Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter
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some cases, to offer a man loyalty or “obedience” meant only to say that he was deserving of praise. Further, many of the relationships witnessed here are more lateral than hierarchic, and, in some cases, panegyrics were written by the more powerful for the less powerful upon whom they nonetheless relied. Where I part with Weber most significantly regards what has been recognized as his “ruler-centric” vantage point that understands claims of legitimacy solely as a tool for implementing obedience, for I am equally interested in what panegyrics did for power-subjects—that is, their authors and audiences. These topics are taken up in the coming chapters, but we can say that while Weber’s conception of authority might not be sufficiently nuanced for the corpus under discussion, his categorization of types of claims remains remarkably apt.15
Further, I argue that praise was not only reflective but also constitutive of power among medieval Jews. That is, authority was a result of its own articulation and could not be realized but for the presentation of praise with its attending metaphors and conceptual frameworks of legitimacy. These metaphors could be relational (e.g., the leader is to his people as the head is to the limbs) or even theological (the leader as a sacred object, an angel, or even God). As Esperanza Alfonso has argued with respect to Hebrew panegyric in al-Andalus, such metaphors are not only hyperbolic but also provide the audience a cognitive means for interpreting the world; they are, as Lakoff and Johnson put it, metaphors to “live by.”16 Metaphors of political structure are fundamental for the effective exercise of power in even the most heavily militarized and dictatorial of regimes. In the case of Jewish leadership in the medieval Mediterranean, which had no military, no real territory, and few means of coercion, such metaphors were sometimes all that existed for the constitution and promulgation of power. Thus, at the core of this book is a fundamental argument about rhetoric, that it is not merely an ornamental layer superadded to a type of discourse but is the very substance of that discourse that has the power to construct “reality” for its audience.
In an eleventh-century Hebrew panegyric for the court astronomer Avraham Ibn al-Muhājir, Mosheh Ibn Ezra wrote: “[His] dominion is built out of precious stones while others’ is built out of whitewash and plaster.”17 What Ibn Ezra recognized was that dominion, whether legitimate or illegitimate, was a matter of construction. In fact, the words translated here as “precious stones” (avnei tehilot, “stones [worthy of] praise”) most literally mean “stones of praise.” Dominion is built out of stones of praise. Although Ibn Ezra’s intent was probably one of comparison and juxtaposition, the verse conveys that dominion is literally built out of praise; without the building blocks of praise, there would be no dominion.
Most studies of Jewish power have focused on the influence of Jews within the court structures of their host cultures, whether or not they carried arms or fought in battle, and the extent of Jewish autonomy.18 This study, in contrast, is interested in the representation of power, the idealization of attributes as conveyed in panegyric. Like the panegyrics recited before Caesar in the classical world or the literary and artistic portraits of English monarchs, Hebrew panegyrics depict leaders who are at once members of their age—that is, they are born, die, and attain certain accomplishments—and embodiments of ideals of peoplehood, religion, and epochs.
Many figures included in this book held high offices within the Jewish community, with titles such as gaon (academy dean), rosh golah (exilarch), nagid (leader), and ra’īs al-yahūd (head of the Jews); lower-ranking but substantial offices such as qāḍī (judge) and kātib (scribe); or titles of honor bestowed upon them for communal or philanthropic activity, such as aluf (captain), rosh ha-seder (head of the order), and rosh kallah (head of the assembly).19 At the same time, the book will treat recipients of panegyric who held no official rank for whom “dominion” (misrah) was generally not a reality. Such figures—including grammarians, poets, and exegetes—were portrayed according to sets of conventions particular to their social roles; still, political imagery found its way into their representation as well, albeit in metaphoric form (the “king of poetry” and the like). This book therefore offers a series of cross-sections of the overlapping layers of Jewish society in the medieval Mediterranean—from the macrostructures of trans-regional leadership, to what was more regional, even local, in character, to circles of merchants and intellectuals.
The central body of texts includes the many hundreds of panegyrics dedicated to Jews of these numerous ranks, most often in Hebrew, sometimes in Judeo-Arabic, and, in some cases, both languages. The texts have been preserved through various means, from highly prized examples copied over many times, sometimes in luxury editions of books (and then printed in modernity), to collections of epistles copied by court scribes, and the occasional letters, poems, and other documents haphazardly discarded in the Cairo Geniza.20 Praise is found not only in freestanding “literary” panegyrics, whether in poetry or prose, but also in texts that are usually designated “documentary sources” such as letters or dedications of books or buildings. One methodological point of this book is to recover the original social function of “literary” texts and to discuss the literary features of “documentary” sources, thus closing the assumed gap between the two corpora; a text presented to the modern reader as a prime example of “medieval Hebrew literature,” a text that was copied, anthologized, and commented upon, may have begun its life with a social purpose functionally indistinguishable from a scrap serendipitously preserved in the Geniza. Other sources utilized throughout the book in an ancillary manner include biblical exegesis, legal and lexicographic works, Arabic poetry, and treatises on philosophy, theology, and poetics by Jewish and non-Jewish authors.
Although the focus of the book is on praise among Jews, I also address, in the final chapter, the panegyrics written by Jews in honor of non-Jews, with examples ranging from Byzantium, Egypt, Syria, Castile, and Aragon in Arabic, Hebrew, and Castilian. The chapter demonstrates how Jews adopted discourses of Islamic and Christian power, sometimes praising non-Jewish figures as Muslims or Christians might have praised them, but also how Jews remained reticent about certain aspects of legitimacy and perhaps furtively conveyed to a Jewish audience a poetics of political resistance.
A Culture of Praise
My interest in Jewish panegyric follows renewed interest in panegyric among scholars of classical Greek and Latin literature, who had previously concentrated their efforts on epic and tragedy, and among scholars of Arabic literature.21 The panegyric turn itself was predicated on new academic interests in the nature and articulation of power, ceremonial aspects of verbal acclamation, anthropological models of exchange, and so forth. As in the cases of other panegyric traditions, a study of Hebrew panegyric is part literary study, part social history, and even part theology. As such, this book will cross paths numerous times with fields of scholarship that grew out of seminal works by figures such as Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Ernst Kantorowicz, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Judith Butler, and others.
The word “panegyric” reflects its originally public function, being derived from a Greek root meaning “public festival.”22 In the classical world, a panegyric could be delivered in poetic or prose form and was recited publicly in conjunction with an event such as an emperor’s birthday, the celebration of a victorious battle, or a religious holiday. Recent studies on panegyric in the classical world have treated the poet-patron relationship, shifting images of model leadership, and the role of panegyric in the propaganda of the state.23 The purposes of panegyric extended far beyond a poet’s offering flattery in the hopes of monetary compensation. Panegyrics afforded leaders the opportunity to fashion their public personae, a central practice of state propaganda. Yet the presenting of ruler images cannot be seen as a top-down process only; leaders also functioned as screens upon which the values and aspirations of a cultural group could be projected.24 Poets sometimes wielded surprising amounts of power and could even use panegyric (and invective) to sway rulers.
Literary representations of leaders tend to pass over individual characteristics in favor of fairly stable and conventional images. They change slowly and are culturally determined and contingent upon historical circumstances. For this reason, seemingly minor shifts within a highly conventional corpus of praise literature can be of great value—both to literary scholars and to historians—not because they reveal much