Dominion Built of Praise. Jonathan Decter

Чтение книги онлайн.

Figure 7. Letter with panegyric by the talmid Yiṣḥaq Ibn Nissim Parsi for Abu Zikri Yiḥye Ibn Mevorakh. TS 13 J 19.21r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

      In short, Jewish culture in the Islamic Mediterranean functioned according to a shared discourse of gift exchange across a range of social relationships—among poetic correspondents, poets receiving material remuneration and their beneficiaries, heads of academies and their communal adherents, among merchants and students. Of course, these relationships were hardly uniform. Some involved financial aspects while others exhibit nonmaterial exchanges of different sorts, but all were premised on reciprocal bonds that were expected to be cyclical and enduring. Although praise was not the only aspect of these relationships, it constituted a “good” of great value, especially insofar as it could extend the mamdūḥ’s reputation before his peers.

      The Rhetoric of Sacrifice

      For the most part, the “gifts” referred to in the discussion above have been devoid of valences of sacrificial offering. In this concluding section, I consider the phenomenon of sacrificial language in the rhetoric of exchange relationships.⁵⁴ The central question is whether the introduction of God as a third party and the dynamics of atonement substantially alter the picture we have depicted about the mutuality of human exchange relationships, particularly in light of the Maussian framework.⁵⁵

      In the letter that opened Chapter 1, Hai Gaon describes the contribution from Rav Yehudah Rosh ha-Seder as a “gift [that] will be considered by God an offering and sacrifice (minḥah ve-azkarah). He made it ransom for him for pardoning and atonement.” Play on the language of the sacrificial cult can also be far more extensive, as in the following letter by Shemuel Ben ‘Eli, which deals primarily with the appointment of Zekhariah Ben Barkhael to the rank of av bet din.⁵⁶ Here the head of the Baghdad academy addresses the community to which Ben Barkhael was being dispatched: “That which arrived to us and him [Ben Barkhael] from you will be considered for you, our brethren, like a whole offering, like incense seasoned with salt, like a burnt offering, like a grain offering…. And when this letter arrives to you, read it in public with a sweet tongue … and a joyous voice.”⁵⁷ “That which arrived” was, in all likelihood, a monetary contribution. What the community received in exchange, in addition to the presence of the sanctioned av bet din, was the letter itself, which was to be read aloud and intoned with beauty, thereby bringing glory upon the community and reinforcing its tie to the academy.

      Did Ben ‘Eli or the recipients of the letter really believe that the monetary donation had expiatory power for the givers? Does using sacrificial language rather than the language of human gift exchange truly alter the way in which the donation was considered? That is, did Ben ‘Eli and the community both recognize that the donations were simply keeping the lights on (or the lamps lit, as it were) and read the language of sacrifice with ironic distance? Was the rhetoric a kind of inside joke among intellectuals, the kind of literary play for which the medieval Hebrew poets are famed (the language of sacrifice is, for example, exploited to describe the garden or the body of the beloved)?⁵⁸ Or should we view this as a kind of cultural practice that created or reinforced some core value of medieval Jewish society? The answers to these questions are, of course, difficult to glean from the sources, but I will try to evaluate the function of this discursive phenomenon.

      There is little doubt that the representation of monetary contributions as sacrifices is on some level rhetorical, but this does not mean that the rhetoric is necessarily empty. It conveys to the reader that giving money to the academy is a type of divine service, and it is arguable that the sacrificial metaphor may have been important for claims of the academy’s legitimacy. At the very least, the rhetoric allows the recipient of the letter to imagine something more complex than a two-party human exchange relationship but instead a three-party dynamic, whereby the academy head acts as a kind of mediator between the donor and God. Rather than participating in mutual back-scratching, both donor and recipient can act as though they are working together in a single cause, likely deepening the sense of embedded exchange. Thus we might ask whether the use of sacrificial language throws a proverbial wrench into the application of the Maussian framework in the study of medieval Jewish exchange practices.

      Following a paradigm proposed for Late Antique Jewish culture by Seth Schwartz, Marina Rustow reflects upon medieval Jewish culture under Islam between the poles of “reciprocity” and “solidarity.”⁵⁹ According to Schwartz’s definitions, a reciprocity-based conception holds that “societies are bound together by densely overlapping networks of relationships of personal dependency constituted and sustained by reciprocal exchange.” On the other hand, a solidarity-based model means that “societies are bound together not by personal relationships but by corporate solidarity based on shared ideals (piety, wisdom) or myths (for example, about common descent).”⁶⁰ In Schwartz’s view, whereas Greco-Roman society was grounded in institutionalized reciprocal structures, biblical religion and rabbinic Judaism theoretically and largely eschewed such structures in favor of a solidarity-based system and, in this sense, did not constitute a “Mediterranean society.” Adding a deeper dimension to Goitein’s use of the phrase and noting the shift from the rabbinic to medieval periods, Rustow cleverly concludes that “the Jews of the tenth through twelfth centuries as reflected in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, then, unlike Schwartz’s ancient Jews, were a ‘Mediterranean’ society.”⁶¹

      Geonic СКАЧАТЬ