Limits of Interpretation,” treats the several poems penned by Jewish authors in honor of Muslim and Christian addressees (in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, and Castilian). The chapter studies the discursive strategies through which Jews praised non-Jewish rulers and explores how Jews used panegyric to negotiate their political position within local and imperial structures. Although recognizing the temporal authority of non-Jewish potentates while maintaining traditional Jewish stances on sacred history could certainly be awkward, interreligious panegyrics reveal various strategies for accommodating these rival claims. Further, the chapter investigates the methodological issues involved in determining whether words of praise should be read subversively as containing a “hidden transcript” that conceals a poetics of Jewish resistance.
A brief afterword revisits some major points of the book.
CHAPTER 1
Performance Matters: Between Public Acclamation and Epistolary Exchange
And my speech I purified, smelted, and cleansed
on balanced scales, marked it out with a stylus….
I worked on it from afternoon to evening. It is sweet like honey….
Recite it every Sabbath like the readings from the Torah and the Prophets,
write and recall it throughout the generations.
—Hai Gaon
These are verses from the conclusion of a lengthy panegyric (more than two hundred lines, all in quantitative meter and monorhyme) by Hai Ben Sherirah (d. 1038), gaon of the Sura academy in Baghdad, in honor of Rav Yehudah Rosh ha-Seder, a dignitary in Qairawan. After the wedding of Yehudah’s son Dunash, Yehudah sent a letter to Hai, along with a monetary gift for the academy. In the panegyric, Hai expresses gratitude for the gift and offers extensive praise for Yehudah, Yehudah’s wife,1 Dunash, and the bride’s family. A small portion of the praise for Yehudah is as follows: “Through him nations in Togarmah and Qedar are blessed. His kindness is upon all like rising vapor and incense. All his oils are scented like spiced early rain, aloe, myrrh, and cinnamon, every powder burning (Sg 3:6). His beneficence is great, too vast to measure. Who can seek out his praise and who can count it when he gives without asking, disperses for others to keep. A thousand gold pieces are like a gerah in his eyes. Before him a hundred thousand kikarim are like an agorah. To every patron he is a king upon a throne and seat; before him others are like concubines.”2
In the poem, Hai also refers to the arrival of Yehudah’s letter and gift: “It arrived like lightning reaching Venus, shining and gleaming. I kissed it and fastened it on me like a sash. I set it in my place exposed, not concealed, and showed it to every guest to rejoice with me and sing. My portion from his wedding that was sent as a gift (ashkarah) will be considered by God an offering and sacrifice (minḥah ve-azkarah). He made it ransom for him for pardoning and atonement. Out of [the gift], I made a holiday [for scholars] and a special day of rejoicing for all the sages of my academy, for lifting spirits and exchanging gifts (terumiyah ve-liteshurah).”3
We begin this section on the social function of Jewish panegyric with this poem because it captures several aspects of the complex dynamics that we will be discussing in this and the following chapter. It is clear that this panegyric was presupposed by and participated in a broad social and administrative system that involved trans-Mediterranean communal bonds, correspondence, the sending of monetary donations, and hyperbolic address. Yehudah held the title Rosh ha-Seder (“head of the order”), which would have been bestowed upon him by a Baghdadi gaon—likely, in this case, because of philanthropic and scholarly activity.4 The concluding dedication conveys that Hai composed the poem from noon until night and commands that others learn and recite it on the Sabbath and new moons to be remembered for generations. Following the poem, the letter continues with praise and assures the recipient that “our companions, students, and loved ones” will “learn and teach [the poem] and publicize it far and wide.” Those who hear it will “not find all this praise strange or foreign” but rather “a word aptly spoken” (cf. Prv 25:11).5
Here we witness the sending of a poem from a gaon, a man of the highest spiritual and intellectual rank, to a prominent donor and communal leader who was nonetheless the gaon’s social subordinate in a far-off community. Despite his higher status, the gaon took the posture of a poet praising his mamdūḥ, appropriate because the donor was arguably a kind of “patron.” The panegyric was part of an epistolary exchange whereby the poem, despite its ornate style, functioned essentially as a letter, one whose value was enhanced by its meter, rhyme, and beauty, and the labor of whose execution was emphasized by the poet-gaon.
This exchange between gaon and communal leader, between the Islamic East and the Islamic West, falls roughly in the middle of the period under discussion in most of this book, c. 950–1250. The poem extends backward in time to a Hebrew panegyric tradition that had been developing for a century and certainly would not be the last such panegyric to be composed. The formal features, including quantitative meter and monorhyme, indicate that Hai was following the Arabized prosodic innovations introduced by Dunash Ben Labrat in al-Andalus during the tenth century (one of Dunash’s panegyrics to Ḥasdai Ibn Shaprut likewise emphasizes its being composed in quantitative meter).6 Finally, the poem illuminates the central subject of the present chapter concerning the performance practices of Jewish panegyric. On the one hand, the poem is clearly part of an epistolary exchange. On the other, Hai’s text testifies to the broader circulation of both the initial letter and the poetic response beyond the eyes of their immediate recipients. The gaon set Yehudah’s letter out for “guests” and ordered that the panegyric be read publicly.7
One set of questions that we must address in determining what Jewish panegyrics were ultimately for—what function they held in the constitution of medieval Jewish society—is how they were received, performed, and circulated. Were they delivered orally, before small or large audiences? Read privately by their addressees? What relationship exists between the written testimonies and oral/aural experiences? We will see that the performance practices of Jewish panegyric in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean were variegated and had written as well as oral dimensions, though the sources elucidate most poignantly the degree to which panegyrics were embedded within epistolary exchange. This is not entirely surprising, since written texts testify to the practices of written culture primarily but to oral culture only serendipitously; it might be the case that the occasional hints that we have of oral recitation are the tip of an iceberg that is largely submerged or has melted away. Still, we do learn that figures were acclaimed aloud, sometimes publicly and even ceremonially, as suggested by Hai’s poem. The written text of the panegyric, which was sent over a distance in response to a letter, preceded the oral performance, but we may assume that public acclamation also took place.
* * *
The primary purpose of this chapter is to consider the evidence for oral and written aspects of Jewish panegyric practice in the contexts of the Islamic Mediterranean, including the world of the academies, local political structures, mercantile circles, and other social and intellectual relationships. Although much of the information considered is rather technical—including scribal inscriptions, the layout of manuscript pages, lists of books—the chapter remains focused on broader cultural issues such as the nature of patronage, the place of panegyric in society, the machinery of disseminating images of leadership, and the continuity and disjunction of Jewish regions across the Mediterranean. The chapter also offers close readings of texts with a focus on political vocabulary.
The discussion begins by reviewing the practice of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic East, where the tradition began, and then turns to the practice
