reciprocal relationships need not require exchange between equal parties; in fact, structural inequality is precisely what allows the cycle of benefaction to perpetuate. The ongoing and dynamic process of indebting and repayment is said to give societies their coherence and structure by tying individuals to one another within and beyond their kinship circles. Mauss’s short book has enjoyed a remarkable afterlife, especially in anthropology and sociology but also in history and literary studies, and many elements of this seminal work have been developed, nuanced, or challenged.
I will not attempt here to describe all of the types of loyalty-based exchanges that made up the “continuity and coherence” of Jewish life in the medieval Mediterranean.4 Rather, I wish to reflect upon the metapoetic trope by which medieval Jewish authors referred to their compositions, especially panegyrics, as “gifts,” and upon the use of gift discourse more broadly. The rhetoric of gift giving pervades panegyric letters and poems throughout the region and reveals a great deal about the functions that their authors and readers ascribed them. I will argue that portraying panegyrics as gifts constituted them as material objects whose value either served as or demanded reciprocation, thus initiating or maintaining bonds of loyalty. Toward the end of the chapter, I consider the specific implications of describing such gifts through the language of the sacrificial cult of ancient Israel, as though these gifts were offered not so much for their human recipients as for the divine.
Fortunately, I am preceded in the application of Maussian theory to the study of panegyric by a number of scholars of Greek, Latin, and Arabic poetry.5 For Arabic, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych discusses a panegyric by the pre-Islamic poet al-Nābighah intended to negotiate the poet’s reentry into the Lakhmid court. With the qaṣīda, the “poet/negotiator virtually entraps his addressee by engaging him in a ritual exchange that obligates him to respond to the poet’s proffered gift (of submission, allegiance, praise) with a counter-gift (in this case absolution and reinstatement), or else face opprobrium.”6 Beatrice Gruendler also draws Mauss (and Mottahedeh) into the exchange between patron and poet: “The poem is a token of the poet’s ongoing allegiance just as the patron’s gifts and benefits were tokens of his ongoing protection and benevolence. To this end, the poem performs a service and thereby repays the patron’s gifts and relieves the poet of some of his liability. The relationship emerges as a mutual exchange. However, it is not one of discrete transactions of giving and thanking; rather, it represents an ongoing process.”7
Before continuing, I wish to introduce two further concepts of gift exchange. First is the idea that gift exchange generally involves objects that are incommensurate and inter-convertible, at least one of which is more symbolic than material. Thus, I am not discussing the exchange of a stock for cash value or the trade of a quantity of flax for a quantity of silk but rather the exchange of praise for such things as elevation in rank, favors, luxury items, or even money itself. The disparate “goods” generally correspond to the social standings of the two men, each of whom has something to offer the other that he does not already possess. Because there is no exact “exchange rate” between goods, the relationship by which giver and receiver are bound does not dissolve once the transaction is complete but, as Gruendler suggests, remains dynamic. This leads to the second point, the distinction between what has been termed “disembedded” and “embedded” exchange. In the former, the exchange belongs to a sphere that has an independent and discrete economic reality (stock for cash) such that the transaction might be considered “complete”; the relationship dissolves once the transaction has been satisfied. In an embedded exchange, the transaction participates in and supports noneconomic institutions such as friendship, kinship, religious affiliation, and learned societies.8
This is not to say that money cannot be an element of embedded exchange. The matter is similar to what is sometimes said about marriage in our own day: it can involve money; it just can’t be about money. Hence panegyric, even panegyric composed for money, is bound by an ethical structure wherein a strict quid pro quo was considered uncouth, blameworthy, and a violation of an unwritten social code (this will be discussed further in Chapter 5). Embedded exchange was always hailed as an ideal; disembedded exchange was sometimes suspected of being the reality. Jocelyn Sharlet writes that in “medieval Arabic and Persian discourse on patronage, there is widespread concern that the exchange of poetry for pay may have more to do with material wealth and individual ambition than ethical evaluation and communal relationships.”9
Central to the issue is the nature of the institution of patronage (Ar., walā’; lit., “proximity”) in the Islamic world, which has been the subject of a significant amount of scholarship in recent years.10 Apart from the earliest usage of the term in the strict legal sense, referring to the arrangement by which non-Arabs could be grafted into the Muslim umma (nation), it had expanded by the tenth century to encompass a broad range of social relationships. The broad application of patronage is summarized nicely by Rustow, as:
using one’s influence, power, knowledge or financial means on behalf of someone else, with an eye toward benefiting both that person and oneself at the same time. Investments of this type could lead to the production of art, literature, architecture, science, philosophy, or works of public hydraulic engineering. Rulers and their courts used them to advance their claims as the bestowers of material and cultural benefits on their subjects, and thus to achieve legitimacy, and indeed, rulers were in a special position to accumulate (or better: extract) the material resources that allowed them to act as patrons. But others bestowed patronage too: village big-men, long-distance traders, elders of the community, or anyone with wealth or power to redistribute. Patronage also included the formation of narrowly or locally political alliances in which a person of higher rank protected or helped a protégé. To sound more sociological about it, patronage was any investment of resources (material or not) for the purposes of giving benefit and receiving some social benefit in return.11
Viewing the phenomenon of Jewish panegyric within this broad context allows us to link the vast range of bonds considered throughout this book and the use of writing, especially ornate writing, as a binding instrument.12 The term mawlā itself is terribly ambiguous in that it can refer either to the more powerful or the less powerful person in the patronage relationship, the patron or the client. Yet the fluidity of this term, and hence the broadness of the institution, is key for understanding the dual role of a figure such as Hai Gaon, who was at once patron (in that he bestowed intellectual resources and prestige upon satellite communities and leaders) and client (in that he relied upon their largesse and recognition to maintain the academy and his own position). The inclusion of material exchange was permissible within patronage relationships but was not their defining characteristic, either. Failure to recognize this point has led to some of the misperceptions about professional poets and “courtliness” referred to in Chapter 1.
If we consider exchanges of praise for favors, recognition, honor, and protection, we see the dynamics of exchange—and the rhetoric of gift exchange, in particular—pervasively among Jews throughout the Islamic Mediterranean. Similar dynamics are operative in the discourse of the academies and in mercantile relationships, in friendships, in family bonds, and among communal members of equal or disparate social station. Any of these relationships could include exchanges of money, but monetary exchange need not have been part of any single exchange. We will see that the receiving of “gifts,” one of which could be praise, essentially obligated the receiver to reciprocate in some way. Al-Andalus was no exception; although it is famed for the exchange of praise for objects of value, even here we need to conceive of a patronage system that encompassed, but was not limited to, remuneration through money, garments, wine, and the like; just as often, exchanges involved favors, honor, and praise itself.
Gifts in the Discourse of the Academies
The operation of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita, as well as the competing academy of Jerusalem, was dependent upon intellectual and monetary
