Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter
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him the title (talqībuna) av bet din of the yeshivah.24 It is incumbent upon the communities of our brethren, may they be blessed, that, when they hear of his arrival and his appearance before them, they gather to meet him with rejoicing and gladness, exuberance, joy, respect, magnification (i‘ẓām), abundant offering, and reverence and that his seat be made beautiful.”
This text also goes on to mention rituals associated with Ben Barkhael’s teaching, pronouncing his name in the qadish, the signet ring, and his right to make appointments. Ben ‘Eli concludes, lending authority to the appointee while claiming his own jurisdiction: “His speech is our speech and his command is our command. He who brings him near brings us near and he who distances him distances us.”25
“Magnification” and “reverence” undoubtedly involved praise of some sort, though it is difficult to know whether this included the formal presentation of panegyric. Ben ‘Eli certainly saw the enumeration of the judge’s virtues a requisite purpose of his letter and recognized that the verbal pronouncement of Ben Barkhael’s greatness was essential to constituting his aura of authority and ultimately his effective leadership. Ben ‘Eli recognized that dominion was built of praise.
Epistolary Panegyric in the East
In comparison with our knowledge of the oral performance of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic East, our knowledge of the place of panegyric in epistolary exchange is quite extensive. As suggested above and exemplified by the poem that opened this chapter, many panegyric texts functioned essentially as letters or as part of a correspondence in which a poem accompanied a letter proper, itself often written in rhymed prose with extensive literary effects. Hai Gaon’s poem to Rav Yehudah was intended for a dual purpose: to function as a letter (in response to another letter) while allowing—indeed, mandating—broader circulation and oral performance.
Over the course of the century prior to Hai’s correspondence with Rav Yehudah, Jewish letter writing had undergone a revolution, owed to Jewish knowledge of Arabic epistolary practices and the expanded functions of correspondence in the organization of the Jewish world. Letters were written for any number of reasons: to update a loved one on one’s state, to inform a business partner on dealings, to initiate a relationship with someone of higher or lower rank, to ask for or offer a legal opinion, to request money or favors of a recipient, or to offer gratitude for a previous kindness. Most of these epistolary registers would be expected to include praise for their addressees, which could be as simple as a few well-chosen terms of address or as extensive as a rhymed, metered poem spanning hundreds of verses.26
Modern readers have sometimes been struck, even puzzled, by the amount of panegyric contained within Jewish letter writing. In fact, some letters seem to be little more than a long series of praises, especially striking since paper was sufficiently precious that letter writers covered every speck of available space, including the margins, with ink. Jacob Mann refers to one Geniza document (TS Loan 203.2), a letter by Sherirah Gaon of Pumbedita to Ya‘aqov b. Nissim of Qairawan, as “the end of a letter consisting merely of verbiage.”27 Yet these documents provide us with an intimate glimpse into the inner logic of medieval Jewish culture, for their rhetoric bespeaks some of its most fundamental conceptions of leadership, friendship, and interpersonal connection.
There has not yet been a comprehensive treatment of Jewish letter writing based on Geniza materials and in light of Arabic epistolary practices that takes into account the full range of stylistic differences across period, location, and social rank, though there have been various localized treatments.28 Goitein, of course, discussed (especially merchant) Jewish letter writing at many points in A Mediterranean Society, and Assaf, already in the early twentieth century, pointed out that epistles of the Baghdad academy from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries followed a standard form that included long sections of praises and blessings at the beginning and end.29 Structural and rhetorical analyses of all types of Jewish letter writing preserved in the Geniza remains an important topic for research, but here I wish only to emphasize praise as a pervasive aspect; it is exchanged among people of all ranks and, especially in the case of more powerful figures, played a constitutive role in the establishment of political legitimacy. In the section below, I present a general overview of Jewish letter writing in the Islamic Mediterranean, including the nodes at which praise was integrated, and argue further for narrowing the presumed gap between written and oral elements of panegyric performance.
On the Art of Medieval Jewish Letter Writing
Jewish letter writing can be dated prior to the geonic period; there are several references to the sending of letters in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Est 3:13, 8:10), and Jewish letters survive from Late Antiquity (obvious examples include the Bar Kokhba letters and the Pauline epistles, though there are others). Jewish letters by nasis are attested in Late Antiquity through references in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds as well as in a comment by Eusebius. As Isaiah Gafni points out, within rabbinic literature, excerpts of epistles are quoted in Hebrew even within Aramaic contexts, which may speak to Hebrew’s status in formal correspondence either as a “national” or “trans-national” language. As Gafni also points out, it seems that Jews were well acquainted with the epistolary practices of Late Antiquity, illustrated colorfully by an anecdote in which a scribe in the service of Yehudah ha-Nasi drafted a letter to Caesar that the Nasi tore up and revised to make the opening salutation adhere to a more formal standard, “To the lord the king from Yehudah, your servant.”30
The transformation of the geopolitical landscape brought by the expansion of Islam dramatically changed the organization of the Jewish world. The central administrative preoccupation of the academies at Baghdad and the competing Palestinian academy was the cultivation and preservation of loyalty from satellite communities from the far west to the far east of the Islamic world. Gaons sought to create standards of practice over these vast territories, encouraged adherence to their legal authority, and solicited funds from distant communities to run the academies. The movement of the Babylonian academies to the capital of Baghdad in the late ninth or early tenth century situated the gaons at the center of power, an ideal position for executing their administrative tasks and for cultivating their intellectual tastes.31 New levels of connection between center and periphery were facilitated by the relative political unity, however fractious, of the ‘Abbasid Empire and the advent of rapid communication.
In many respects, the powers and responsibilities of the Jewish academies mirrored what was taking place administratively within the Islamic political world, whose governments also sought loyalty over vast territories and relied on an efficient system of mail delivery to bind center and periphery.32 Neither private Jewish nor Muslim citizens had access to this governmental postal system, but the academies were able to use their own emissaries to circulate its letters, likely following similar routes. Other Jewish postal traffic seems to have been maintained through the “serendipitous, although heavy, traffic of Jewish travelers” and a more formalized system that Goitein described as a “commercial mail service” wherein Muslim couriers delivered letters sent among Jews.33
Islamic civilization also witnessed the rise of the court scribe (kātib), a powerful office that required knowledge of rhetoric, religion, poetry, philosophy, and diplomacy.34 Letter writing became an art form in its own right that merited the composition of manuals offering advice for scribes including al-Risāla ilā al-kuttāb (Epistle to the secretaries), by ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib; Adab al-kātib (The etiquette of the secretary), by Ibn Qutaiba; Adab al-kuttāb (The etiquette of the secretaries), by al-Ṣūlī; Tashīl al-sabīl ilā ta‘allum al-tarsīl (Easing the path to learning the art of letter writing), by al-Ḥumaydī; and the late fourteenth-century–early fifteenth-century Ṣubḥ al-a‘ashā’ fī ṣinā‘at alinshā’ (Morning light for the night-blind in composing letters), by al-Qalqashandī.35 As stated by A. Arazi: “Even an administrative letter should be composed according to artistic and literary criteria; in society’s view, it belonged to the domain of the fine arts, and accordingly, the kātib was considered above all an artist.”36 Members of the dīwān al-inshā’, the correspondence bureau or chancery, were expected to gain