One of our earliest Hebrew panegyrics, fragmentary though it is, is written in honor of Sa‘adia Gaon. It consists of strings of words, between two and five words each, that maintain a common end rhyme from between four and ten strings. After praising the mamdūḥ, the author asks a particular question pertaining to a matter of exegesis and expresses hope for a response. Do we have here a poem or a piece of correspondence? The answer is both. The verso contains the beginning of the gaon’s response, replete with the kind of wordplay that Sa‘adia describes in his commentary on the Book of Creation (Sefer yeṣirah) as belonging to letter openings, thus reinforcing the reading of the poem as a letter.85
The same is also the case with the lengthy panegyric that opened this chapter; it is certainly a poem but also meets standard epistolary expectations (greetings, congratulations, thanks, updates, closings), not to mention that it was written in response to a letter proper. Another poetic panegyric by Hai Gaon is introduced in the manuscript with a revealing superscription, undoubtedly inserted by a scribe of the academy, “the correspondence (Ar., mukātaba) of our master Hai Gaon with master Avraham Ben ‘Aṭa, Nagid of Qairawan.”86 In an important article on the Andalusian native Menaḥem Ben Saruq, Ezra Fleischer stressed epistolary dimensions of Menaḥem’s poetry and argued for the continuity, based on formalistic grounds, between the poet’s writing and Eastern precedents. I am wholly in agreement with this aspect of Fleischer’s article, which helps us situate Andalusian Jewish culture within the broader context of the Islamic Mediterranean.87
In the following section, I take the argument for the link in Jewish literary culture between the Islamic East and the Islamic West a step further by arguing for the basic continuity of panegyric performance as a hybrid oral-epistolary system. Although there are obvious structural differences between, for example, a gaon’s thanking a donor and a poet’s initiation of a relationship with a potential benefactor, the hybrid performance practice points to some level of shared function and interpersonal dynamic. This fact presses us to rethink the nature of Jewish culture in the Islamic West, particularly in al-Andalus, with respect to what has been termed its “courtly” quality. The section on the performance of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic West begins with a historiographic excursus on what I will call the “courtly hypothesis,” which, I argue, has had a distorting effect on our perception of panegyric’s function.
Jewish Panegyric Performance in the Islamic West
Andalusian Jewish culture has often been imagined as a kind of novum that broke forth ex nihilo, owed to the high degree of Arabization of Andalusian Jewry. If there is one word that is usually used to distinguish Andalusian Jewish culture from other Jewish cultures in the Islamic Mediterranean, it is “courtly,” though scholars are seldom precise about what this term means. Seventy years have passed since Joseph Weiss delivered his paper “Tarbuṭ ḥaṣranit ve-shirah ḥaṣranit” (Courtly culture and courtly poetry) at the first World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem (1947).88 By that time, research on the “court Jew” had gained momentum among researchers of different periods of Jewish history. Selma Stern had written her Der Hofjude im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (1640–1740), in which she presented court Jews as “the forerunners of the emancipation,” although debates raged over whether these Jews, who maintained contacts with and proved useful instruments of royalty, represented a people apart from their coreligionists or safeguarded their welfare (see, especially, the square critique of Stern by none other than Hannah Arendt).89 Likely influenced by the tragedy of the Holocaust, Yitzhak Baer had portrayed the court Jews of Christian Iberia with a mixture of admiration and suspicion.90
Weiss aimed to elevate the study of Andalusian Hebrew poetry from philological-textual research and biographical description to create a “history of the spirit.” His paper argued that the Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus reflected a Jewish “courtly” reality by drawing attention to the social manners idealized in the poetry as well as the lavish material surroundings described. Weiss wrote that “the Jews of the Arab courts who were close to royalty became the dedicated initiators of an independent Jewish court culture as a secular culture that was separate from Jewish society.” He suggested that “Jews’ experience in the Arab courts caused Jews to create their own similar culture and that the patron, in whose honor poets offered praise, stood at the center of this parallel culture.” At the same time, Weiss opined, “courtly Jewish society could not be anything, of course, other than a spiritual semblance [of Muslim courtly society] (albeit one abounding in brightness and splendor), but was deprived of all real political power.” Panegyric was marshaled as evidence in constructing this “court culture,” and the presumed structure of the Jewish court, in turn, has determined how panegyric has been conceived and interpreted.
Weiss’s paper became a classic in the field and remains cited widely, but its thesis has rarely been revisited.91 Questions we might ask include: Where exactly was this Jewish court? Was the patron as central as Weiss had imagined? To what extent can we generalize about Jewish patronage structures across periods (Umayyad, Taifa, Almoravid)? Weiss’s study had an impact on Schirmann, who, as discussed in the Introduction, saw the panegyric phenomenon as the paramount (and somewhat ugly) aspect of poetry as a “vocation.” Weiss also had a deep impact on Eliahu Ashtor, who assented to the courtly image and saw the poet-patron relationship as key to understanding the great explosion of Jewish intellectual production during the “Golden Age” of al-Andalus. His influential The Jews of Moslem Spain portrays a performance scenario wherein Yiṣḥaq Ibn Khalfūn recites a Hebrew poem aloud before his Jewish patron and an audience, including competing poets, leading the patron to toss some coins into the poet’s purse. Yet, as Ann Brener points out, there is really no evidence for this.92 The image is undoubtedly constructed out of depictions of similar scenes in Arabic adab collections and what seem to be performative aspects of the poems themselves, such as first-person addresses, references to rival poets, and dedicatory sections. Because of the accepted view that Jews imitated the prevailing Muslim court culture on a smaller scale, not only textually but also materially, it would only be fitting that they practiced some version of public or semipublic adulation.93
Given that the courtly image is tightly bound up with the practice of panegyric—specifically, its oral recitation before a paying patron—it is worth revisiting the evidence for oral and written aspects of Andalusian Jewish poetic culture and panegyric practice in particular. It is clear that Hebrew poets sometimes met and exchanged poems and even competed to outdo one another within certain formal constraints, but we have exceedingly few anecdotes that recount panegyric performance or modes of remuneration. Some poems include specific requests for payment in the form of robes and the like, but one imagines that, had the direct payment of a poet for his panegyric before an audience been a norm, we would have at least a few anecdotes to that effect.94 Despite some justification for the type of courtly performance that Weiss and others have imagined, I argue below that the preponderance of evidence points to a mixed oral-epistolary function similar to that described with respect to the Islamic East. Overall, the social structure of Andalusian Jewry represents more of a localized and less hierarchic (yet more elitist) version of its Eastern counterparts than a break with Jewish culture in the rest of the Islamic Mediterranean.
Insofar as at least some Hebrew panegyrics were performed orally in al-Andalus, the social setting is mostly reminiscent of the majlis uns, or, better still, the mujālasa, the more egalitarian salon of the middle strata. As Samer Ali has argued, the mujālasa was forged through bonds of mutual affection and “often prompted bacchic excess: banquet foods, wine, fruits, flowers, perfumes, singing, and of course, displays of sexuality and love.”95 This practice, too, may have had at least some precedent among Jews in the East prior to the year 1000, as suggested by one of the only wine poems to survive from that environment, “When I drink it I fill it for another, who gives it to his companion, and he, too, pours [lit., “mixes”] it…. All the lovers call out, ‘drink in good health!’” (lit., “life”). The poem not only idealizes wine but also a host of social ideals of
