Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter

“courtly” reality by drawing attention to the social manners idealized in the poetry as well as the lavish material surroundings described. Weiss wrote that “the Jews of the Arab courts who were close to royalty became the dedicated initiators of an independent Jewish court culture as a secular culture that was separate from Jewish society.” He suggested that “Jews’ experience in the Arab courts caused Jews to create their own similar culture and that the patron, in whose honor poets offered praise, stood at the center of this parallel culture.” At the same time, Weiss opined, “courtly Jewish society could not be anything, of course, other than a spiritual semblance [of Muslim courtly society] (albeit one abounding in brightness and splendor), but was deprived of all real political power.” Panegyric was marshaled as evidence in constructing this “court culture,” and the presumed structure of the Jewish court, in turn, has determined how panegyric has been conceived and interpreted.

      Weiss’s paper became a classic in the field and remains cited widely, but its thesis has rarely been revisited.⁹¹ Questions we might ask include: Where exactly was this Jewish court? Was the patron as central as Weiss had imagined? To what extent can we generalize about Jewish patronage structures across periods (Umayyad, Taifa, Almoravid)? Weiss’s study had an impact on Schirmann, who, as discussed in the Introduction, saw the panegyric phenomenon as the paramount (and somewhat ugly) aspect of poetry as a “vocation.” Weiss also had a deep impact on Eliahu Ashtor, who assented to the courtly image and saw the poet-patron relationship as key to understanding the great explosion of Jewish intellectual production during the “Golden Age” of al-Andalus. His influential The Jews of Moslem Spain portrays a performance scenario wherein Yiṣḥaq Ibn Khalfūn recites a Hebrew poem aloud before his Jewish patron and an audience, including competing poets, leading the patron to toss some coins into the poet’s purse. Yet, as Ann Brener points out, there is really no evidence for this.⁹² The image is undoubtedly constructed out of depictions of similar scenes in Arabic adab collections and what seem to be performative aspects of the poems themselves, such as first-person addresses, references to rival poets, and dedicatory sections. Because of the accepted view that Jews imitated the prevailing Muslim court culture on a smaller scale, not only textually but also materially, it would only be fitting that they practiced some version of public or semipublic adulation.⁹³

      Given that the courtly image is tightly bound up with the practice of panegyric—specifically, its oral recitation before a paying patron—it is worth revisiting the evidence for oral and written aspects of Andalusian Jewish poetic culture and panegyric practice in particular. It is clear that Hebrew poets sometimes met and exchanged poems and even competed to outdo one another within certain formal constraints, but we have exceedingly few anecdotes that recount panegyric performance or modes of remuneration. Some poems include specific requests for payment in the form of robes and the like, but one imagines that, had the direct payment of a poet for his panegyric before an audience been a norm, we would have at least a few anecdotes to that effect.⁹⁴ Despite some justification for the type of courtly performance that Weiss and others have imagined, I argue below that the preponderance of evidence points to a mixed oral-epistolary function similar to that described with respect to the Islamic East. Overall, the social structure of Andalusian Jewry represents more of a localized and less hierarchic (yet more elitist) version of its Eastern counterparts than a break with Jewish culture in the rest of the Islamic Mediterranean.

      Insofar as at least some Hebrew panegyrics were performed orally in al-Andalus, the social setting is mostly reminiscent of the majlis uns, or, better still, the mujālasa, the more egalitarian salon of the middle strata. As Samer Ali has argued, the mujālasa was forged through bonds of mutual affection and “often prompted bacchic excess: banquet foods, wine, fruits, flowers, perfumes, singing, and of course, displays of sexuality and love.”⁹⁵ This practice, too, may have had at least some precedent among Jews in the East prior to the year 1000, as suggested by one of the only wine poems to survive from that environment, “When I drink it I fill it for another, who gives it to his companion, and he, too, pours [lit., “mixes”] it…. All the lovers call out, ‘drink in good health!’” (lit., “life”). The poem not only idealizes wine but also a host of social ideals of which wine is a metonym.⁹⁶ Still, it was only in al-Andalus that such social practices seem to have become the emblematic pastimes of a recognizable group.

      At the heart of the matter is what is meant by the word “courtly” that is so often affixed to Andalusian Jewish culture. If it means tastes for wine drinking, garden settings, and an attraction to things worldly—then the Andalusians were more courtly than their counterparts in the Islamic East.⁹⁷ If it refers to Jews who held actual positions within Islamic courts, then this is a phenomenon that is well attested throughout the Islamic Mediterranean.⁹⁸ If it refers to a set of intellectual values that blends traditional Jewish learning with contemporary intellectual currents (whether termed “secular” or “Islamic”), then this, too, is something we find among Jews from Córdoba in the West to Baghdad in the East. But if it refers to the political practices associated with Islamic courts—a penchant for hierarchic structures, pronouncements of rank, and an imperial perspective—then Andalusian Jewish culture might be considered less courtly than its Eastern counterpart.

       Oral and Written Elements of Panegyric Culture in al-Andalus

      Generally speaking, the Hebrew poetic culture of al-Andalus had strong oral components.⁹⁹ Even Mosheh Ibn Ezra, who describes his own generation as a period of decline, testifies to the continued oral circulation of poetry through poetry transmitters (Ar., ruwā’; sing., rāwī). In fact, he characterizes oral transmission as superior to written recording, or at least that the latter is rendered unnecessary when the machinery of oral transmission is in place. Writing of the finest poets, he states: “I did not record any of the best poetry of this superlative group or an exalted word of their superior words, for they are well known and preserved in the mouths of the poetry transmitters (alruwā’). For the light of the morning obviates the need for lamps, and the sun obviates the need for candles!”¹⁰⁰

      A number of other pieces of evidence point to oral and even improvisational elements of this poetic culture in the generations prior to Ibn Ezra. Hebrew liturgical poems were certainly heard, and we imagine that many poems composed for weddings and funerals, which often contained praise, were recited aloud. In an epistle to his patron Ḥasdai Ibn Shaprut, Menaḥem Ben Saruq mentions, regarding laments that he had composed over the patron’s father, that “all Israel lamented [them] each day of mourning” (one presumes orally).¹⁰¹ As Schirmann notes, the Judeo-Arabic superscription preserved in a Geniza fragment to a well-known poem by Dunash Ben Labrat reads: “Another poem by Ben Labrat about the sound of the canals…. [here the scribe lists other subjects of the poem]. He described this at a gathering (majlis) of Ḥasdai the Andalusian.”¹⁰² Yehosef the son of Shemuel ha-Nagid relates, in a superscription to a poem, how his father improvised fifteen poems on the theme of an apple at a small social gathering (maqom ḥevrato).¹⁰³ Oral recitation at a small gathering is also suggested by a superscription in the dīwān of Yiṣḥaq Ibn Khalfūn: “And he wrote to him while drinking his medicine [i.e., wine] and his friends were with him at the gathering (majlis).”¹⁰⁴ Again, such gatherings are reminiscent of the majlis uns, or the mujālasa, and, notably, there is no evidence for the presence of a patron paying professional poets.

      Abū Walīd Marwān Ibn Janāḥ presents an anecdote that highlights a mixture of oral and written elements in Andalusian Hebrew poetic culture. While a young man, Ibn Janāḥ visited the poet Yiṣḥaq Ibn Mar Shaul and tried to impress his host by reciting one of Yiṣḥaq’s poems. Ibn Janāḥ relates that he opened with the words segor libi (the enclosure of my heart) and then: “when I recited this poem before its author, he responded to me qerav libi (the innards of my heart)! I said to him, ‘I have not seen it (like this) in any of the books but rather segor libi. If so, whence this change?’ He said to me, ‘When Ya‘aqov and his sons recited this, he sent it from his city to Córdoba, and when it reached the transmitter (rāwī) Rav Yehudah Ben Hanija and with him Rav Yiṣḥaq Ibn Khalfūn, the poet had difficulty with the verse and changed it.’”¹⁰⁵