The eminent turn-of-the-sixteenth-century theologian and exegete Isaac Abarbanel was hardly the first Jewish scholar to receive established principles and ways of thinking and a large body of classical Hebrew literature from the past. Nor was he the first to feel the Jewish past's “rich and intimidating legacy” weighing on his intellectual and literary shoulders. Indeed, it has been noted that medieval Jewish writers habitually felt compelled to justify their intellectual-literary existence, and that they often did so using an almost conventional literary genre largely designed for this purpose—the introduction.

In their rhetoric, the ex-conversos who settled in “lands of freedom” outside the Iberian Peninsula tended to emphasize the anguish and lack of freedom they had endured while in the orbit of the Inquisition–in stark contrast to the free and thriving Jewish collective life they had now built outside it. If the Peninsula had been a swamp of “Egyptian idolatry,” the Jewish ex-converso communities in Amsterdam, Venice, Livorno, and London (to name only the most vibrant) were, by implication, encampments on the way to the Holy Land. Yet one aspect of their new condition subtly undermined the ex-conversos' confidence as Jews vis-a-vis the gentile world. Ever sensitive to their image, they were exquisitely aware of their now unambiguous identification in Christian eyes, not with conviction rewarded, not with faith triumphant, but with a defeated and exiled people.

The poet Abba Kovner was a partisan and freedom fighter during World War II (1942–1945), made aliyah in 1945, and published his first long poem, ‘Ad lo ’or (“Until There Was No Light”), in 1947. At the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence he fought on the Egyptian front (1947–48), serving as a cultural officer, or politruk in the Giv'ati Brigade. Preda me-ha-darom (“A Parting from the South”), his second long poem and one of the pivotal works by a modern Hebrew poet, was written against the background of the War of Independence. However, critics have not yet been able to find a fitting place for it in the canon of Hebrew poetry and culture, although several serious attempts have been made. The present study does not refer to every aspect of this complex poem but focuses on one particular point. I contend that “A Parting from the South” implies an attempt by the visionary speaker of the poem to compel the young country, soon after the war, to part from the world of death, from cultic memories of the dead and guilt feelings toward them (the dead in the 1948 war in Israel and the dead in the ghettos of Nazi Europe in World War II). Abba Kovner tries to detach himself, and his readers, from death, to liberate them from the old perspectives.