Imber, Naphtali Herz

(1856–1909)

   Hebrew poet. Imber, born in Galicia, wrote Hebrew poetry from an early age. In 1882 he became secretary to Laurence Oliphant, a British journalist, in Palestine and two years later published Barkai (‘Dawn’), his first collection of poetry. This included the poem Hatikvah (‘The Hope’) which became the Zionist and then the Israel national anthem. Imber translated Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam into Hebrew. IMMANUEL ben-Solomon of Rome c. 1261–after 1328. Italian poet. Born in Rome, Immanuel lived in a number of cities in Italy, tutoring children of the wealthy. Machbarot (‘Compositions’, 1491), is a collection of Hebrew verses and rhymed prose, in a form which was imitated from medieval Spanish Jewish literature. The last of these ‘compositions’ describes the author’s journey through heaven and hell and is clearly based on the Divine Comedy of his great contemporary, Dante. Gay and witty, and frequently frivolous, the ‘compositions’ were regarded by some later rabbis as unfit reading matter because they tended to immorality. In spite of this, portions of the work were translated into English, Italian, Yiddish, German, Hungarian and Latin.