status in formal correspondence either as a “national” or “trans-national” language. As Gafni also points out, it seems that Jews were well acquainted with the epistolary practices of Late Antiquity, illustrated colorfully by an anecdote in which a scribe in the service of Yehudah ha-Nasi drafted a letter to Caesar that the Nasi tore up and revised to make the opening salutation adhere to a more formal standard, “To the lord the king from Yehudah, your servant.”30
The transformation of the geopolitical landscape brought by the expansion of Islam dramatically changed the organization of the Jewish world. The central administrative preoccupation of the academies at Baghdad and the competing Palestinian academy was the cultivation and preservation of loyalty from satellite communities from the far west to the far east of the Islamic world. Gaons sought to create standards of practice over these vast territories, encouraged adherence to their legal authority, and solicited funds from distant communities to run the academies. The movement of the Babylonian academies to the capital of Baghdad in the late ninth or early tenth century situated the gaons at the center of power, an ideal position for executing their administrative tasks and for cultivating their intellectual tastes.31 New levels of connection between center and periphery were facilitated by the relative political unity, however fractious, of the ‘Abbasid Empire and the advent of rapid communication.
In many respects, the powers and responsibilities of the Jewish academies mirrored what was taking place administratively within the Islamic political world, whose governments also sought loyalty over vast territories and relied on an efficient system of mail delivery to bind center and periphery.32 Neither private Jewish nor Muslim citizens had access to this governmental postal system, but the academies were able to use their own emissaries to circulate its letters, likely following similar routes. Other Jewish postal traffic seems to have been maintained through the “serendipitous, although heavy, traffic of Jewish travelers” and a more formalized system that Goitein described as a “commercial mail service” wherein Muslim couriers delivered letters sent among Jews.33
Islamic civilization also witnessed the rise of the court scribe (kātib), a powerful office that required knowledge of rhetoric, religion, poetry, philosophy, and diplomacy.34 Letter writing became an art form in its own right that merited the composition of manuals offering advice for scribes including al-Risāla ilā al-kuttāb (Epistle to the secretaries), by ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib; Adab al-kātib (The etiquette of the secretary), by Ibn Qutaiba; Adab al-kuttāb (The etiquette of the secretaries), by al-Ṣūlī; Tashīl al-sabīl ilā ta‘allum al-tarsīl (Easing the path to learning the art of letter writing), by al-Ḥumaydī; and the late fourteenth-century–early fifteenth-century Ṣubḥ al-a‘ashā’ fī ṣinā‘at alinshā’ (Morning light for the night-blind in composing letters), by al-Qalqashandī.35 As stated by A. Arazi: “Even an administrative letter should be composed according to artistic and literary criteria; in society’s view, it belonged to the domain of the fine arts, and accordingly, the kātib was considered above all an artist.”36 Members of the dīwān al-inshā’, the correspondence bureau or chancery, were expected to gain mastery over literary techniques associated with the composition of poetry; al-Khwārazmī, in reviewing the technical vocabulary utilized within the chancery, defines various types of wordplay and rhetorical devices using works of poetics as his basis.37
Epistolographic manuals not only reflect the aesthetic and intellectual ideals of the age but also reveal a great deal about how society was organized and how the relations among various ranks of people were imagined. Al-Ḥumaydī (c. 1028–95), who was born in Córdoba and died in Baghdad, intended his book for “private letter writing” (ikhwāniyya) and planned another book that would deal with “letters from rulers dealing with matters of governance” (sulṭāniyya).38 Within the volume on private letters, opening blessings are organized hierarchically according to the ranks and professions of the correspondents (caliphs, governors, scribes, judges, merchants). Although these openings essentially offer the same blessings for long life, for God’s kindness and favor, and so on, the precise phrasing encodes social rank and negotiates the status differential between writer and recipient. Some elements also relate to the particular profession, as when a merchant is wished good fortune and even profit in business.39 The Ṣubḥ al-a‘ashā’ similarly organizes blessings according to social rank, what is appropriate for a superior to send to an inferior (ra’īs and mar’ūs) and vice versa. One of the most unadorned forms of address occurs when a father writes to his son. When a letter is sent from a subordinate to a superior, the formulas tend to expand and become more elaborate rhetorically—for example, “May God elongate the life of the qāḍī (judge) in might (‘izz) and happiness; may He extend his prestige (karāma) and execute His kindness (ni‘ma) for him with the broadest well-being (‘āfiya) and the utmost security (salāma).”40 Actual letters discovered in Quseir, which were directed to an elder merchant, follow similar formulas.41 In short, blessings constitute a form of praise because their wording can mark the relative status of author and addressee.
The Geniza document Oxford e.74 1a–6b is part of a Judeo-Arabic transcription of an Arabic epistolary manual attributed to Aḥmad Ibn Sa‘d al-Iṣfahānī; the work was divided into twenty-one chapters, beginning with taḥmīdāt (doxology) and sulṭaniyāt, and included examples for different genres, occasions, and purposes, including the expression of condolence, gratitude, apology, and, of course, praise (al-thanā’).42 While the section on praise does not survive, it seems likely that it included formulations for figures of different rank. The existence of the text in Hebrew characters, which even preserves specifically Islamic formulations (including qur’ānic verses), indicates that the genre was sufficiently important among Jews to be studied and, in all likelihood, imitated.43 Further, a book list from the Geniza includes a work titled adab al-kātib, possibly the guide for scribes by Ibn Qutaiba.44
As Haggai Ben Shammai points out, the Judeo-Arabic correspondence of the academies adopts conventions of Islamic chancery correspondence.45 With likely precedent from Late Antiquity, numerous Jewish letters from the Islamic milieu open with an introductory formula of blessing, often in three parts, with dimensions of literary play. Examples of mellifluous letter introductions abound in Geniza correspondence. As is the case with the formulas for blessing in Islamic correspondence, the degree of ornament and even length usually correspond with rank. Sa‘adia Gaon gives examples of the types of wordplay that “we constantly write in our epistles” (fī rasā’ ilinā),46 and, in a fragment from an actual letter by Sa‘adia, itself a response to a panegyric, the opening blessings follow the same pattern.47 Here Sa‘adia was writing to a student of one of his disciples and likely invested the blessing with literary effect to demonstrate his skill, to “thank” the inquirer for his query and poem, and to mark them both as members of the same Jewish social and intellectual elite.
Although there are no manuals for Hebrew letter writing on the scale of the Arabic guides for scribes, there do survive Geniza manuscripts that compile Hebrew literary introductions for letters to addressees, both real and hypothetical, of various ranks (gaon, scribe, cantor, even synagogue caretaker), thus following the structural organization of Arabic epistolary manuals.48 The most significant of these formularies (TS J 3.3; Figure 3) was published by Tova Beeri.49 Such texts were probably intended to circulate as models for Jewish letter writers, including aspiring scribes. The mere existence of these documents demonstrates that Hebrew letter writing was also considered an art that adhered to conventions. Many of these introductions, and many actual letters dedicated to known recipients, include panegyric sections ranging from a few lines to several manuscript pages. Much of the literary creativity associated with versified panegyrics is observed within epistles, and the execution of literary praise was not dependent upon a “courtly” structure, per se; it was a by-product, or better a means, of human interconnection, whether bureaucratic,
