In fact, rabbinic writing expresses reservation toward direct praise and further demonstrates, as Seth Schwartz argues, that the rabbis largely opted out of the euergetic system of their day.58 An illustrative text is b. Eruvin 18b, wherein Yermiyahu Ben El‘azar expounds upon a discrepancy between Gn 6:9 and 7:1. The narrative voice of the Flood story (i.e., God, in Yermiyahu’s view) introduces Noah as a “righteous and upright man in his generation; Noah walked with God.” However, when God addresses Noah directly, He calls him “righteous” only. From this, Ben El‘azar concludes, “one speaks little of a man’s praise before him but all of it when not before him.” Even in death, the sages warned against excessive praise for the deceased.59
The dramatic shift in the place of praise in Jewish society in the medieval period is illustrated with the following text, an unpublished Geniza manuscript (TS 8 J 16.18r; Figure 2), which is an address to a certain Ovadiah. Following a brief wish for success, the text praises the recipient in a mixture of Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew (Hebrew in italics):
All that reaches a man with respect to praise [al-madīḥ] and sincere thanks [al-shukr al-ṣarīḥ] falls short with regard to the lofty lord, confidant of the state, security of kingship, our lord and master Ovadiah the minister, the noble, the wise, the intelligent, may God extend his grace, elevate his status, and give him abundant fortune in the eyes of kings and ministers. May he bless his brothers and his sons the ministers and may they be a blessing in the midst of the land. All that they address before him [of praise and thanks] is but a fraction of what is said when he is not present according to what the rabbis [al-awā’il], may God be satisfied with them, made clear in their saying, “One says little of a man’s praise before him but all of it when not before him.” They said this because we have found that God, lofty and exalted, when Noah was not present, described him with three qualities—righteous, upright, and so on—but when he addressed him, He said, “For I have seen you righteous before me” and so on. He described him as righteous only.
Figure 2. Panegyric for a certain Ovadiah. TS 8 J 16.18r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
The letter suggests that praise had previously been directed to Ovadiah in person, which is not at all surprising, given that he was a man of significant rank. He was called “confidant of the state, security of kingship” (amīn al-dawla, thiqqat al-mulk), both of which are titles common in Islamic political discourse that were appropriated within the titulature of the Jewish academies.60 Most strikingly, the rabbinic warning against direct praise becomes a device exploited within panegyric (i.e., all this is said about you in your presence; just imagine what is said when you are not present!). The document also reveals something about the letter’s reception and afterlife; the margins bear a text in Judeo-Arabic, composed in a different hand, which explains the content of the letter, including the rabbinic dictum regarding what is “said of praise (min al-madīḥ) in the presence of the individual praised (al-shakhṣ al-mamdūḥ)” and the references to Noah. The letter was of sufficient value to merit commentary and was interpreted through the contemporary idiom of Arabic praise writing, replete with the terminology of madīḥ and mamdūḥ. Clearly, a great deal had changed since the rabbinic period.
Why this change? The short answer is Islam, but that is hardly descriptive of a process. It is difficult to identify any single cause that brought Jews into the social practice of offering extensive praise in a manner similar to the practice among Muslims.61 It would be far too facile to ascribe the Jewish adoption of an Islamic social and political practice to the affinity of Judaism for Islam generally, though perhaps it was of at least some relevance that another aniconic monotheistic community had found a way to accommodate praise for men without usurping God’s place as the one true object of praise. Certainly, the Arabization of the Near East is relevant, as are the migration patterns of Jews to cosmopolitan centers of Islamic power and the relocation of the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita from their ancestral homes along the Euphrates to the ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad (late ninth—early tenth century). While the leadership institutions of the geonic period predate the spread of Islam, in the words of Robert Brody: “Under the unifying umbrella of Islam, international trade flourished as never before, and a form of international banking developed as well. Jews played a leading role in both of these areas…. [T]he center of this vast empire was transferred from Syria, where the Umayyads had had their capital at Damascus, to Babylonia, where the Abbasids made their capital at Baghdad. The leaders of Babylonian Jewry were thus admirably positioned to influence their coreligionists worldwide, and they made the most of their opportunities.”62
These transformations aligned the geonim, the leaders of the Baghdad academies (and also their counterparts at the Jerusalem academy), with an imperial perspective, and, in many ways, the administrative functions of the academies mirrored those of the ‘Abbasid government whose central preoccupation was to establish and maintain loyalty over a vast region. To these ends, Jewish leaders staged ceremonies of power, political rituals that included laudation and the profession of loyalty; they circulated textual accounts that “re-created” those ceremonies for distant communities; they sent legal opinions (responsa) and epistles on moral themes; and they dispatched emissaries throughout the region to represent them. Further, in comparison with Jews in Late Antiquity, Jews in Islamic empires appeared more often in governmental spaces, either as petitioners before officials or as courtiers, and probably had greater exposure to modes of professing loyalty and acclamation. Still, our knowledge about how these transformations occurred will necessarily remain deficient because of lacunae in the written record.63
Inasmuch as satellite Jewish communities in Syria, North Africa, al-Andalus, and Yemen turned to the various academies for legal opinions or expressed loyalty toward them (bonds that could be multiple, shifting, or ephemeral), they also maintained robust local leaderships, including courtiers who enjoyed audience with proximate dynasties of Islamic power, including independent caliphates. The precise interplay between local and central Jewish authority in the Islamic Mediterranean, between hierarchic and horizontal structure, has been and remains a central preoccupation of scholarship.64 Like responsa literature, panegyrics can help historians create rich pictures of institutional loyalties.
Moreover, bonds among Jews across the region of Islamic aegis were not limited to the hierarchy of religious institutions; Jews participated in smaller and sometimes interrelated groups or social networks that could be oriented toward shared goals of a political, mercantile, or intellectual nature. Inasmuch as a panegyric demonstrates a link, though sometimes an aspirational one, between two men, a full map of panegyric exchanges allows for a kind of representation, however partial, of Jewish social relations in the medieval Mediterranean, both spatially and across ranks. To understand the web of social relations among Jews in the region, we must envision several overlapping maps: (1) academy leaders, their local supporters, emissaries, and adherents in satellite communities; (2) local Jewish authorities and their adherents; (3) merchants, their family members, and partners in enterprise; and (4) intellectuals who had tastes for various types of knowledge.65 Although not mutually exclusive, the maps for each of these could look quite different, and praise writing is a major resource for marking their contours and characters.66
A single author might belong to several social networks simultaneously and address members of each appropriately. Shemuel ha-Nagid of al-Andalus praised his fellow Andalusian Abū Faḍl Ibn Ḥasdai in a pure biblicizing Hebrew for his wisdom, generosity, and eloquence, but, when he lamented Hai Gaon of Baghdad, he wrote in a register described in the manuscript as “like the language of the Mishnah” (mithl lughat al-mishnah) and focused on his knowledge of Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud as well as his power of judgment.67 Here, the linguistic registers themselves, along with the characteristics selected for praise, demarcate the social networks, one a set of Andalusian intellectuals
