Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter
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in his eyes. Before him a hundred thousand kikarim are like an agorah. To every patron he is a king upon a throne and seat; before him others are like concubines.”2
In the poem, Hai also refers to the arrival of Yehudah’s letter and gift: “It arrived like lightning reaching Venus, shining and gleaming. I kissed it and fastened it on me like a sash. I set it in my place exposed, not concealed, and showed it to every guest to rejoice with me and sing. My portion from his wedding that was sent as a gift (ashkarah) will be considered by God an offering and sacrifice (minḥah ve-azkarah). He made it ransom for him for pardoning and atonement. Out of [the gift], I made a holiday [for scholars] and a special day of rejoicing for all the sages of my academy, for lifting spirits and exchanging gifts (terumiyah ve-liteshurah).”3
We begin this section on the social function of Jewish panegyric with this poem because it captures several aspects of the complex dynamics that we will be discussing in this and the following chapter. It is clear that this panegyric was presupposed by and participated in a broad social and administrative system that involved trans-Mediterranean communal bonds, correspondence, the sending of monetary donations, and hyperbolic address. Yehudah held the title Rosh ha-Seder (“head of the order”), which would have been bestowed upon him by a Baghdadi gaon—likely, in this case, because of philanthropic and scholarly activity.4 The concluding dedication conveys that Hai composed the poem from noon until night and commands that others learn and recite it on the Sabbath and new moons to be remembered for generations. Following the poem, the letter continues with praise and assures the recipient that “our companions, students, and loved ones” will “learn and teach [the poem] and publicize it far and wide.” Those who hear it will “not find all this praise strange or foreign” but rather “a word aptly spoken” (cf. Prv 25:11).5
Here we witness the sending of a poem from a gaon, a man of the highest spiritual and intellectual rank, to a prominent donor and communal leader who was nonetheless the gaon’s social subordinate in a far-off community. Despite his higher status, the gaon took the posture of a poet praising his mamdūḥ, appropriate because the donor was arguably a kind of “patron.” The panegyric was part of an epistolary exchange whereby the poem, despite its ornate style, functioned essentially as a letter, one whose value was enhanced by its meter, rhyme, and beauty, and the labor of whose execution was emphasized by the poet-gaon.
This exchange between gaon and communal leader, between the Islamic East and the Islamic West, falls roughly in the middle of the period under discussion in most of this book, c. 950–1250. The poem extends backward in time to a Hebrew panegyric tradition that had been developing for a century and certainly would not be the last such panegyric to be composed. The formal features, including quantitative meter and monorhyme, indicate that Hai was following the Arabized prosodic innovations introduced by Dunash Ben Labrat in al-Andalus during the tenth century (one of Dunash’s panegyrics to Ḥasdai Ibn Shaprut likewise emphasizes its being composed in quantitative meter).6 Finally, the poem illuminates the central subject of the present chapter concerning the performance practices of Jewish panegyric. On the one hand, the poem is clearly part of an epistolary exchange. On the other, Hai’s text testifies to the broader circulation of both the initial letter and the poetic response beyond the eyes of their immediate recipients. The gaon set Yehudah’s letter out for “guests” and ordered that the panegyric be read publicly.7
One set of questions that we must address in determining what Jewish panegyrics were ultimately for—what function they held in the constitution of medieval Jewish society—is how they were received, performed, and circulated. Were they delivered orally, before small or large audiences? Read privately by their addressees? What relationship exists between the written testimonies and oral/aural experiences? We will see that the performance practices of Jewish panegyric in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean were variegated and had written as well as oral dimensions, though the sources elucidate most poignantly the degree to which panegyrics were embedded within epistolary exchange. This is not entirely surprising, since written texts testify to the practices of written culture primarily but to oral culture only serendipitously; it might be the case that the occasional hints that we have of oral recitation are the tip of an iceberg that is largely submerged or has melted away. Still, we do learn that figures were acclaimed aloud, sometimes publicly and even ceremonially, as suggested by Hai’s poem. The written text of the panegyric, which was sent over a distance in response to a letter, preceded the oral performance, but we may assume that public acclamation also took place.
* * *
The primary purpose of this chapter is to consider the evidence for oral and written aspects of Jewish panegyric practice in the contexts of the Islamic Mediterranean, including the world of the academies, local political structures, mercantile circles, and other social and intellectual relationships. Although much of the information considered is rather technical—including scribal inscriptions, the layout of manuscript pages, lists of books—the chapter remains focused on broader cultural issues such as the nature of patronage, the place of panegyric in society, the machinery of disseminating images of leadership, and the continuity and disjunction of Jewish regions across the Mediterranean. The chapter also offers close readings of texts with a focus on political vocabulary.
The discussion begins by reviewing the practice of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic East, where the tradition began, and then turns to the practice in the Islamic West, particularly within al-Andalus. I review the relatively scant evidence that we have for the oral performance of Jewish panegyric, whether in public ceremonies—what might be called “political rituals”—or in small gatherings, and the more extensive evidence we possess regarding its place in epistolary exchange. The chapter stresses the epistolary context for Jewish panegyric alongside a performative, sometimes ceremonial, one while also breaking down the dichotomy presumed to exist between the two. I do not propose an austere culture of poetic reading that negated aural experience; as demonstrated, poems that played a primarily epistolary function could be recited publicly subsequent to reception.
In discussing the subject of Jewish regionalism within the Mediterranean, I also offer, inter alia, a critique of what has generally been dubbed the “courtly” Jewish culture of al-Andalus. It has often been asserted that the Jews of al-Andalus imitated the performance practices of Islamic courts where poets lauded caliphs for pay and thus engaged in a kind of miniature Jewish court culture; a key element of this portrayal has been the image of the Jewish patron surrounded by professional poets who recited his praise in exchange for money. Although the courtly image is justified to an extent, it has also been partly misunderstood, a point that has had the effect of distorting our ideas about Andalusian Jewish panegyric and its function. In the Islamic West, as in the Islamic East, Hebrew panegyric practice involved epistolary as well as performative elements, which makes its role more continuous than has been imagined. Further, the performative settings of Jewish panegyric recall both the hierarchic majlis as well as the more egalitarian mujālasa, as distinguished in the Arabic context by Samer Ali and discussed in the Introduction to this book.8
Evidence for the Oral Performance of Panegyric in the Islamic East
Our sources for the oral performance of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic East are fairly sparse.9 Even more rarely do we find indications of oral performance in connection with an actual political ceremony. Natan ha-Bavli, writing in the tenth century, reports that when a new exilarch was invested on the Sabbath, he stood under a canopy beneath which a cantor also placed his head in order to “bless [the exilarch] with prepared blessings (berakhot metuqanot), prepared the previous day or the day before, in a soft voice so that no one could hear them save those sitting around the dais and the young men beneath it. When he blessed him the young men would respond ‘Amen!’ in a loud voice but all the people remained silent until he had finished his blessings.”10
Because Natan’s text was originally written in Judeo-Arabic and this section survives only in a medieval Hebrew translation, we are left to deduce what Arabic word lay behind the Hebrew berakhot (blessings). It seems likely that the word was du‘ā, “invocations with blessings,” which were frequently used when acclaiming men of power in Islamic political ceremonies.11 On the one