community with ancient roots.68
Similarly, Yehudah Halevi praised his fellow Andalusian poet-scholar Yehudah Ibn Ghiyat as one who wears garments of wisdom, fear, integrity, justice, skill, honor, modesty, and kindness, a “tree of knowledge that gives life to those who gather [its fruit], a lion whelp who shepherds ewes.”69 Both Halevi and Ibn Ghiyat belonged to the circle of Andalusian Jews who have sometimes been called “courtier rabbis,” though it is preferable to refer to them as they sometimes referred to themselves in Arabic, as ahl al-adab, the “people of adab,” an expansive concept that incorporated wide-ranging knowledge (in poetry, oratory, rhetoric, grammar, exegesis) and a refined, urbane code of etiquette.70 At the same time, Halevi praised the Nagid Shemuel Ben Ḥananiah of Egypt by dwelling on his power, “A Nagid ‘who seeks the good of his people and speaks peace to all its seed,’” a verbatim description of Mordechai, the archetypal Jewish courtier (Est 10:3); “a righteous man who rules over men, who rules with the fear of God,” predicated of King David (2 Sm 23:3); “he stood in the counsel of the holy.” Moreover, this poem situates the Nagid geographically within the Mediterranean: “Canaan (Palestine) envies Egypt because it is illumined by the light of his face; Shinar (Iraq) studies his ways and beseeches ‘Majestic Full of Light’ (i.e., God) to see the king who stands above the waters of the Nile. Sefarad (al-Andalus) joins them to measure out his boundary.”71
Iraq and Palestine, the gravitational centers to which other communities turn, here focus their gaze upon this “king” of Egypt; al-Andalus “joins them” in honoring the Nagid, thus setting the place of al-Andalus within the hierarchy. The representation of Mediterranean geography is taken up in Chapter 4, but a few words are in order here.
The Mediterranean
It should be clear by now that Dominion Built of Praise treats a broad geographic expanse that ranges from al-Andalus and North Africa in the Islamic West to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq in the Islamic East, and then areas along the Mediterranean Sea under Christian control (northern Iberia, southern France, Sicily). This whole region has, with much justification, been called “the Mediterranean,” and since I use the term in the title of this book, I will include here a brief discussion of the term’s history and my usage of it. At other points, I reflect further on this book as a Mediterranean project.
The idea of the Mediterranean as an object of study enjoyed considerable prestige during the early and mid-twentieth century (with scholars such as Henri Pirenne and Fernand Braudel) and has emerged with renewed force in recent decades.72 By placing the well-traversed sea at the center of a map rather than segregating Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East according to continent, or the Islamic world from the Christian world according to spheres of religious dominance, scholars have appreciated lines of continuity that emerged across political, religious, or linguistic lines, even through war and conflict.73 Debates over the utility of a Mediterranean orientation have revolved around whether the region (however demarcated) can be analyzed as a unity—a “discriminable whole,” in Horden and Purcell’s phrasing—or whether the various points around a Mediterranean route remained sufficiently distinct as to resist unified treatment.74 Should political unity or relative peace be considered a necessary precondition for undertaking the region as a whole? Should continuities such as vocabulary items or culinary influence be considered sufficient for imagining a shared cultural sphere? The harshest critiques of the Mediterranean as an analytic framework have argued that it is essentializing and imperialist, much as Edward Said argued in the case of the Orient.75
The first question that might be asked is: Where, exactly, was the Mediterranean—its territorial contours? As Sarah Stroumsa laconically notes in her study of Maimonides as a “Mediterranean thinker,” the cultural notion of the Mediterranean world has taken on “impressive dimensions,” sometimes reaching as far as the Low Countries and, ironically enough, the Atlantic world.76 In S. D. Goitein’s monumental A Mediterranean Society, a study of Jewish (and, to a significant degree, Muslim) society as reflected in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, the Mediterranean meant the areas under Islamic rule that bordered the Mediterranean Sea (Egypt, al-Andalus, the Maghrib, Sicily, Palestine) and included the region termed the Near East, extending toward the Indian Ocean (primarily Syria and Iraq).77 Although Goitein was well aware that the political and cultural climates of the locales throughout the Mediterranean were diverse, he chose to stress the interconnection and cohesion of Jews in the Arabic-speaking Mediterranean over several centuries, offering the “big picture” according to major categories (economy, family, community) rather than a series of local histories. The further exposure and organization of Geniza documents has allowed Goitein’s successors to produce more localized histories, even focusing on fairly small groups of people; but still, the idea of the Mediterranean has not lost meaning.78
Throughout most of this book, I use the term “Mediterranean” largely in the way that Goitein used it—an “Islamized Mediterranean,” as Fred Astren has termed it.79 Clearly, figures introduced above, such as Shemuel ha-Nagid of al-Andalus and Yehudah Halevi, can be analyzed simultaneously as members of intimate Andalusian circles and broader trans-Mediterranean networks. In order to document specific phenomena (say, installation to communal office), I bring together examples from Iraq in the tenth century, al-Andalus in the eleventh, and Syria in the twelfth, knowing full well that I am eliding important distinctions. To the extent that “jumping around” is a quality from which A Mediterranean Society suffers, the present book will be guilty of the same offense. While I give weight to regional and temporal variation and, at times, strongly emphasize it, I believe that looking at specific locales only would obscure certain elements of Jewish culture across the region.
At the same time, my outlook on the Mediterranean differs from Goitein’s in two main respects. First, in Goitein’s study, due to the natural pertinence of Geniza materials to Egypt, al-Andalus appears as a remote frontier of the Islamic world (which it undoubtedly was!). Given the focus of the present study on praise writing and the plethora of surviving materials that originated in al-Andalus, this area will loom larger than in A Mediterranean Society. Second, whereas the geographic span of Goitein’s magnum opus remained more or less within the confines of the Islamic world, this study contains an extended chapter on the Christian Mediterranean, including Christian Iberia, southern France, and Norman Sicily.
One might argue that any segregation between the Islamic and the Christian Mediterranean is artificial and obscures a cultural continuity that was not delimited by language or creed. Thus, the coherence of al-Andalus, Castile, and southern France might be at least as strong as that of Qairawan, Yemen, and Iraq.80 Not segregating Christian and Islamic domains is further justified when one considers the itineraries of certain individuals. Yehudah Halevi and Yehudah al-Ḥarīzī, the focal characters of Chapter 4, engaged with communities not only in the Islamic East and the Islamic West but also within Christian Iberia and southern France. A Jewish intellectual such as Anatoli Ben Yosef (late twelfth–early thirteenth century) was active in Marseilles, Lunel, Alexandria, and Sicily.81 Indeed, I consider the movement of people, objects, knowledge, and cultural practices across Islamic and Christian territories to be one of the more interesting and fruitful areas of scholarship today. My segregating the Christian Mediterranean within a single chapter has more to do with chronology than geography and certainly does not reflect an assumption that the Islamic world was at odds with Christendom.
Finally, this book is not an attempt to write a grand history “of the Mediterranean,” the vast project attempted by Horden and Purcell, but rather a relatively modest history of an identifiable phenomenon “in the Mediterranean”—and then largely within the confines of a single religious community.82 Although social and political dynamics vary substantively over time and space, the basic practice of offering praise remained a constant among Mediterranean Jews. We are not simply
