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Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean (Jewish Culture and Contexts) - Hardcover

Buch 31 von 68: Jewish Culture and Contexts

Decter, Jonathan

 
9780812250411: Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812250419 ISBN 13: 9780812250411
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A constant feature of Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean was the dedication of panegyric texts in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and other languages to men of several ranks: scholars, communal leaders, courtiers, merchants, patrons, and poets. Although the imagery of nature and eroticism in the preludes to these poems is often studied, the substance of what follows is generally neglected, as it is perceived to be repetitive, obsequious, and less aesthetically interesting than other types of poetry from the period. In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter demurs. As is the case with 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 the individuals they portray. Looking at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives—social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological—he finds that they offer representations of Jewish political leadership as it varied across geographic area and evolved over time.

Decter focuses his analysis primarily on Jewish centers in the Islamic Mediterranean between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and also includes a chapter on Jews in the Christian Mediterranean through the fifteenth century. He examines the hundreds of panegyrics that have survived: some copied repeatedly in luxurious anthologies, others discarded haphazardly in the Cairo Geniza. According to Decter, the poems extolled conventional character traits ascribed to leaders not only diachronically within the Jewish political tradition but also synchronically within Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Christian civilization and political culture. Dominion Built of Praise reveals more than a superficial and functional parallel between Muslim and Jewish forms of statecraft and demonstrates how ideas of Islamic political legitimacy profoundly shaped the ways in which Jews conceptualized and portrayed their own leadership.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Decter is the Edmond J. Safra Professor of Sephardic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. He is author of Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe.

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Introduction

I remember once as a graduate student reading in class a long Hebrew poem, "Lekha re'i ve-re'a ha-me'orim" (Come, my friend and friend of the luminaries), by the eleventh-century Andalusian Jewish poet Shelomoh Ibn Gabirol. We began with the poem's exquisite introduction, which describes a palace garden wherein the flowers, statues, and birds engage in a word battle of one-upmanship, each claiming superiority over his rivals. Ultimately, the poet's voice intrudes upon the scene to silence the competitors and declare that none can compare with the addressee of the poem, whose virtues the poet extols for another ten lines. I remember how we read the poem line by line, meticulously parsing each word, appreciating the aesthetic effects, and comparing themes with themes from Arabic poetry. We began with the first line, and, by the time class ended, we had barely reached the takhallu? (Ar., "escape verse"), in which the poet made a transition from the description of the garden to praise for his addressee.

In the next class, we did not return to read the panegyric section but began with another qa?īda (Ar., formal ode), Yehudah Halevi's "Ere? ke-yaldah haytah yoneqet" (The earth nursed like a baby girl), another nature description leading into panegyric. Again, we read to the takhallu?, and class ended. None of us missed reading the panegyric in detail. Even a cursory glance at the panegyric sections of several poems revealed a rather predictable set of virtues (generosity, wisdom, eloquence) inevitably presented through tropes that were equally as predictable (generous as the rain, wise as Solomon, speech like arrows). Further, the panegyrics seldom offered any personal data that a biographer or historian might find of interest. And most of all, we found the poet's obsequious posturing downright detestable—all of that fawning was laid on so thick and reeked of phoniness, especially since poets seemed to say the same thing about every addressee.

Alas, medieval Hebrew praise poetry did not fit our literary tastes. Surely, we were not alone. Our preference for love poetry, nature poetry, and other genres was something that we shared with the pioneering scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, whose Romantic tastes had a lasting impact on the development of the field of medieval Hebrew poetry. Jefim 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." 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."

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." 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).

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." 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." 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).

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. In Mosheh Ibn Ezra's review of desirable literary devices in his Judeo-Arabic treatise on Hebrew poetics, Kitab al-mu?a?ara wa'l-mudhakara (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 Abu Tammam in order to demonstrate how poetic meaning is conveyed.

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." 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...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812250419
ISBN 13 
9780812250411
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

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Breda
4831 GR
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