The Courtier as the "Scepter of Judah"

Yomtov ben Hana (Abenhanya) was the scribe of the Jewish community of Montalbán in Aragon during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Ben Hana's poems express the courtiers' widespread image—and self-image—as fulfillers of the prophecy "the scepter shall not depart from Judah" (Gen. 49:10), a reputation they enjoyed in virtue of their political power in Spain. Foremost among the courtiers, in ben Hana's view, was Judah ben Lavi, described in one of the poems as a lion, a venerable leader at the end of a long line of exalted figures, from Adam through the Patriarchs and Kings Saul and David to his own day, and even as a "son of God." In time, most of Saragossa's Jewish courtiers succumbed to the pressure to convert to Christianity, culminating in the mass conversions of 1414-1415. Ben Lavi was an exception. Faithful to his people and religion and, with his family, almost a lone Jewish remnant of the Lavi-Cavalleria family in Saragossa, ben Lavi fulfilled, to some extent, the vision of ben Hana's poem.