Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter

upright, and so on—but when he addressed him, He said, “For I have seen you righteous before me” and so on. He described him as righteous only.

Figure 2. Panegyric for a certain Ovadiah. TS 8 J 16.18r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

      The letter suggests that praise had previously been directed to Ovadiah in person, which is not at all surprising, given that he was a man of significant rank. He was called “confidant of the state, security of kingship” (amīn al-dawla, thiqqat al-mulk), both of which are titles common in Islamic political discourse that were appropriated within the titulature of the Jewish academies.⁶⁰ Most strikingly, the rabbinic warning against direct praise becomes a device exploited within panegyric (i.e., all this is said about you in your presence; just imagine what is said when you are not present!). The document also reveals something about the letter’s reception and afterlife; the margins bear a text in Judeo-Arabic, composed in a different hand, which explains the content of the letter, including the rabbinic dictum regarding what is “said of praise (min al-madīḥ) in the presence of the individual praised (al-shakhṣ al-mamdūḥ)” and the references to Noah. The letter was of sufficient value to merit commentary and was interpreted through the contemporary idiom of Arabic praise writing, replete with the terminology of madīḥ and mamdūḥ. Clearly, a great deal had changed since the rabbinic period.

      Why this change? The short answer is Islam, but that is hardly descriptive of a process. It is difficult to identify any single cause that brought Jews into the social practice of offering extensive praise in a manner similar to the practice among Muslims.⁶¹ It would be far too facile to ascribe the Jewish adoption of an Islamic social and political practice to the affinity of Judaism for Islam generally, though perhaps it was of at least some relevance that another aniconic monotheistic community had found a way to accommodate praise for men without usurping God’s place as the one true object of praise. Certainly, the Arabization of the Near East is relevant, as are the migration patterns of Jews to cosmopolitan centers of Islamic power and the relocation of the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita from their ancestral homes along the Euphrates to the ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad (late ninth—early tenth century). While the leadership institutions of the geonic period predate the spread of Islam, in the words of Robert Brody: “Under the unifying umbrella of Islam, international trade flourished as never before, and a form of international banking developed as well. Jews played a leading role in both of these areas…. [T]he center of this vast empire was transferred from Syria, where the Umayyads had had their capital at Damascus, to Babylonia, where the Abbasids made their capital at Baghdad. The leaders of Babylonian Jewry were thus admirably positioned to influence their coreligionists worldwide, and they made the most of their opportunities.”⁶²

      These transformations aligned the geonim, the leaders of the Baghdad academies (and also their counterparts at the Jerusalem academy), with an imperial perspective, and, in many ways, the administrative functions of the academies mirrored those of the ‘Abbasid government whose central preoccupation was to establish and maintain loyalty over a vast region. To these ends, Jewish leaders staged ceremonies of power, political rituals that included laudation and the profession of loyalty; they circulated textual accounts that “re-created” those ceremonies for distant communities; they sent legal opinions (responsa) and epistles on moral themes; and they dispatched emissaries throughout the region to represent them. Further, in comparison with Jews in Late Antiquity, Jews in Islamic empires appeared more often in governmental spaces, either as petitioners before officials or as courtiers, and probably had greater exposure to modes of professing loyalty and acclamation. Still, our knowledge about how these transformations occurred will necessarily remain deficient because of lacunae in the written record.⁶³

      Inasmuch as satellite Jewish communities in Syria, North Africa, al-Andalus, and Yemen turned to the various academies for legal opinions or expressed loyalty toward them (bonds that could be multiple, shifting, or ephemeral), they also maintained robust local leaderships, including courtiers who enjoyed audience with proximate dynasties of Islamic power, including independent caliphates. The precise interplay between local and central Jewish authority in the Islamic Mediterranean, between hierarchic and horizontal structure, has been and remains a central preoccupation of scholarship.⁶⁴ Like responsa literature, panegyrics can help historians create rich pictures of institutional loyalties.

      Moreover, bonds among Jews across the region of Islamic aegis were not limited to the hierarchy of religious institutions; Jews participated in smaller and sometimes interrelated groups or social networks that could be oriented toward shared goals of a political, mercantile, or intellectual nature. Inasmuch as a panegyric demonstrates a link, though sometimes an aspirational one, between two men, a full map of panegyric exchanges allows for a kind of representation, however partial, of Jewish social relations in the medieval Mediterranean, both spatially and across ranks. To understand the web of social relations among Jews in the region, we must envision several overlapping maps: (1) academy leaders, their local supporters, emissaries, and adherents in satellite communities; (2) local Jewish authorities and their adherents; (3) merchants, their family members, and partners in enterprise; and (4) intellectuals who had tastes for various types of knowledge.⁶⁵ Although not mutually exclusive, the maps for each of these could look quite different, and praise writing is a major resource for marking their contours and characters.⁶⁶

      A single author might belong to several social networks simultaneously and address members of each appropriately. Shemuel ha-Nagid of al-Andalus praised his fellow Andalusian Abū Faḍl Ibn Ḥasdai in a pure biblicizing Hebrew for his wisdom, generosity, and eloquence, but, when he lamented Hai Gaon of Baghdad, he wrote in a register described in the manuscript as “like the language of the Mishnah” (mithl lughat al-mishnah) and focused on his knowledge of Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud as well as his power of judgment.⁶⁷ Here, the linguistic registers themselves, along with the characteristics selected for praise, demarcate the social networks, one a set of Andalusian intellectuals devoted to linguistic purity, the other a group of rabbinic scholars for whom mishnaic Hebrew marked a legal community with ancient roots.⁶⁸

      Similarly, Yehudah Halevi praised his fellow Andalusian poet-scholar Yehudah Ibn Ghiyat as one who wears garments of wisdom, fear, integrity, justice, skill, honor, modesty, and kindness, a “tree of knowledge that gives life to those who gather [its fruit], a lion whelp who shepherds ewes.”⁶⁹ Both Halevi and Ibn Ghiyat belonged to the circle of Andalusian Jews who have sometimes been called “courtier rabbis,” though it is preferable to refer to them as they sometimes referred to themselves in Arabic, as ahl al-adab, the “people of adab,” an expansive concept that incorporated wide-ranging knowledge (in poetry, oratory, rhetoric, grammar, exegesis) and a refined, urbane code of etiquette.⁷⁰ At the same time, Halevi praised the Nagid Shemuel Ben Ḥananiah of Egypt by dwelling on his power, “A Nagid ‘who seeks the good of his people and speaks peace to all its seed,’” a verbatim description of Mordechai, the archetypal Jewish courtier (Est 10:3); “a righteous man who rules over men, who rules with the fear of God,” predicated of King David (2 Sm 23:3); “he stood in the counsel of the holy.” Moreover, this poem situates the Nagid geographically within the Mediterranean: “Canaan (Palestine) envies Egypt because it is illumined by the light of his face; Shinar (Iraq) studies his ways and beseeches ‘Majestic Full of Light’ (i.e., God) to see the king who stands above the waters of the Nile. Sefarad (al-Andalus) joins them to measure out his boundary.”⁷¹

      Iraq and Palestine, the gravitational centers to which other communities turn, here focus their gaze upon this “king” of Egypt; al-Andalus “joins them” in honoring the Nagid, thus setting the place of al-Andalus within the hierarchy. The representation of Mediterranean geography is taken up in Chapter 4, but a few words are in order here.

      The Mediterranean

      It should be clear by now that Dominion Built of Praise treats a broad geographic expanse that ranges from al-Andalus and North Africa