Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter
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Schirmann, in a classic article of 1954, “The Function of the Poet in Medieval Spain,” wrote about the patronage system that he saw as the primary context for Hebrew panegyric in al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia): “Such dependence [on patrons] induced the poets to indulge in exaggerations and sycophancy of the worst kind.”2 Years later, in his posthumous Toledot ha-shirah ha-‘ivrit bi-Sefarad ha-muslemit (History of Hebrew poetry in Muslim Spain), Schirmann described the patronage system more generously, though he still maintained a sharp division between praise poetry, which he considered a necessary chore, and the other genres, which he believed were closer to the poets’ hearts. “Since it was now possible for [the poet] to work under the protection of a patron, he was able to write in his free time poetry for purposes other than making a living—that is for his personal enjoyment—meditative poems, poems on nature, love, and wine, humorous and invective poems, and poems of grief and complaint.”3
However, we should not be so quick to judge which literary genres held personal meaning for the poets; Schirmann’s assessment reflects his own literary tastes more than theirs. Most peculiar is his placement of panegyric in the “chore” category and invective in the “personal enjoyment” category, since classical and medieval critics, including Aristotle, Ibn Rushd, and Mosheh Ibn Ezra, saw them as two sides of the same coin and often treated them together. While Schirmann may well be one of the finest scholars of medieval Hebrew poetry ever to have lived, it is worth critically evaluating his position on panegyric and the cultural assumptions that it entails. His views are reflective of a general devaluation of panegyric in modernity. Already in 1656, an English dictionary by Thomas Blount defined panegyric as “a licentious kind of speaking or oration, in the praise and commendation of Kings, or other great persons, wherein some falsities are joined with many flatteries.”4 J. A. Burrow has argued that, beginning with the late seventeenth century, “[m]any deep seated changes in society, politics, economics and religious belief have contributed to a culture more at home with tin men than with heroes” (“tin men” being a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound).5
Panegyric’s decline in modern Europe surely had an impact on scholarship’s approach to panegyric in non-Western traditions. Jaroslav Stetkevych notes that German Orientalists first “enthusiastically engaged and assimilated the qasida, including panegyric, particularly in adaptations and translations, but then in the mid-nineteenth century, enthusiasm was replaced by a stale technical approach.”6 In 1909, Louis Ginzberg, a leading scholar of rabbinics, blamed Hai Gaon for having gone in panegyric “to an extreme of extravagance unusual even in an Oriental writer.”7 S. D. Goitein also wrote that most praise writings preserved in the Cairo Geniza (a great mass of documents discovered in a Cairo synagogue) were “exasperating by their hyperbolic generalities” (though in this context he wrote that a particular poem was an exception).8
No medieval Hebrew poet laments that the exigencies of writing praise poetry kept him from pursuing more noble poetic genres. Poets marshaled their skills in panegyric just as much as they did in other areas. Although the panegyrist had to avoid certain ethical pitfalls, I see no evidence that the poets generally regarded panegyric as a lesser genre.9 In Mosheh Ibn Ezra’s review of desirable literary devices in his Judeo-Arabic treatise on Hebrew poetics, Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa’l-mudhākara (The book of conversations and discussions), more than one-third of the Hebrew poetic excerpts are taken from panegyrics, and one section is dedicated to a device particular to panegyric; in addition, he quotes four lines of an Arabic panegyric by Abū Tammām in order to demonstrate how poetic meaning is conveyed.10
If we can judge from the sheer prevalence and persistence of Hebrew panegyric across time and space, it is clear that it played a vital function in Jewish society in the medieval Mediterranean. In fact, the ubiquity of praise as a social practice is difficult to overstate. It was a common feature of social interaction across a host of relationships, quite often divorced from the remunerative patronage structure that Schirmann emphasized. Further, we will see that literary panegyric was only one facet of a broader practice of praise, which also included terms of address and titles, greetings and blessings, and simply commending one party to another. Although such practices may seem strange to us, they were clearly very important to medieval Jews.
As mentioned, panegyrics can be frustratingly ungenerous sources for the historian; they offer typology, not biography, as well as hyperbolic and formulaic statements—what the historian of the Jews Jacob Mann sometimes called “verbiage.”11 Yet positivist historians such as Mann also recognized that panegyrics are sometimes the only surviving sources that testify to the existence of particular figures, where and when they lived, with whom they were in contact, how many sons they had, and other precious tidbits of data. In the present book, however, panegyric will be used in other ways in order to illuminate medieval Jews’ most essential notions of group cohesion, human virtue, leadership, and politics; in fact, the book will consider how praise intersected with nearly every aspect of Jewish social and intellectual culture in the medieval Mediterranean.
Dominion Built of Praise
This book presents Jews of the medieval Mediterranean through the lens of praise writing. The focus is on Jewish centers in the Islamic Mediterranean between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and includes an extensive chapter on Jews in the Christian Mediterranean through the fifteenth century. The book has two main interrelated purposes. One is to study the phenomenon of praise writing in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives: social-historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological. These interests are reflected in the table of contents, where the reader will notice an arc beginning with social history and moving toward topics more abstract and ethereal, before closing with a chapter on the Christian Mediterranean and another on interreligious panegyric. Studying medieval Jewish society through the lens of praise writing reveals some of that society’s social values and political structures. The subject also helps delineate the place of Jews within the Mediterranean, including their interior and interreligious discourses of power. Panegyric addresses not only relationships within Jewish groups (whether these are intellectual circles or an imagined polity) but also, on occasion, relationships between Jews and their non-Jewish rulers.
The second purpose of the book is to study more specifically the nature and changing elements of images of ideal Jewish leadership, images that hark back to earlier Jewish constructions of power while drawing upon contemporary non-Jewish formulations of legitimacy. Like visual portraits, panegyrics operate according to a code of cultural norms that tell us at least as much about the society that produced them as they do about the individuals they portray.12 I am thus less interested in studying the people behind literary facades than in studying the facades themselves.13 This book seeks to understand the valences of conventional character traits ascribed to Jewish leaders both diachronically within the “Jewish political tradition” and synchronically within Islamic (and, to a lesser extent, Christian) civilization and political culture. Throughout the book, I place subjects under discussion in dialogue with related phenomena in contemporary non-Jewish culture, especially the poetics of political legitimacy as expressed in Arabic writing. I argue that points of overlap between Jewish and Islamic discourses of power demonstrate more than a surface functional parallel between Muslim and Jewish forms of “statecraft” but also that ideas of Islamic legitimacy profoundly shaped how Jews conceptualized and portrayed their own leadership. At the same time, the book studies shifting representations of Jewish leadership according to social role, political rank, period, and region.
To a certain degree, I use the word “legitimacy,” which appears in the book title, in the way that Max Weber did, whereby a power-holder essentially persuades a power-subject of his rightful authority through various means. For Weber, different types of claims undergirded a variety of forms of legitimacy: traditional, whereby power is secured by claims of long-standing, sometimes sacredly inflected, norms; charismatic, whereby the governed submit because of some extraordinary quality of a given person, family, or office, and this, too, can be inflected with the sacred; and rational or legal, which appeals to norms that are established not by mere precedent but by reason.14
Throughout this book, the reader will encounter many examples of the first two varieties, though the idea of “authority”