this anecdote? First, we learn that Ibn Ezra’s panegyric to Ibn Ṣadīq circulated beyond the hands of its recipient; it was likely sent to Ibn Ṣadīq and then copied or circulated orally to others.125 Halevi’s letter might be alluding to some of the social practices associated with court culture (wine, music, poetry), particularly the majlis uns, and the reciprocity of the social relations recalls the mujālasa most directly. The oral recitation of poetry, including Ibn Ezra’s panegyric for Ibn Ṣadīq and possibly other panegyrics (perhaps suggested by “songs of friendship”) is clearly attested.126 However, to the extent that Ibn Ezra was the “prince of their host,” he was not actually present; there was no patron in the sense of one receiving praise and offering payment in exchange. Halevi also created a panegyric without the mamdūḥ’s being present, a poem that he subsequently sent within an epistle. What did Halevi want from Ibn Ezra in sending him the epistle embedded with the poem? The answer, quite simply, is recognition, association, protection, and possibly even financial support. However, he was not seeking quid pro quo cash remuneration but something much broader, the dynamics of which we explore further in Chapter 2.
While scholars often cite this anecdote in order to capture Halevi’s remarkable skill and rise to fame, here I stress the social dynamics revealed. The poem, after all, was not any old muwashshaḥ but one dedicated to Ibn Ezra’s honor. The events that Halevi describes might be viewed as a pretext for directing praise toward Ibn Ezra. The letter is essentially a “self-introduction” written in the hopes of formalizing a relationship. Praise is the expected rhetorical register for doing so and is highly attested both in the introduction to the letter and in the poem that it contains. It is possible that Halevi’s poem was recited aloud after reception, but we do not know this with certainty. This turned out to have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, as Ibn Ezra responded to Halevi’s letter with a poem inviting the young poet to Granada. The poem praises the eloquence of Halevi’s letter and the poem that it contained and reflects astonishment at the author’s prowess despite his youth. On the other hand, Ibn Ezra’s response did not praise Halevi himself; the poem is a type of panegyric sent from an older and more powerful “patron” to a younger and less powerful “client.” The poem employs only circumscribed praises and thus defines the formality and vertical dynamic of the relationship during its formative stage.127
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In discussing Jewish panegyric in the Islamic East above, I pointed out that many poems held a specifically epistolary function. The same is true of many poems from the Andalusian corpus. An important example is the poem “Afudat nezer,” written by Menaḥem Ben Saruq as the introduction to an epistle on behalf of Ḥasdai Ibn Shaprut for Yosef, king of the Khazars. Adopting monorhyme (a standard feature of Arabic prosody), the poem opens with the kinds of blessings that one would expect in an epistle proper:
May the priestly crown [be given] to the tribe that rules the far-off kingdom,
May God’s benefit be upon it and peace be upon all its governors and host,
May salvation be a raiment upon its shrine, its holidays and sacred occasions.
In particular, the wishes for “God’s benefit” and “peace”—ne‘imot and shelomot—correspond precisely to Arabic epistolary standards and are actually cognates of the widely attested ni‘mat allah and salamāt.128 The epistolary style here is not surprising, given that the poem introduced an actual epistle, was used by Ibn Shaprut to introduce himself to the king, and was sent over a great distance.
Epistolary function is apparent even in many of the so-called courtly panegyrics exchanged among intellectuals within al-Andalus. Medieval scribes often indicate when a poem was written in response to another poem, and such sets of poems, generally written according to the same meter and rhyme, served as a type of correspondence. Previous scholars have assembled lists of such exchanges—between Abū Faḍl Ibn Ḥasdai and Shemuel ha-Nagid, Yiṣḥaq Ibn Khalfūn and ha-Nagid, Yehudah Halevi and Mosheh Ibn Ezra, Avraham Ibn Ezra and Yosef Ibn Ṣadīq, Todros Abulafia and Yosef al-Qarawi—and we need not rehearse them here; let it suffice to say that such exchanges demonstrate that the function of poems as correspondence was obvious and paramount.129 Despite their performative aspects, these poems were clearly not performed by their authors before their mamdūḥs, though it remains a possibility that they were recited orally subsequent to reception.
A significant number of poems originally accompanied letters. As Schirmann suggests, many of the freestanding poems that have reached us were likely affixed to letters and were severed through anthologizing processes and the vagaries of textual transmission. Shemuel ha-Nagid’s famous war poem “Eloah ‘oz” (God of might) bears a superscription: “He said this poem that commenced his letter.”130 Ha-Nagid also composed an Aramaic poem (a condolence sent to Ḥananel Ben Ḥushiel upon the death of his father) that is appended to a letter, also in Aramaic.131 Mosheh Ibn Ezra’s dīwān preserves two letters that were originally connected with poems, and Halevi’s dīwān preserves several letters as well. The exterior of a letter bearing the address could bear a few verses of panegyric.132 We also learn from a superscription that Mosheh Ibn Ezra had to resend a letter and include a new poem because the original had been lost at sea.133 In modern (and some pre-modern) editions of Hebrew poetic oeuvres, poems appear segregated from the epistles for which they were composed, but we should remain attuned to the original function of the poems as an element of correspondence.134
Let us conclude by commenting on the epistolary function of one of the most famous Hebrew poems of al-Andalus, a panegyric by Abū Faḍl Ibn Ḥasdai for Shemuel ha-Nagid. The poem is nicknamed the shirah yetomah, the “orphan poem,” taking on the sense of the Arabic cognate yatīma, meaning “orphan” but also “unique, one of a kind, unparalleled.” The poem is a highly classicized panegyric that evokes pre-Islamic themes and lavishes praise upon the addressee’s wisdom, writing, and generosity. It opens with the theme of the “night phantom” (Ar., ṭaif lail) who visits the poet during his sleep; just as the poet is imagining an erotic encounter with his beloved, an encounter marked foremost by arousing scents, he awakens to find that there is naught save the “scent that revives souls … like the name of Shemuel ha-Nagid,” thus figuring the mamdūḥ’s broad reputation as his “scent.”135
According to Mosheh Ibn Ezra, Ibn Ḥasdai sent this poem from the east of al-Andalus to the Nagid, then in Granada—and indeed, the content of the poem intimates separation and longing. For all its literary brilliance, the poem ultimately belongs to an established epistolary genre, shafā‘a (commending someone to someone else, a “letter of introduction”), whereby the author asks the Nagid to offer protection for two refugees.136 Ibn Ḥasdai did not request monetary payment from the Nagid but rather the performance of a favor; the poem was Ibn Ḥasdai’s “payment in advance” to the Nagid for fulfilling the request. The give-and-take of this relationship is captured succinctly toward the end of the poem:
Take this poem most pleasing, a gift of love (teshurat ahavah) pure and of old,
adorned in her jewels as a bride, wrapped in her ornaments as a maiden.
You are her betrothed yet she will remain forever a virgin!
She has a father but is still an orphan!
In your hands I entrust, my lord (lit. gaon), two brothers, desolate exiles,
whose inheritance is as though they were strangers, their land is (destroyed) like Admah (cf. Hos 11:8).
Were it not for your shade, they would wander to the ends of the earth!
The
