I remember once as a graduate student reading in class a long Hebrew poem, “Lekha re‘i ve-re‘a ha-me’orim” (Come, my friend and friend of the luminaries), by the eleventh-century Andalusian Jewish poet Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol. We began with the poem’s exquisite introduction, which describes a palace garden wherein the flowers, statues, and birds engage in a word battle of one-upmanship, each claiming superiority over his rivals. Ultimately, the poet’s voice intrudes upon the scene to silence the competitors and declare that none can compare with the addressee of the poem, whose virtues the poet extols for another ten lines. I remember how we read the poem line by line, meticulously parsing each word, appreciating the aesthetic effects, and comparing themes with themes from Arabic poetry. We began with the first line, and, by the time class ended, we had barely reached the takhalluṣ (Ar., “escape verse”), in which the poet made a transition from the description of the garden to praise for his addressee.

      In the next class, we did not return to read the panegyric section but began with another qaṣīda (Ar., formal ode), Yehudah Halevi’s “Ereṣ keyaldah haytah yoneqet” (The earth nursed like a baby girl), another nature description leading into panegyric. Again, we read to the takhalluṣ, and class ended.¹ None of us missed reading the panegyric in detail. Even a cursory glance at the panegyric sections of several poems revealed a rather predictable set of virtues (generosity, wisdom, eloquence) inevitably presented through tropes that were equally as predictable (generous as the rain, wise as Solomon, speech like arrows). Further, the panegyrics seldom offered any personal data that a biographer or historian might find of interest. And most of all, we found the poet’s obsequious posturing downright detestable—all of that fawning was laid on so thick and reeked of phoniness, especially since poets seemed to say the same thing about every addressee.

      Alas, medieval Hebrew praise poetry did not fit our literary tastes. Surely, we were not alone. Our preference for love poetry, nature poetry, and other genres was something that we shared with the pioneering scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, whose