Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter

broad observations about the nature of medieval Jewish culture in Islamic domains. This chapter will delve further into what function panegyrics actually held and why they were so pervasive across relations among poets and patrons, gaons and donors, and between friends. What was it about panegyric that was fitting to all these types of relationships? The answer, in part, can be found by analyzing panegyrics’ metapoetic and self-referential discourse, how authors described them and how readers received them.

      The most common terms for describing panegyric writing in medieval Hebrew discourse, apparent in the shirah yetomah that closed the previous chapter, belong to the semantic range of “gifts,” most often in the mundane sense of gifts exchanged among humans and sometimes reaching over into the language of Temple sacrifice, offerings to God. The language of gift giving, and the constitution of panegyrics as gifts, permeates several levels of Jewish social organization in the Islamic Mediterranean, from the relations between geonic academies and satellite communities, to those among poets and patrons in a given locale, to those among intellectuals across and within Mediterranean centers. What these sets of relations among individuals, institutions, and communities shared was a foundation on bonds of loyalty—elements that tied people to one another in relationships that were essentially voluntary, or at least not inviolable.

      Referring to the well-known study by Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in Early Islamic Society, which demonstrates the essentiality of loyalty-based relationships (more than formal legal relationships) for the functioning of Islamic court life, Marina Rustow has investigated patronage and clienthood in various Jewish contexts, including ties between rabbinic leaders and followers and bonds among more humble folk. Rustow shows that “parallels between courtly literature and everyday letters demonstrate how deeply the modes and manners that we ascribe to courtly etiquette permeated other realms of relationships whose stability rested on the binding power of loyalty.”² In particular, she considers the dynamic of granting benefaction (ni‘ma) and the gratitude (shukr) that such benefaction required, a dynamic that engendered the “continuity and coherence” of life, political and otherwise.

      Jewish life in the Islamic Mediterranean may be said to have functioned according to what Marcel Mauss called (in French) a system of prestations and contre-prestations—usually rendered in English as a system of “total services” and “total counter-services”—in which the exchange of gifts provided an essential component of group coherence.³ Mauss’s classic book, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, demonstrates that, cross-culturally, the giving of a gift obligates the receiver to reciprocate not only in kind but rather with something of greater value than the original gift (a point also recognized by Rustow in her study). For Mauss, reciprocal relationships need not require exchange between equal parties; in fact, structural inequality is precisely what allows the cycle of benefaction to perpetuate. The ongoing and dynamic process of indebting and repayment is said to give societies their coherence and structure by tying individuals to one another within and beyond their kinship circles. Mauss’s short book has enjoyed a remarkable afterlife, especially in anthropology and sociology but also in history and literary studies, and many elements of this seminal work have been developed, nuanced, or challenged.

      I will not attempt here to describe all of the types of loyalty-based exchanges that made up the “continuity and coherence” of Jewish life in the medieval Mediterranean.⁴ Rather, I wish to reflect upon the metapoetic trope by which medieval Jewish authors referred to their compositions, especially panegyrics, as “gifts,” and upon the use of gift discourse more broadly. The rhetoric of gift giving pervades panegyric letters and poems throughout the region and reveals a great deal about the functions that their authors and readers ascribed them. I will argue that portraying panegyrics as gifts constituted them as material objects whose value either served as or demanded reciprocation, thus initiating or maintaining bonds of loyalty. Toward the end of the chapter, I consider the specific implications of describing such gifts through the language of the sacrificial cult of ancient Israel, as though these gifts were offered not so much for their human recipients as for the divine.

      Fortunately, I am preceded in the application of Maussian theory to the study of panegyric by a number of scholars of Greek, Latin, and Arabic poetry.⁵ For Arabic, Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych discusses a panegyric by the pre-Islamic poet al-Nābighah intended to negotiate the poet’s reentry into the Lakhmid court. With the qaṣīda, the “poet/negotiator virtually entraps his addressee by engaging him in a ritual exchange that obligates him to respond to the poet’s proffered gift (of submission, allegiance, praise) with a counter-gift (in this case absolution and reinstatement), or else face opprobrium.”⁶ Beatrice Gruendler also draws Mauss (and Mottahedeh) into the exchange between patron and poet: “The poem is a token of the poet’s ongoing allegiance just as the patron’s gifts and benefits were tokens of his ongoing protection and benevolence. To this end, the poem performs a service and thereby repays the patron’s gifts and relieves the poet of some of his liability. The relationship emerges as a mutual exchange. However, it is not one of discrete transactions of giving and thanking; rather, it represents an ongoing process.”⁷

      Before continuing, I wish to introduce two further concepts of gift exchange. First is the idea that gift exchange generally involves objects that are incommensurate and inter-convertible, at least one of which is more symbolic than material. Thus, I am not discussing the exchange of a stock for cash value or the trade of a quantity of flax for a quantity of silk but rather the exchange of praise for such things as elevation in rank, favors, luxury items, or even money itself. The disparate “goods” generally correspond to the social standings of the two men, each of whom has something to offer the other that he does not already possess. Because there is no exact “exchange rate” between goods, the relationship by which giver and receiver are bound does not dissolve once the transaction is complete but, as Gruendler suggests, remains dynamic. This leads to the second point, the distinction between what has been termed “disembedded” and “embedded” exchange. In the former, the exchange belongs to a sphere that has an independent and discrete economic reality (stock for cash) such that the transaction might be considered “complete”; the relationship dissolves once the transaction has been satisfied. In an embedded exchange, the transaction participates in and supports noneconomic institutions such as friendship, kinship, religious affiliation, and learned societies.⁸

      This is not to say that money cannot be an element of embedded exchange. The matter is similar to what is sometimes said about marriage in our own day: it can involve money; it just can’t be about money. Hence panegyric, even panegyric composed for money, is bound by an ethical structure wherein a strict quid pro quo was considered uncouth, blameworthy, and a violation of an unwritten social code (this will be discussed further in Chapter 5). Embedded exchange was always hailed as an ideal; disembedded exchange was sometimes suspected of being the reality. Jocelyn Sharlet writes that in “medieval Arabic and Persian discourse on patronage, there is widespread concern that the exchange of poetry for pay may have more to do with material wealth and individual ambition than ethical evaluation and communal relationships.”⁹

      Central to the issue is the nature of the institution of patronage (Ar., walā’; lit., “proximity”) in the Islamic world, which has been the subject of a significant amount of scholarship in recent years.¹⁰ Apart from the earliest usage of the term in the strict legal sense, referring to the arrangement by which non-Arabs could be grafted into the Muslim umma (nation), it had expanded by the tenth century to encompass a broad range of social relationships. The broad application of patronage is summarized nicely by Rustow, as:

      using one’s influence, power, knowledge or financial means on behalf of someone else, with an eye toward benefiting both that person and oneself at the same time. Investments of this type could lead to the production of art, literature, architecture, science, philosophy, or works of public hydraulic engineering. Rulers and their courts used them to advance their claims as the bestowers of material and cultural benefits on their subjects, and thus to achieve legitimacy, and indeed, rulers were in a special position to accumulate (or better: extract) the material resources that allowed them to act as patrons.