הרב דונש בן לברט

Rav Dunash HaLevi ben Labrat (c. 4680/920–c. 4750/990), known also by his Hebrew name Adonim HaLevi, was a poet, grammarian and commentator of the golden era of Spanish Jewry — the man who gave Hebrew poetry its meter, and whose Shabbat zemer D’ror Yikra is sung at tables the world over. Born in Fez in Morocco, he traveled in his youth to the yeshivot of Bavel and learned under Rav Saadia Gaon; on his return to Morocco his poems spread his name, and songs were even composed in his honor. Chasdai ibn Shaprut, who labored to gather the finest minds to Cordoba, invited him to Spain, and there Dunash met the grammarian Menachem ben Saruk — the start of a famous machloket, sharpened by Menachem’s harsh criticism of Rav Saadia Gaon, Dunash’s teacher.

Dunash was the first to bring the quantitative meter of Arabic verse into Hebrew, setting the sheva na and the chataf-vowels in place of the Arabic short vowels — the meter of yetedot and tenuot on which the whole edifice of Sefarad’s Hebrew poetry was afterward built. The students of Menachem ben Saruk attacked him for bending the forms of the Tanach to a foreign meter, and his own talmid, Yehudi ben Sheshet, rose hotly to his defense. Beside D’ror Yikra he composed Devai Haser, which opens the zimun at a sheva brachot seudah in the communities of Ashkenaz, and his riddles are among the first known in the Hebrew language. A poem by his wife, written on his leaving home, came to light among the fragments of the Cairo Geniza — the only known Hebrew verse of a Jewish woman from those centuries.

In grammar his great work is the Teshuvot Dunash on the Machberet of Menachem, dedicated to the nasi Chasdai ibn Shaprut: he was the first Hebrew grammarian to distinguish a transitive from an intransitive verb, the first to arrange verbs by their three-letter roots, and he faulted Menachem for closing his eyes to the kinship of Hebrew and Arabic. He also wrote some two hundred hasagot on Rav Saadia Gaon, to which Rav Avraham ibn Ezra later replied in the Gaon’s defense. Rashi brings Dunash in his commentary on the Torah, and the dispute of the two schools was weighed generations later in the Hachraot of Rabbeinu Tam, who mostly upheld Menachem, while Rav Yosef Kimchi, father of the Radak, sided with Dunash. He was niftar in Cordoba about 4750/990; in Yerushalayim’s Rechavia neighborhood, the street that bears his name crosses the street of Menachem ben Saruk.