Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter
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Greek, Latin, and Arabic panegyric), that portraying panegyrics as gifts constituted them as material objects whose value served as or demanded reciprocation, thus initiating or perpetuating a cycle of loyalty. Toward the end of the chapter, I consider the specific implications of describing gifts through the language of the sacrificial cult of ancient Israel, as though these gifts were offered not for their human recipients but rather for God.
Chapter 3, “‘Humble Like the Humble One’: The Language of Jewish Political Legitimacy,” reviews dominant characteristics ascribed to idealized Jewish figures and interprets the cultural resonances of these virtues through diachronic and synchronic representations of power and legitimacy. Thus, the chapter considers such elements as associating the mamdūḥ with biblical predecessors (e.g., Moses, David, Samuel) and offices (priests, prophets, kings) as well as resonances with contemporary images of Islamic legitimacy. Further, the chapter considers ways in which panegyrists tailored their compositions for mamdūḥs of different rank.
Chapter 4, “‘Sefarad Boasts over Shinar’: Mediterranean Regionalism in Jewish Panegyric,” reflects upon the present study as a “Mediterranean” project. The subject of this book offers an ideal case study for thinking through debates concerning Mediterranean cohesion in that it traces a demonstrable feature of continuity and connectivity—the praise writing of Jews who lived, traveled, and traded around “the sea”—even as it stresses variations and disjunctions among the several subregions. With a focus on the panegyrics of Yehudah Halevi and Yehudah al-Ḥarīzī, I argue that minor fluctuations in the idealization of leadership across the highly conventional and relatively stable corpus of Jewish panegyric provide a telling measure of differences in Jewish political cultures.
Although panegyric writing was clearly more normative and acceptable in the medieval period than it is in our own day, the practice was not without its detractors. The ethical misgivings surrounding the culture of praise were several, from the worldly aspirations of fame-seeking mamdūḥs, to the sincerity of the panegyrist (especially when he received remuneration), the potential falsehood of poetic statements themselves, and the problem of praising men when, theologically speaking, all praise was properly due to God. In Chapter 5, “‘A Word Aptly Spoken’: The Ethics of Praise,” I review comments concerning praise among major Jewish authors (e.g., Sa‘adia Gaon, Baḥya Ibn Paquda, Mosheh Ibn Ezra, Maimonides) who expressed qualms about the practice or tried to navigate the ethical concerns implicit. Because these authors did not treat these topics extensively or systematically, their views are gleaned from occasional statements in their biblical exegesis and ethical and poetic writings. I show that, with a few exceptions, praise writing was viewed as ethically sound as long as it was executed within certain parameters.
Chapter 6, “‘A Cedar Whose Stature in the Garden of Wisdom …’: Hyperbole, the Imaginary, and the Art of Magnification,” continues with one theme raised in Chapter 5 concerning the potential of panegyric for presenting falsehood. Beyond the suspicion that the conniving panegyrist could simply lie for personal gain was the concern that panegyric, like other poetic genres, relied upon “deception” as its very mode of discourse. This chapter considers the role of hyperbole and metaphor in panegyric composition as well as the prescribed boundaries for these devices, especially with regard to Mosheh Ibn Ezra’s Judeo-Arabic treatise on Hebrew poetics within the context of Arabic poetics. I demonstrate that the fundamental mode of panegyric discourse is what Aristotle called auxesis, “magnification” (Heb., giddul; Ar., ta‘aẓīm) and that magnifying the qualities of a mamdūḥ was not only permitted but was required according to “his due.” Although poetic discourse remained a kind of deception, it was a unique quality of poetic speech that it could make statements that were meaningful without any particular claim to truth.
Chapter 7, “In Praise of God, in Praise of Man: Issues in Political Theology,” is an exhaustive treatment of the poetic device of praising mamdūḥs with phrases that are predicated of God in the Hebrew Bible. The discussion is situated within classical Arabic literary criticism, in which the practice of interlacing panegyrics with God’s praises from the Qur’ān was sometimes labeled contemptible speech and even polytheism (Ar., shirk, “attributing partners to God”). Despite such condemnations, Muslim and Jewish poets adopted this poetic practice precisely because it pressed against a perceived boundary between the human and the divine. Not only was sacred hyperbole rhetorically effective, but it provided poets a means of conveying vital aspects of political ideology. Through engagement with the idea of political theology as formulated by Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz, I argue that divine association in panegyric did not make mamdūḥs divine so much as it presented a theological structure within politics.
Chapter 8, “‘May His Book Be Burnt Even Though It Contains Your Praise!’: Jewish Panegyric in the Christian Mediterranean,” follows themes developed throughout the book in Christian Iberia, southern France, and Sicily during the later Middle Ages. I stress continuities and disjunctions in patronage relationships, poetic ideals, modes of representation, and political culture. The chapter recognizes new elements that left imprints on the panegyric corpus such as the kabbalah, Jewish-Christian polemics, religious conversion, and Romance vernacular literature.
Chapter 9, “The Other ‘Great Eagle’: Interreligious Panegyrics and the Limits of Interpretation,” treats the several poems penned by Jewish authors in honor of Muslim and Christian addressees (in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, and Castilian). The chapter studies the discursive strategies through which Jews praised non-Jewish rulers and explores how Jews used panegyric to negotiate their political position within local and imperial structures. Although recognizing the temporal authority of non-Jewish potentates while maintaining traditional Jewish stances on sacred history could certainly be awkward, interreligious panegyrics reveal various strategies for accommodating these rival claims. Further, the chapter investigates the methodological issues involved in determining whether words of praise should be read subversively as containing a “hidden transcript” that conceals a poetics of Jewish resistance.
A brief afterword revisits some major points of the book.
CHAPTER 1
Performance Matters: Between Public Acclamation and Epistolary Exchange
And my speech I purified, smelted, and cleansed
on balanced scales, marked it out with a stylus….
I worked on it from afternoon to evening. It is sweet like honey….
Recite it every Sabbath like the readings from the Torah and the Prophets,
write and recall it throughout the generations.
—Hai Gaon
These are verses from the conclusion of a lengthy panegyric (more than two hundred lines, all in quantitative meter and monorhyme) by Hai Ben Sherirah (d. 1038), gaon of the Sura academy in Baghdad, in honor of Rav Yehudah Rosh ha-Seder, a dignitary in Qairawan. After the wedding of Yehudah’s son Dunash, Yehudah sent a letter to Hai, along with a monetary gift for the academy. In the panegyric, Hai expresses gratitude for the gift and offers extensive praise for Yehudah, Yehudah’s wife,1 Dunash, and the bride’s family. A small portion of the praise for Yehudah is as follows: “Through him nations in Togarmah and Qedar are blessed. His kindness is upon all like rising vapor and incense. All his oils are scented like spiced early rain, aloe, myrrh, and cinnamon, every powder burning (Sg 3:6). His beneficence is great, too vast to measure. Who can seek out his praise and who can count it when he