Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter

areas along the Mediterranean Sea under Christian control (northern Iberia, southern France, Sicily). This whole region has, with much justification, been called “the Mediterranean,” and since I use the term in the title of this book, I will include here a brief discussion of the term’s history and my usage of it. At other points, I reflect further on this book as a Mediterranean project.

      The idea of the Mediterranean as an object of study enjoyed considerable prestige during the early and mid-twentieth century (with scholars such as Henri Pirenne and Fernand Braudel) and has emerged with renewed force in recent decades.⁷² By placing the well-traversed sea at the center of a map rather than segregating Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East according to continent, or the Islamic world from the Christian world according to spheres of religious dominance, scholars have appreciated lines of continuity that emerged across political, religious, or linguistic lines, even through war and conflict.⁷³ Debates over the utility of a Mediterranean orientation have revolved around whether the region (however demarcated) can be analyzed as a unity—a “discriminable whole,” in Horden and Purcell’s phrasing—or whether the various points around a Mediterranean route remained sufficiently distinct as to resist unified treatment.⁷⁴ Should political unity or relative peace be considered a necessary precondition for undertaking the region as a whole? Should continuities such as vocabulary items or culinary influence be considered sufficient for imagining a shared cultural sphere? The harshest critiques of the Mediterranean as an analytic framework have argued that it is essentializing and imperialist, much as Edward Said argued in the case of the Orient.⁷⁵

      The first question that might be asked is: Where, exactly, was the Mediterranean—its territorial contours? As Sarah Stroumsa laconically notes in her study of Maimonides as a “Mediterranean thinker,” the cultural notion of the Mediterranean world has taken on “impressive dimensions,” sometimes reaching as far as the Low Countries and, ironically enough, the Atlantic world.⁷⁶ In S. D. Goitein’s monumental A Mediterranean Society, a study of Jewish (and, to a significant degree, Muslim) society as reflected in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, the Mediterranean meant the areas under Islamic rule that bordered the Mediterranean Sea (Egypt, al-Andalus, the Maghrib, Sicily, Palestine) and included the region termed the Near East, extending toward the Indian Ocean (primarily Syria and Iraq).⁷⁷ Although Goitein was well aware that the political and cultural climates of the locales throughout the Mediterranean were diverse, he chose to stress the interconnection and cohesion of Jews in the Arabic-speaking Mediterranean over several centuries, offering the “big picture” according to major categories (economy, family, community) rather than a series of local histories. The further exposure and organization of Geniza documents has allowed Goitein’s successors to produce more localized histories, even focusing on fairly small groups of people; but still, the idea of the Mediterranean has not lost meaning.⁷⁸

      Throughout most of this book, I use the term “Mediterranean” largely in the way that Goitein used it—an “Islamized Mediterranean,” as Fred Astren has termed it.⁷⁹ Clearly, figures introduced above, such as Shemuel ha-Nagid of al-Andalus and Yehudah Halevi, can be analyzed simultaneously as members of intimate Andalusian circles and broader trans-Mediterranean networks. In order to document specific phenomena (say, installation to communal office), I bring together examples from Iraq in the tenth century, al-Andalus in the eleventh, and Syria in the twelfth, knowing full well that I am eliding important distinctions. To the extent that “jumping around” is a quality from which A Mediterranean Society suffers, the present book will be guilty of the same offense. While I give weight to regional and temporal variation and, at times, strongly emphasize it, I believe that looking at specific locales only would obscure certain elements of Jewish culture across the region.

      At the same time, my outlook on the Mediterranean differs from Goitein’s in two main respects. First, in Goitein’s study, due to the natural pertinence of Geniza materials to Egypt, al-Andalus appears as a remote frontier of the Islamic world (which it undoubtedly was!). Given the focus of the present study on praise writing and the plethora of surviving materials that originated in al-Andalus, this area will loom larger than in A Mediterranean Society. Second, whereas the geographic span of Goitein’s magnum opus remained more or less within the confines of the Islamic world, this study contains an extended chapter on the Christian Mediterranean, including Christian Iberia, southern France, and Norman Sicily.

      One might argue that any segregation between the Islamic and the Christian Mediterranean is artificial and obscures a cultural continuity that was not delimited by language or creed. Thus, the coherence of al-Andalus, Castile, and southern France might be at least as strong as that of Qairawan, Yemen, and Iraq.⁸⁰ Not segregating Christian and Islamic domains is further justified when one considers the itineraries of certain individuals. Yehudah Halevi and Yehudah al-Ḥarīzī, the focal characters of Chapter 4, engaged with communities not only in the Islamic East and the Islamic West but also within Christian Iberia and southern France. A Jewish intellectual such as Anatoli Ben Yosef (late twelfth–early thirteenth century) was active in Marseilles, Lunel, Alexandria, and Sicily.⁸¹ Indeed, I consider the movement of people, objects, knowledge, and cultural practices across Islamic and Christian territories to be one of the more interesting and fruitful areas of scholarship today. My segregating the Christian Mediterranean within a single chapter has more to do with chronology than geography and certainly does not reflect an assumption that the Islamic world was at odds with Christendom.

      Finally, this book is not an attempt to write a grand history “of the Mediterranean,” the vast project attempted by Horden and Purcell, but rather a relatively modest history of an identifiable phenomenon “in the Mediterranean”—and then largely within the confines of a single religious community.⁸² Although social and political dynamics vary substantively over time and space, the basic practice of offering praise remained a constant among Mediterranean Jews. We are not simply witnessing a set of parallel cultures of praise but a coherent, genetically interrelated corpus of texts with shared literary features and tropes; certain continuities exist across Islamic and Christian domains on the level of both literary history and the construction of legitimacy.⁸³ This project is therefore grounded in a relatively concrete kind of “connectivity,” the term given by Horden and Purcell for justifying a Mediterranean study, and demonstrates the coherence, at some minimal level, of Jewish culture throughout the region over the centuries.⁸⁴ I therefore see differences among Jewish groups across the regions of the Mediterranean not as differences between but rather as differences within. At the same time, this is a study in regionalism: for example, distinct features in the representation of Jewish legitimacy emerge in Christian domains due to the different place of Jews and Judaism within Christian theology and the nature of Jewish-Christian debate. Concentrating on the practice of panegyric and the representation of legitimacy over space and time allows for significant, if subtle, changes in Jewish culture to emerge.

      Outline of Chapters

      Dominion Built of Praise begins with two chapters on the social function of Jewish panegyric in the Islamic Mediterranean. The first, “Performance Matters: Between Oral Acclamation and Epistolary Exchange,” studies how Jewish panegyric texts were patronized, received, performed, and circulated. Were they delivered orally, either before small or large audiences, or read privately by their mamdūḥs? What relationship exists between the written testimonies and oral/aural experiences? Here I consider the function of panegyric within Jewish political rituals, such as the appointment of a man to office, less formal social gatherings, and within epistolary exchange in which it helped forge and maintain bonds over distances.

      Chapter 2, “Poetic Gifts: Maussian Exchange and the Working of Medieval Jewish Culture,” reflects upon the metapoetic trope by which medieval Jewish authors referred to their panegyrics as “gifts.” Jewish culture in the Islamic Mediterranean may be said to have operated according to a complex “economy of gifts” wherein goods and favors were exchanged among people over distances and at close proximity to one another. The rhetoric of gift giving permeates panegyrics and reveals a great deal about the functions that their authors and readers