Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean by Jonathan Decter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean by Jonathan Decter David Torollo (bio) Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean Jonathan Decter University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 400 pp. $79.95 cloth. Joining the panegyric turn in Classical and Arabic literary scholarship and applying the Mediterranean as an analytic framework, in Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter offers a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the way in which dominion and legitimacy were constructed among Jews living in the Islamic Mediterranean between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and those living in the Christian Mediterranean until the fifteenth century. Decter studies hundreds of panegyrics dedicated to Jews written either in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic, in prose or in verse, in literary or documentary sources; he also explores the phenomenon of praise in medieval Jewish culture from multiple angles and the nature and development of images of the ideal Jewish leadership. Chapter one focuses on the use of panegyrics in exchange relationships. The survival of multiple examples demonstrates that poems were widely used either as letters per se or as literary pieces accompanying letters. Although "the function of the poems as correspondence does not preclude their circulation or even their oral performance" (65), instances of this performance are difficult to glimpse. In fact, the broad circulation of poem-letters and the scarcity of evidence of recurrent gatherings of poets prompt Decter to call into question the unchallenged idea of the courtly nature of the Andalusian Jewish intellectual life. He suggests the possibility of the parallel existence of a network of geographically disconnected thinkers who were connected through epistolary exchange, something akin to an Andalusian Republic of Letters. Consequently, chapter two analyses the metapoetic trope of panegyrics as gifts following the conceptualization of the reciprocity of presents by Marcel Mauss. Through an analysis of the use of gift discourse, Decter proves that panegyrics played a pivotal role in dynamic and reciprocal [End Page 139] exchanges to create and maintain bonds of loyalty, where the exchange of praise for favors, recognition, or help was the norm. Chapter three classifies the ideal virtues that are expected of Jewish mamdūḥs (the praised ones). These character traits, and the ways in which they were represented, are quite fixed; indeed, personalized portrayals are absent, since "mamdūḥs sought idealized depictions of social types that they were said to embody" (92). In this sense, Decter concedes that depicting traits such as humility, generosity, eloquence, or wisdom, and employing tropes such as the image of the leader as a shepherd or his connection with the divine world had a double purpose, for panegyrics "not only enhanced the legitimacy of those individuals but also gave the community a sense that these qualities resided within the group" (126). In addition, Hebrew panegyrics combined in a novel way the contemporary Islamic discourse of power with traditional Jewish formulas of praise, bolstering claims of legitimacy for the mamdūḥ and strengthening the community's sense of group identity. The following three chapters address specific elements of the production of medieval Jewish panegyric. Chapter four compares the representation and praise of figures in the East and the West, proving that differences existed within the corpus of conventional poems and that they responded to locally contingent portrayals of the images of leadership. Chapter five deals with the ethics of praise by exploring how panegyrics operated under theological and ethical tensions. On the one hand, praising men was permissible in order to offer worldly recognition and inspire others to emulate good virtues, but on the other hand, praise was the antithesis of piety. Besides this, concerns over plagiarism, the issue of poetry for pay, and the idea that poetry relied upon deception made the task of distinguishing truth from falsehood difficult. As a result, the authors' compunction can be read between the lines. Lastly, and in connection with the idea of the insincerity of poetry, chapter six traces the role of hyperbole (Hebrew: havai / Arabic: al-ghulū) in Arabic and Hebrew treatises on rhetoric and poetics back to the Aristotelian concept of auxesis (magnification). Chapter seven brilliantly explores the significance and meaning of the...