, and therefore his gay pedophile love poems constitute the equivalent of a halachic teshuva or mussar sefer recommending that one is permitted to write gay pedophile love poems?
Actually, given the cover-ups I've seen, I would not be shocked at such a conclusion. Perhaps Frum Jews don't really care much about it after all.
I’m genuinely curious, and I’m not trying to argue with you. Do you honestly not see how rabbinic figures writing and publishing homoerotic poetry one of which, in the case of Moshe Ibn Ezra, appears to graphically describe an actual homosexual encounter, and Yehuda Haleivi expressing attraction to specific men, with the first one by Shmuel HaNagid seemingly suggesting that the sin is worth the pleasure of indulging his homosexual urges, could be seen as indicative of a greater tolerance for such preferences?
Well, I am genuinely curious about your opinion also. Binyamin says he wrote this for fun, not to justify anything. I have my suspicions, but I will keep them to myself. But you seem to be taking this as a bit more than fun. So my question is, have you ever read the Kuzari? Does he seem like somebody who doesn't take the laws of the Torah seriously? Have you ever read Avraham Ibn Ezra's commentary on Tanach, where he quotes R' Yehudah HaLevi in numerous places? Does this seem like a friend who doesn't take the Torah seriously? So what do you think actually happened here? I think there are a few possibilities.
I honestly am not completely sure what to make of it. I’m also not an expert on the culture and times in which these men lived, so I don’t have a firm opinion. If I had to guess (which is not worth much), I’d say that it seems likely that religious imagery and language were used differently than they are today. For example, when someone today says, “I had the worst day ever,” they don’t mean it literally it’s just a way of expressing that they had a really bad day. I wonder if much of religious discourse in the past functioned in a similar way, using dramatic or poetic language that wasn’t always meant to be taken at face value. But again, I really don’t know much other then they seem to have been a lot more comfortable talking about their Homosexual urges and encounters then I’d think they would be based solely on their religious writings.
So you speculate that Rabbi Yehuda Halevi understood that the laws of the Torah (according to the Rabbinic interpretation) weren't mean to be taken at face value? After having read the Kuzari, do you think this is a plausible interpretation of his position?
Or maybe it's the other way around? Without being experts on the culture and times in which these men lived, perhaps a poem that seems homoerotic to us had more innocent connotations for them? I'm not saying that this is the explanation here, but it's something to consider. If I had to guess, I would say that these poems were written at a different stage of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi's life.
I’m not entirely sure. it can be a mix of both I think. These ideas can be taken at face value as necessary for identity and society, but in a way that’s different from how we typically understand them.
For example, I’m sympathetic to the idea that pornography should be illegal, not because I believe adults shouldn’t have the freedom to make their own choices, but because criminalizing it would allow the government to intervene whenever boundaries are pushed too far. It would provide a mechanism to shut it down if it began to degrade the overall quality of life in society.
If I lived in a time when everything was framed through the lens of God and religion, I might say something like, “God destroys societies because of pornography.” And I would absolutely mean it, just not in the way a traditionally religious person today would interpret it. My personal conduct might also reflect that difference.
I’m not making the claim that I am sure this is the case. Just guessing. The poems definitely seem Homoerotic I’m not sure how they could be anything other than that. It’s possible he lived on the edge for a while and did Tsuvah too. I’d need to know more about his biography and culture he lived in to have an opinion on that possibility
"if it began"????
Well it flies in the face of what R Moshe said that gay sex is an inherent "toaivah" and not a natural urge.
Why? What is your reasoning?
I guess you didn't read the whole post where Moshe Ibn Ezra says this:
"Had Moshe 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."
To be entirely fair, while the last poem I quoted is my favorite it's a little more complicated.
Rav Yehuda Alharizi, a Spanish rabbi and poet from the 12th and 13th century, quotes this as a poem from an unnamed man from Baghdad:
לו שר בנו עמרם פני דודי
מתאדמים העת שתות שכר
ויפי קווצותיו והודו יופיו
לא חק בתורתו ואת זכר
(Book of Tahkemoni, Gate 50)
Jeffrey Gorsky translates this poem quite beautifully as:
"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."
(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.
I edited the post to reflect the more complicated origins of the Al-harizi poem
Yes, what does this anonymous poem prove? If somebody wanted to kill his wife badly, and wrote a little poem about what a beautiful thing it would be, would that prove that killing one's wife is not a deviant act? This is your reasoning?
Stop getting all defensive. Nobody is proving anything. It's just a supremely fascinating find. (And it does bother me a bit. Not really sure what to make of it.)
Well, mr. Bpsb thought he was proving something. I guess whether it is supremely fascinating depends on whether the underlying issue speaks to somebody on personal level. Whatever.
There is a good amount of scholarship on the question of "What the **** is going on?!?!" vis a vis the homoerotic poetry of the rishonim. I'd recommend Dan Pagis' book, Moshe ibn Ezra u'Vnei Doro, as a perspective I personally find compelling. For what it's worth, the rabbis who wrote/compiled these poems do often claim that they are merely being metaphorical. To quote one example, Shmuel ha-Nagid writes (ben Tehillim no. 75) ידידי, תשמעו שירי ונפשי / כמו תדעו ליראת אל סמוכה // ולא פשר כפשר שיר שלמה בדודי צח ועין כברכה, implying that his poems are just like the book of שיר השירים is a metaphor. Shmuel haNagid's son Yehosef, who compiled his father's poetry, makes this exact disclaimer on the first page of the compilation, "even though I include poetry of desire, he intends to refer to כנסת ישראל and its partner." Moshe ibn Ezra writes similarly in his Kitaab al-Muhadhara. But either way, if a rosh yeshiva would write poetry like this today, they'd probably be fired anyway no matter what explanation they gave. (Also by the way, most historians believe Moshe ibn Ezra and Avraham ibn Ezra were not related; despite having the same family name and living in approximately the same time and place, those coincidences do happen)
woops, I typed לא פשר instead of לו פשר
This is somewhat known in Orthodox Jewish circles.
I recall Rabbi Wien saying that Yehuda Halevi wrote love poetry but later regretted it probably due to this content as "straight" love was still an acceptable topic in pre-yeshivish times.
But the Frum response will be that they are false attributions. R Moshe already did that with Yehuda Hachasid on Chumash (for not being fanatically anti-gay).
Wow!! This is fascinating!!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Kh6tylBq29VMUsBOfWhqc?si=96097fc8db9f402a this and other episodes about paytanim from this excellent shiur on tefillah give greater historical context to these types of poems - poets who wanted to prove their capabilities were following set formats of andalusian poetry, later in life some regretted it and dedicated themselves only to religious poetry
Can you give links and sources to this?
I added links. Most of them are in The Dream of the Poem, a collection of Medieval Jewish poetry translated by Peter Cole.