“The Hidden Praises of Time Have I Seen” is a panegyric by a poet named Pinḥas, a rival of the more famous Todros Halevi Abulafia (1247–d. after 1298), in honor of Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok, a courtier in the service of Alfonso X of Castile. The poem opens with a fictional poetic speaker recounting a “prophetic” vision, a gathering in which poets come from all directions to boast over their specific locales. After the representatives of the East, North, and South speak, they call for the prince of the West, but no one answers until Pinḥas himself steps forth and boasts of its qualities. The participants “whisper to one another about the one for whom kingship is fitting” until Time (i.e., Fate) interjects, “What have I to do with North, East, and South? The West have I acquired! / Behold, my seal and its cord [Genesis 38:18] are yours; the mark of dominion have I set upon your beloved's forehead.” The “beloved,” of course, refers to the addressee of the poem, Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok.
Pinḥas's masterful poem participates in a discourse of post-Andalusian Hebrew poetry that centered on geography, a subject of cultural import after the period of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus (Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, etc.) had come to a close. Clearly for Pinḥas, the West (which meant Spain from a Mediterranean perspective) could claim superiority over other regions, and here the claims of poetic accomplishment and political legitimacy dovetail poignantly.
The recent book by Uriah Kfir, based on a Hebrew doctoral dissertation (Tel Aviv University), provides an in-depth view of the fascinating dynamics of geographic debate in Andalusian and post-Andalusian Hebrew literature. (The dissertation also offers critical editions of many of the texts discussed.) The approach departs from existing scholarship in that previous scholars (with a few exceptions) have thought more in terms of literary development across geography rather than the way in which geography itself functions as a topic within medieval Hebrew literature. Rather than focusing on the degree to which post-Andalusian poets depended on, selectively absorbed, or departed from Andalusian literary conventions, Kfir investigates the cultural tensions of place, wherein al-Andalus and later Christian Iberia functioned as a “center” with a venerated literary tradition, while other locales—including Italy, Provence, Egypt, and Iraq—functioned as its “periphery.” In approaching the corpus in this way, Kfir reads through prisms that have been employed fruitfully in postcolonial theory in Europe and the United States, including within the field of modern Hebrew literature.
The book is divided into two main sections, the first of which deals with the Iberian “center” from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. Here Kfir discerns a four-part process (“distinction, amplification, promotion, and preservation”) by which the hegemonic claims of the earliest generations of Andalusian poets are reproduced by authors of Christian Iberia for the retention of hegemony in the face of rising Hebrew centers in Provence and the Islamic East. Kfir first shows how the great poets of what has been termed the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus promoted the primacy of the Jewish culture of the Islamic West. Thus Samuel ha-Nagid asserted not only his literary prowess but also his independence from Hai Gaon of Baghdad in legal matters. Andalusian Jews represented themselves as the descendants of Jerusalem exiles, hence claimants of pure Hebrew speech, and also as the inheritors of Eastern geonic authority. Hebrew authors of Christian Iberia, though they departed from their predecessors in significant ways, could make the case for continuing the Andalusian tradition most easily and represent their superiority not as a matter of mere emulation but rather as one of innate ability.
The second part of the book presents a series of case studies of authors from Iraq, Egypt, Italy, and Provence during the thirteenth century in order to argue for a four-fold set of strategies used to cope with claims of Iberian supremacy (“competition, equilibration, vacillation, and de-territorialization”). For example, Kfir demonstrates convincingly that Joseph ben Tanḥum Yerushalmi (obviously of Jerusalemite background and writing in Egypt) set himself on equal footing with the Iberian Judah al-Ḥarizi by laying out an alternate historical trajectory of Hebrew culture. Whereas al-Ḥarizi presented himself as the heir of the Andalusian poets descended from Jerusalem exiles and depicted Eastern authors as derivative of and inferior to himself, Yerushalmi presented the Andalusian school and himself as two prongs of the same Jerusalemite heritage (“equilibration”). The chapter on Isaac ha-Gorni and Abraham ha-Bedersi of Provence argues, based on the notion of “de-territorialization” as framed by Deleuze and Guattari (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986]), that the poets sought to “unravel the ties between language and territory which the majority literature takes for granted” (143).
The book is full of fine readings and insights. Ironically, as Kfir notes, members of the periphery often assert their arguments using the idiom of the center, measuring their accomplishments by the yardstick of existing standards—and in the process amplify the center's preeminence. Kfir is a sensitive and logical reader of literary texts who employs literary theory with comfort and clarity. As is true of any book that seeks to interpret literary texts, some readings are more convincing than others. I am not persuaded, for example, that Elazar ben Ya‘akov ha-Bavli's justification of a grammatical point through an appeal to Andalusian precedent was necessarily a geographically motivated “silent rejoinder” to an assault by Judah al-Ḥarizi (101). However, Kfir's other arguments about the same poet are persuasive. Of course, there is always more that can be done to unpack the dynamics that are detected in this book. The data exists, for example, to delineate in more detail how the image of Andalusian superiority emerged; one might return to the manuscripts to look at scribal inscriptions and processes of anthologization that produced representations of authorial personae and geographic predominance. One could also extend the dynamics here further in time, for example, to Solomon Bonafed (fifteenth century) who described the poets of his age as following a poetics that was both “old and new” and, in one instance, imagined an extended dialogue between himself and an apparition of the long-deceased Ibn Gabirol. Kfir's book offers an important reorientation away from the sometimes descriptive and mechanical treatments of medieval Hebrew poetry to investigate a dynamic cultural process as it unfolded.
