charge, as though constituting the poem as the Nagid’s possession demanded his reciprocation.
By way of a nearly contemporary comparison, the Geniza manuscript TS 20.24r (Figure 5) is a shafā‘a sent to Fustat by three notables of Granada, described as “the city of our master Shemuel ha-Nagid and his son Yehosef.” The document is written in large, clear letters in the style of some official Arabic correspondence. The opening lines, which consist of blessings for the recipients’ welfare, are presented in rhyme. The letter describes (in very vague terms) the unfortunate circumstances under which the person being recommended fled “exiled before a whetted sword and a drawn bow” and commends him as “modest, demure (baishan), and subtle of speech ([ba‘al] devarim rakkim).”137 Just as Ibn Ḥasdai’s poem offered “payment” through a panegyric in meter and rhyme, this letter also contained a poem (though not a panegyric) and was crafted as a beautiful material object for appreciation and possibly for display. Literary ornamentation and physical adornment were similar means of causing value to inhere within the material object of the letter or poem and thereby show esteem for the recipient and, quite possibly, obligate him to reciprocate.
Figure 5. Shafa‘a (letter of introduction) sent from Granada. TS 20.24r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Again, in the shirah yetomah, Ibn Ḥasdai did not request monetary payment but rather the performance of a favor. The Nagid’s response poem, a panegyric composed according to the same meter and rhyme and playing on the same themes, assures Abū Faḍl that the requested protection has been granted.138 These praise poems were not intended primarily as publicly performed panegyrics, and the authors were certainly not paid for their compositions. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the poems did not possess value, in some sense, a point that will be expanded upon in Chapter 2, on the function of panegyrics as “gifts.” Further, the function of the poems as correspondence does not preclude their circulation or even their oral performance. The Nagid shared the poem with his son, at least, who included it in the dīwān, and the poem was cited with respect by later authors. Although assertions about the performance of the poem beyond these points is guesswork, it is evident that Ibn Ḥasdai’s panegyric contributed to the construction of the Nagid’s public image, probably in his lifetime and certainly for posterity.
In sum, the evidence that we have for panegyric practices among Andalusian authors points to a highly developed culture of textuality—with poems serving as or accompanying letters and circulating beyond the hands of their recipients—and also to an oral culture of sorts, but one only partly meeting the expectations of courtly performance in the sense of a poet appearing before a patron with the hope of remuneration. I have suggested that the dedication of panegyric pertained more often to the circumstance of separation between men rather than their unification. We have limited evidence for panegyric performance at public gatherings, possibly including political rituals, and slightly more for its recitation in small gatherings, but most of our record attests to panegyric being exchanged through writing. Again, the oral dimensions of panegyric practice might be underrepresented in the surviving corpus, and even those texts whose primary purpose was to be read might have been performed subsequently. In any case, panegyrics clearly enjoyed a broad circulation that confirms their essential role in constructing the images of their mamdūḥs.
Throughout this chapter, I have highlighted what I see as some basic points of continuity in Jewish panegyric practice across the Islamic Mediterranean—a mixture of oral and written elements, the use of panegyric in exchange relationships, and its role in the promotion of public images and claims to legitimacy. I see the rise of Jewish panegyric writing in al-Andalus more as a continuation of the Eastern practice than a new courtly function. Still, I do not mean to minimize the differences between the world of the academies and the contours of social relations among intellectuals in al-Andalus. In subsequent chapters, we will investigate further the idealized representations of mamdūḥs among the various regions and subcommunities of the Jewish Mediterranean. Al-Andalus was clearly not the world of the great academies of Baghdad, but what the gaons and the Andalusian intellectuals shared were elements of social exchange based on informal, and ultimately unenforceable, bonds.
CHAPTER 2
Poetic Gifts: Maussian Exchange and the Working of Medieval Jewish Culture
The propositions that are known to be true and require no proof for their truthfulness are of four kinds: perceptions, as when we know that this is black, this is white, this is sweet, and this is hot; … conventions, as when we know that uncovering nudity is ugly and that recompensing a benefactor with something of greater honor is beautiful.1
—Maimonides, The Treatise on Logic
The previous chapter discussed issues related to the performance of panegyrics, essentially the Sitz im Leben of the texts, while also making some broad observations about the nature of medieval Jewish culture in Islamic domains. This chapter will delve further into what function panegyrics actually held and why they were so pervasive across relations among poets and patrons, gaons and donors, and between friends. What was it about panegyric that was fitting to all these types of relationships? The answer, in part, can be found by analyzing panegyrics’ metapoetic and self-referential discourse, how authors described them and how readers received them.
The most common terms for describing panegyric writing in medieval Hebrew discourse, apparent in the shirah yetomah that closed the previous chapter, belong to the semantic range of “gifts,” most often in the mundane sense of gifts exchanged among humans and sometimes reaching over into the language of Temple sacrifice, offerings to God. The language of gift giving, and the constitution of panegyrics as gifts, permeates several levels of Jewish social organization in the Islamic Mediterranean, from the relations between geonic academies and satellite communities, to those among poets and patrons in a given locale, to those among intellectuals across and within Mediterranean centers. What these sets of relations among individuals, institutions, and communities shared was a foundation on bonds of loyalty—elements that tied people to one another in relationships that were essentially voluntary, or at least not inviolable.
Referring to the well-known study by Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in Early Islamic Society, which demonstrates the essentiality of loyalty-based relationships (more than formal legal relationships) for the functioning of Islamic court life, Marina Rustow has investigated patronage and clienthood in various Jewish contexts, including ties between rabbinic leaders and followers and bonds among more humble folk. Rustow shows that “parallels between courtly literature and everyday letters demonstrate how deeply the modes and manners that we ascribe to courtly etiquette permeated other realms of relationships whose stability rested on the binding power of loyalty.”2 In particular, she considers the dynamic of granting benefaction (ni‘ma) and the gratitude (shukr) that such benefaction required, a dynamic that engendered the “continuity and coherence” of life, political and otherwise.
Jewish life in the Islamic Mediterranean may be said to have functioned according to what Marcel Mauss called (in French) a system of prestations and contre-prestations—usually rendered in English as a system of “total services” and “total counter-services”—in which the exchange of gifts provided an essential component of group coherence.3 Mauss’s classic book, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, demonstrates that, cross-culturally, the giving of a gift obligates the receiver to reciprocate not only in kind but rather with something of greater value
