was seen as fundamentally ethical in that the exchanges were of the “embedded” variety. Yet even this was sometimes not enough. Rather than portraying a gift to the academy as a mere contribution to a scholarship fund that brought its donor honor, it could be said to affect and delight the divine and to engender efficacious atonement. The rhetoric of sacrifice, whereby all donations are said to belong ultimately to God, intimates a system of solidarity.
Returning to the letters by Hai Gaon and Shemuel Ben ‘Eli, do we have here a system of reciprocity merely masquerading as a system of solidarity? Should we doubt the gaons’ sincerity? It would be cynical and exaggerated to view the leaders with the severity with which Martin Luther impugned the papacy for selling indulgences in order to raise funds for the erection of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The trajectories of reciprocity were portrayed, and quite possibly perceived, through a lens of solidarity. At least rhetorically, the language of ideological solidarity remained paramount.
Mauss, for his part, was hardly oblivious to reciprocal relationships that involved third parties such that exchange occurred between a donor and something otherworldly with the human recipient serving as a facilitator or intermediary. The Gift was preceded by some time with a work that Mauss had written (at the age of twenty-six) in collaboration with his fellow Durkheimian (also twenty-six, and a philo-Semite) Henri Hubert: Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function.62 In classic Durkheimian fashion, the book characterizes sacrifice in social terms such that the phenomenon of sacrifice—far from being a self-abnegating act of total surrender—belonged to a system of reciprocity. Mauss later integrated this element within The Gift, where he titled the last part of the introduction, “Note: the present made to humans, and the present made to the gods,” which itself includes a further “note on alms.” Here, he argued that “destruction by sacrifice” is an “act of giving that is necessarily reciprocated.”63 Mauss sees here the beginnings of a theory of “contract sacrifice” wherein the “gods who give and return gifts are there to give a considerable thing in the place of a small one,” a system characteristic within monotheistic religions as well. Rather than seeing a structural opposition between giving to the human and the nonhuman, Mauss focuses on giving to men who are manifestations of the nonhuman such that the realm of the nonhuman penetrates the realm of the human, “The exchange of presents between men, the ‘namesakes’—the homonyms of the spirits, incite the spirits of the dead, the gods, things, animals, and nature to be ‘generous toward them.’”64
Mauss was not dealing with the rhetoric of sacrifice so much as actual sacrifice, and it would be difficult to call the academies’ leaders “manifestations” or “homonyms” of God rather than “mediators” or “representatives.” The language of sacrifice simply deepened the claim of solidarity-based exchange. In any case, as Schwartz and Rustow stress, solidarity and reciprocity are not strict alternatives; they are paradigms, both opposing and complementary, through which we might meditate upon specific cultural practices, including rhetorical ones. In the case of exchanging donations to the academy for praise, reciprocity was plain to all; solidarity existed because it existed rhetorically.
The language of sacrifice is also apparent within correspondence that is relatively private or noninstitutional. TS 8 J 39.10, an unpublished epistolary formulary, preserves a copy of a letter addressed to “our lord and master Yeshayahu son of […]ḥyah” that opens with extensive blessings. After acknowledging receipt of a gift “sent amid love and affection,” the author goes on to express embarrassment for having needed the donation and adds “we asked the Creator of all to make it like the whole sacrifice upon the altar and like the regular meal offering in the morning and in the evening.”65 The author probably belonged the group that Mark Cohen has termed the “conjunctural poor,” people of means who had fallen upon hard times. The financial assistance was given through a private, rather than an institutional, channel and was the cause of some “shame” for the recipient.66 The rhetoric of the letter created the veneer—or, quite possibly, the true perception—of social solidarity involved with the donation.
Not all usage of sacrificial language was tied to monetary donation. An unpublished letter, TS 10 J 9.4v, contains a poem whose main purpose was to wish good health upon an addressee who had fallen ill. The anonymous poet, who laments that he could not offer a real “gift” (teshurah), calls his composition a type of sacrifice pleasing unto God:
May the Lord of praises prepare healing balm and all types of remedies … and strengthen the respected, beneficent leader, the choice of His people, a turban upon all of the communities. To bring you a gift (teshurah) is not in my power, though I was determined and constituted it as prayer (samtiha tefilot) pleasing before the face of God as an offering (qorban); may it be considered like a sacrifice (zevaḥ) and burnt offering (‘olot). It heals like spell-inducing water!67 We sing a song like the song over the splitting of the depths (i.e., the Song of the Sea, Exodus 15), and the daughters of my people go out with timbrels and drums and sing amid dance.68
The poet offered the “sacrifice” that will hopefully incite God to heal the sick recipient.69 The letter certainly draws upon the grandeur of Israel’s past and likens the delivery of the infirm addressee with the delivery of Israel from bondage. Solidarity is placed at the center of the relationship by stressing a shared historical and theological consciousness. What else the anonymous author wanted in return is unclear. I would presume that author and addressee were already involved in an unequal relationship involving the addressee’s support of the poet and that the letter was intended to maintain that relationship.
Similar is the dynamic of a short letter, written in a beautiful hand, addressed to a certain Ḥiyya, “Pride of the God-Fearing.” The letter requested wine, which had been prescribed by the author’s doctor after bloodletting and had previously been promised to the author. The letter concludes with blessings of well-being in Hebrew rhymed prose and adds “may his offering (minḥah) bring prosperity quickly like a fragrant sacrifice (qorban), and peace.”70
Is the function of sacrificial rhetoric different in private and institutional correspondence? Earlier in this chapter, I cited examples that I described as “playful,” such as El‘azar Ben Ya‘aqov ha-Bavli’s referring to a sum of money received as “the weight of the sanctuary weight”71 or ‘Eli he-Ḥaver Ben ‘Amram’s request from a mamdūḥ for a “freewill offering.” How do we know when reference to a gift as a sacrifice is playful and when it is serious? The answer is that we cannot always know this with certainty, and our judgments are necessarily subjective. What is striking is how continuous the rhetoric of sacrifice was across the social and political strata of Jews in the Islamic Mediterranean. Both in the context of the geonic world and in Andalusian circles, the rhetoric of sacrifice played a role in group formation and cohesion, of building political and communal ties between center and periphery, on the one hand, and of boundary marking for a social elite, on the other. While I would assign greater import to the rhetoric of sacrifice in institutional contexts, it arguably presented some dimension of solidarity in personal contexts as well.
CHAPTER 3
“Humble Like the Humble One”: The Language of Jewish Political Legitimacy
At various points, historians have tried to discern tidbits of biographical data, the “kernel of truth,” from the broadly conventional representations of medieval Jewish panegyric. Regarding TS 16.68r, a panegyric by Shemuel ha-Shelishi Ben Hosh‘anah for Shemariah Ben Elḥanan of Fustat, Jacob Mann wrote: “There is undoubtedly much flattery and exaggeration in all these praises of our Egyptian scholar, as was the fashion of the time in Muslim countries. Yet a genuine substratum remains which was certainly true to the Rabbi’s great merits.”1 Menaḥem Ben Sasson makes a similar conclusion concerning a panegyric by Yiṣḥaq
