AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

Jonathan Decter's book on panegyric focuses on that part of the medieval Hebrew literary tradition that represents a special Jewish subtype within the larger framework of medieval Arabo-Islamic poetry and adab. It joins a number of other works that deal with Jewish poetry and literature more generally against the background of the Arabic context—chief among these, perhaps, Ross Brann's Compunctious Poet (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Together, these books provide nuanced insights into the workings of Hebrew poetics from the Spanish Golden Age and into later developments in Iberia, Provence, the eastern Mediterranean (especially Egypt), and Iraq. Decter and Brann are both students of Raymond Scheindlin, himself a Hebraist and Arabist, and I do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that their work is evidence of a robust American tradition of philologically rooted literary research in Golden Age Hebrew poetry that is profoundly informed by a full command of the Arabic matrix from which it sprang.

Decter provides a systematic and methodologically well-grounded overview of his topic: performance contexts of Jewish panegyric (chapter 1); panegyric as gift (chapter 2); panegyric tropes (humility, generosity, eloquence, etc.; chapter 3); regionalism as reflected in panegyric (i.e., Spain versus the eastern Mediterranean; chapter 4—for this topic see also the recently published U. Kfir, A Matter of Geography [Leiden: Brill, 2018]); ethical considerations in the composition and consumption of panegyric (chapter 5); hyperbole and sacral imagery in panegyric (chapters 6–7); the evolution of the panegyric tradition in the Christian Mediterranean (chapter 8); and panegyric by Jewish poets for non-Jewish recipients, including some Arabic examples and one in Castilian, as well as a Hebrew poem showing troubadour influence (chapter 9). Throughout, Decter's discussions are based on copious examples—in English translation—drawn both from the relevant poetic corpora as well as from medieval discussions of [End Page 200] literary criticism (reaching back, as relevant, to Aristotle). The result is an integrated treatment of a topic that constitutes a major (though not a particularly exciting—at least not to modern tastes, as Decter stresses in several places) component of the Golden Age Hebrew poetic tradition.

As Decter passes freely and seamlessly between Hebrew panegyric and the world of Arabic poetics whence it sprang, he succeeds in establishing that the former is in large part a confessionally and linguistically specialized extension of the latter. Another, equally fundamental, notion that runs like a red thread through the book is the idea that Jewish panegyric is a Mediterranean phenomenon, that is, it is not a literary mode restricted to the formal Hebrew qas.ida poetry of Spain, but also takes in the eastern offshoots of the Golden Age poetic tradition, and in fact pervades medieval Jewish social exchanges in the Mediterranean littoral as mediated through other literary genres, in particular the epistolary. Thus, he succeeds in drawing a clear connection via the panegyric mode between material that is traditionally treated as poetic-literary on the one hand, and as documentary on the other. The notion of an interface between these two categories is, of course, not radically new, but what is new here is its incorporation as the principle guiding a holistic treatment of an important aspect of medieval Hebrew literary and social culture.

Against the background of the embeddedness of Jewish panegyric in a dominant Arabo-Islamic matrix, Decter's concluding chapter on instances of boundary-crossing—Jewish panegyric for gentile recipients—is particularly intriguing. By highlighting the incorporation of Jewish-Hebrew references to referents existing within the prevailing Islamic (or Christian) milieu, it simultaneously underscores the degree to which the Hebrew tradition had in fact become an organic semiotic unity—that is, praise for non-Jews could be the occasion for introducing new elements referring to the external culture. This may be compared with Arabo-Muslim panegyric addressed to a Jewish recipient. The two examples...