Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter
in Fustat. The letter was written to initiate contact between the scholar-merchant, who already enjoyed significant fame, and the gaon, whom Ben Natanel hoped would maintain contact and promote his reputation. The existence of multiple drafts in Judeo-Arabic for the same purpose clearly attests to the deliberateness that Ben Natanel invested in getting the tone just right. Comparing the versions is revealing:
1. My lord, my master, the most high, my support, my refuge, the most revered, my help, my stay, the most excellent, crown of the Exile, lamp of the religious community, perfection of exaltedness, fit for the domains of religion and the material world, his virtue and beneficence are widespread.
2. My lord, the most high, my master, the unique, the most excellent, the most beautiful crown, and the most perfect splendor, banner of banners, the source of perfection, the beauty of thought, ornament of the age.
3. My lord, my master, august as is proper for him, the sublime, foremost in priority, his exalted and sublime Presence.
From the first version to the third, the terms of praise actually become fewer in number. On the other hand, the author moved away from one-word descriptions (the most high, my support, my refuge), which are fairly generic, to more complex constructions, though these are not absent even in the first example. Already in the first example, the author has drawn upon terms of praise common within Islamic political discourse and Arabic panegyric, most importantly “fit for the domains of Religion and the World” (al-dīn wa’l-dunyā), a theme that had a long life span in Jewish discourse. In the second and third examples, the author has dropped terms referring to the Jewish community specifically (the Exile, the religious community) and offered a more universal depiction. Most importantly, the text moves toward vocabulary that is much more rare, abstract, and particular to royalty (“banner,” “Presence”).
Official letters were sometimes enacted dramatically through the oral presentation of their contents. A long letter sent on behalf of the congregations of Alexandria by Yeshu‘a Kohen Ben Yosef to Ephraim Ben Shemariah, head of the Jerusalem congregation in Fustat, requests contributions for the freeing of captives; even in such an urgent matter, the author did not fail to include six lines of complicated rhymed prose in the introduction (praise in honor of the community) and thirty in the body of the letter. In thanking Ben Shemariah for a previous letter, the author writes, “the whole community (of Alexandria) enjoyed your letter …, the greatness of your wisdom and the beauty of your rhymes.” Ben Yosef also requests that his letter be read to the community in Fustat.80 Shemuel Ben ‘Eli specifies that a letter should be read “in public and sweetly” (meteq lashon) and a joint letter from Sherirah and Hai Gaon to the Palestinian academy commands that the letter be read in public, “which was done there for our forefathers many times.”81 A letter of Maimonides to Yosef Ibn ‘Aqnīn describes a highly ritualized public reading of a letter from an exilarch such that the community members rose while the reader stood with the elders of the community to his right and left.82 The fact that epistles were frequently performed orally helps close the functional gap between epistles and oral panegyrics. And because epistles contained so much praise, their wide distribution demonstrates how public images of legitimacy could be disseminated and consumed.
Poetic Epistles, Epistolary Poems
As noted, many letters were written with a great deal of literary flair and made use of the same poetic techniques characteristic of “literature” proper. Similarly, many poems can be shown to have held an epistolary function. To be sure, letters and poems were distinguished in the medieval period and were theorized, respectively, in works on epistolography and poetics. At the same time, however, the Geniza preserves two book lists in which a dīwān al-mukātabāt (collection of correspondence) appears adjacent to a dīwān alshi‘r (collection of poetry), which points to differentiation but also to the proximity of the two forms.83 Further, no neat dichotomy can be maintained between texts that were “poems” and those that were “epistles.” At the very least, both utilized praise as a dominant mode of address, which points to their common rhetorical goals. The shared function of praise is corroborated by similar organizational strategies in works of epistolography and poetics, in that both tend to be structured around hierarchy. We have already seen that al-Ḥumaydī and al-Qalqashandī organize blessings of address according to rank; similarly, the panegyric section of Kitāb al-‘umda, a major work on Arabic poetics by Ibn Rashīq, is organized according to rank by specifying what qualities should be praised for occupants of different offices.84
One of our earliest Hebrew panegyrics, fragmentary though it is, is written in honor of Sa‘adia Gaon. It consists of strings of words, between two and five words each, that maintain a common end rhyme from between four and ten strings. After praising the mamdūḥ, the author asks a particular question pertaining to a matter of exegesis and expresses hope for a response. Do we have here a poem or a piece of correspondence? The answer is both. The verso contains the beginning of the gaon’s response, replete with the kind of wordplay that Sa‘adia describes in his commentary on the Book of Creation (Sefer yeṣirah) as belonging to letter openings, thus reinforcing the reading of the poem as a letter.85
The same is also the case with the lengthy panegyric that opened this chapter; it is certainly a poem but also meets standard epistolary expectations (greetings, congratulations, thanks, updates, closings), not to mention that it was written in response to a letter proper. Another poetic panegyric by Hai Gaon is introduced in the manuscript with a revealing superscription, undoubtedly inserted by a scribe of the academy, “the correspondence (Ar., mukātaba) of our master Hai Gaon with master Avraham Ben ‘Aṭa, Nagid of Qairawan.”86 In an important article on the Andalusian native Menaḥem Ben Saruq, Ezra Fleischer stressed epistolary dimensions of Menaḥem’s poetry and argued for the continuity, based on formalistic grounds, between the poet’s writing and Eastern precedents. I am wholly in agreement with this aspect of Fleischer’s article, which helps us situate Andalusian Jewish culture within the broader context of the Islamic Mediterranean.87
In the following section, I take the argument for the link in Jewish literary culture between the Islamic East and the Islamic West a step further by arguing for the basic continuity of panegyric performance as a hybrid oral-epistolary system. Although there are obvious structural differences between, for example, a gaon’s thanking a donor and a poet’s initiation of a relationship with a potential benefactor, the hybrid performance practice points to some level of shared function and interpersonal dynamic. This fact presses us to rethink the nature of Jewish culture in the Islamic West, particularly in al-Andalus, with respect to what has been termed its “courtly” quality. The section on the performance of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic West begins with a historiographic excursus on what I will call the “courtly hypothesis,” which, I argue, has had a distorting effect on our perception of panegyric’s function.
Jewish Panegyric Performance in the Islamic West
Andalusian Jewish culture has often been imagined as a kind of novum that broke forth ex nihilo, owed to the high degree of Arabization of Andalusian Jewry. If there is one word that is usually used to distinguish Andalusian Jewish culture from other Jewish cultures in the Islamic Mediterranean, it is “courtly,” though scholars are seldom precise about what this term means. Seventy years have passed since Joseph Weiss delivered his paper “Tarbuṭ ḥaṣranit ve-shirah ḥaṣranit” (Courtly culture and courtly poetry) at the first World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem (1947).88 By that time, research on the “court Jew” had gained momentum among researchers of different periods of Jewish history. Selma Stern had written her Der Hofjude im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (1640–1740), in which she presented court Jews as “the forerunners of the emancipation,” although debates raged over whether these Jews, who maintained contacts with and proved useful instruments of royalty, represented a people apart from their coreligionists or safeguarded their welfare (see, especially, the square critique of Stern by none other than Hannah Arendt).89 Likely influenced by the tragedy of the Holocaust, Yitzhak Baer had portrayed the court Jews of Christian Iberia with a mixture of admiration and suspicion.90
Weiss aimed to elevate the study of Andalusian Hebrew