The youngest member of ‘Adat Nognim was Shelomo Bonafed. A prolific poet,
he wrote with apparent ease about everything he encountered, and his work is marked above all by its individuality, vitality, density, and poignancy. Far more
than the other poets of the Saragossan circle, Bonafed reacted in his poems to the events of his day and the hardships faced by the Jewish community. He saw himself as both a defender of the faith in troubled times (on which see, “World gone Wrong,” below), and, eventually, the last Hebrew poet of Spain: “When I die,” he wrote, conjuring the most famous musicians and singers of the Psalms,
“Yeduthun and Heman will pass away with me. When I disappear, my generation will be silent as a widower.” The Golden Age of Andalusian poetry was a
distant memory, having come to an end in the mid-twelfth century with the emigration of Yehuda HaLevi to the east and the Ibn Ezras to the north; the
Catalan-Provençal school of the thirteenth century had no heirs; Todros Abulafia’s work (unknown to Bonafed) was a thing of the past; and the founders
of ‘Adat Nognim were dying out. As the self-perceived last poet of a late renascence, with his potential audience evaporating (through conversion) before
him, Bonafed bore a heavy burden. Though hardly a major figure, he responded valiantly, and the extant manuscripts of his work contain several hundred poems, only a handful of which have been published. Of these, fewer still have been presented with a critical apparatus that would make his work accessible to the general reader.
