THE "UBI SUNT" THEME IN MEDIEVAL HEBREW POETRY By Norman Roth, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuerunt" ( "Where are they who were in the world before us? ") is a common theme of early Christian writers and of the Muslim preachers.1 As successfully demonstrated by P. Keseling, the most likely source for this theme is the Old Testament and not the Greek writers; or at least the authors of the Hebrew Bible and of the apocryphal Baruch did not derive the theme from the Greek, as Becker had thought. The locus classicus is Deut. 32. 26: "I said, I will blow them away (or: scatter them - afeihemlfa 'ah); I will make their memory cease among men. " The Vulgate, however, understood the Hebrew to be eifo' heim ("where are they?"), and accordingly rendered: "Ubinam sunt?" In Deut. 32. 37 we find: "And it is said: Where are their gods, the rock in whom they trusted. " Isaiah 19. 12: "Where are they, then, the wise men? And let them tell thee now. . . " Isaiah 36. 19: "Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? " Particularly apposite to our theme is Baruch 3. 16-19: "Where are the princes of the heathen, And such as ruled the beasts that are upon the earth; They had their pastime with the fowls of the air, And they that hoarded up silver And gold, wherein men trust And of whose getting there is no end? For they that wrought in silver, and were so careful, And whose works are past finding out, They are vanished and gone down to the grave, And others are come up in their steads. " Scarcely any attention has been given to the prevalence of this theme in medieval Hebrew poetry. This article will examine the theme in some repre sentative secular poems of the medieval Spanish school. Moses Ibn Ezra, whose personal tribulations often caused his poetry to be pessimistic and gloomy, has left several examples: Where are the graves of all the men That died on the earth from days of old? One grave is digged upon another, And corse is laid to rest on corse; In holes in the ground they lie together ? The bits of chalk and the precious stones.2 (These lines are rather reminiscent of Hamlet's famous "Alas, poor Yorick" speech, as we imagine the poet standing in an ancient cemetery and con templating that he, like they, will come to rest here.) I have seen upon the earth spacious mansions, Palaces of ivory, with lofty chambers And pillars upon carved pedestals ? Houses richly adorned and filled with things of beauty ? 56