The medieval Hebrew poetry of Spain (shirat Sefarad) is one of the summits of Jewish literary creation.
A diwan attributed to a fourteenth-century Avraham Encaoua, preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford (ms. Heb. d. 77), comprises liturgical poems (piyyutim), Andalusian love poems, and elegies (kinot) for the persecutions of 1391.
The piyyut (Hebrew liturgical poetry) saw an extraordinary development in medieval Spain. Great poets such as Shlomo ibn Gabirol (1021–1058), Yehouda Halevi (1075–1141), and Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1167) carried Hebrew poetry to an unrivalled summit, blending the Arabic metrical forms (the qasida, the muwashshaha) with a profoundly Jewish content. The Encaoua, living within this literary environment, naturally absorbed this poetic tradition into their rabbinic vocation. The diwan of Avraham Encaoua, mingling secular and liturgical poems, illustrates the Encaoua capacity to straddle the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, between Talmudic rigor and poetic effusion.
Among the most poignant pieces of Avraham Encaoua's diwan are elegies (kinot) composed after the massacres of 1391. These poems of lamentation belong to a long tradition of catastrophe literature (sifrut ha-shoah) in medieval Judaism, from the kinot composed after the destruction of the Temple to the poems of the Rhineland Crusades (1096). Yet Avraham Encaoua's style stands out for its use of the classical Andalusian verse to express Jewish grief — a linguistic and cultural fusion that is itself the expression of a vanishing world. These kinot were incorporated into the Tisha be-Av liturgy in certain North African communities, thereby perpetuating the memory of the events of 1391 in the collective Sephardic consciousness.