Hebrew performance: elitist events in fourteenth-century Italy

Italy was one of the most important centres of Jewish cultural and religious life. Jews first arrived in Italy in the second century BCE. The largest communities lived in Venice, Rome, Padua, Livorno and Florence. Their history is very different from that of the Jews of the rest of Europe. Unlike their European counterparts, the Jews of Italy never faced mass expulsion. Instead, they thrived for many years, economically and culturally. Still, in thirteenth-century Italy, Jews had to wear a circular yellow badge to distinguish them from Christians and lived in separate sections of towns reserved for them. The term ‘ghetto’ was first used in Venice in the sixteenth century, designating a place allocated for Jews which they were prohibited to leave between sundown and sunrise (the word ‘ghetto’ is derived from a word for the foundry which used to be in the neighbourhood). During the Middle Ages there were Italian Jews with great wealth, contacts in ruling circles, widespread connections and ‘leisure for study, and the lavish patronage of letters which resulted from this’.Footnote ⁵ Such lavish patronage was bestowed on Immanuel.

Manoello Giudeo (Immanuel the Jew), also known as Immanuel Romano, was born in Rome around 1261, and is thought to have died in Fermo around 1331. He had come to that city some years earlier, where a Jewish community leader called Daniel (‘the Prince’), befriended him and took him into his household. His full name was Immanuel ben Solomon ben Jekuthiel of Rome, from the prominent Zifroni family. A contemporary of Dante, a poet, philosopher and biblical exegete, he also wrote Italian lyrics. The Jews, says Fabrizio Lelli, ‘adopted some of the most common motifs fashionable among their neighbours. For such intellectual borrowings they could either use the holy language or local vernaculars’.Footnote ⁶

Hebrew was not the Jewish vernacular in Immanuel’s Italy, and a public reading of Hebrew poetry was no ordinary occurrence. It was already no longer a spoken language by the second century BCE, when it was replaced by the lingua franca of the Middle East, Aramaic. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but subsequently, as Jews went into exile, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud were written in Aramaic.

The Hebrew language of the period of exile, which includes the language as it was in the Middle Ages, spans a very long period from around 200 CE until 1700. During this time Hebrew was ‘the holy tongue’: Jewish males learned to read and write Hebrew in engaging with the Bible and prayer. But in other everyday contexts the language was not in use, and few could actually speak it. As a literary language, Hebrew was considered a dead or artificial tongue. Until the nineteenth century, its status among the Jews was similar to that of Latin in Western Europe, where only the highly educated understood it in any depth, and it served mainly as a written language, usually for religious purposes. But even when it had ceased to be the language of the everyday, Hebrew remained a common language for Jews of different lands, for example in business correspondence or Halachic responsa.Footnote ⁷ Although it lost its role in ordinary speech, it remained important as a written language. Poems were penned in Hebrew, and philosophers wrote down their arguments in Hebrew. In the long exilic period, thousands of Hebrew books were published in many subjects: science, philosophy, the sacred, poetry, plays, medicine, mathematics, grammar.

Jewish culture in the diaspora was essentially multilingual: Jewish vernacular speech was a communal dialect, and Jewish speech communities were inherently diglossic (or even triglossic).Footnote ⁸ This was not diglossia in the classic sense, where the same language is used in a low register for the everyday and in a high and more prestigious register for writing. The vernacular of medieval Italian Jews, known as Judaeo-Italian (and by other names, including Italkian) was in fact a group of Italian dialects, varying from one part of Italy to another, but containing a number of words of Hebrew origin and a few lexical items from other sources. Immanuel composed and likely conversed in (Judaeo-)Romanesco, Tuscan or other dialects, depending on the context.

As a result, Hebrew poetry readings in Immanuel’s time were meant only for those few with sufficient comprehension, even while they did not actually speak the language. Poetry readings in a language which the community was accustomed to hearing only in the context of religious ritual obviously have had a special impact. Did these recitations acquire a dimension of ritual? One can say that speaking Hebrew in Immanuel’s time was a kind of performance in itself, due to its non-vernacular condition. Those coming together to hear Hebrew were probably conscious of the ceremonial aspect of what they were doing, of the special value of the recitative soundscape, beyond semantic content. It is very likely that accents were random, or mixed, and this too had a particular value. Hebrew was pronounced in a number of ways during the Middle Ages, for example the Sephardic pronunciation used by the Jews of Spain, Italy and some of the Jews of Islamic countries. As mentioned, this pronunciation was not used for regular speech, which barely existed, but mainly for prayer, religious ritual, Torah study and public readings. Whatever pronunciation was adopted, it intensified the aural significance of public poetry readings in Hebrew in the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁹

Let us go back to Immanuel. In the years at his benefactor’s home, Immanuel wrote, in Hebrew, his life story and poems, collecting the latter as Immanuel’s Machberot. His writing was rather eclectic. The machberet (singular for machberot) ‘Hell and Paradise’, riffing off Dante’s Divine Comedy, is the twenty-eighth chapter of the book. According to Dan Pagis, it is the best known of Immanuel’s writings, which, thanks to its unique moral style, has been published separately in many print versions and translations.Footnote ¹⁰ Immanuel gave Dante’s description of the journey in Heaven and Hell a Jewish twist: first, the two protagonists are the Jews Immanuel and Daniel ‘greatly beloved’ (some suggest that Daniel, his generous benefactor, was intended),Footnote ¹¹ rather than Dante the Christian and Virgil the pagan. Second, the figures Immanuel meets in the next world are taken from the repertoire of the Jewish sources. Third, the language is Hebrew. Furthermore, the description of the circles of Hell is unlike Dante’s. But the main alteration is the disappearance of Purgatory, which is not a feature of Jewish cosmology. Immanuel judaizes the geography of the world to come: a Jew arrives prepared and ready for a life after death, Heaven or Hell.

On the other hand, Immanuel’s erotic descriptions in the third chapter of the Machberot, ‘The Scroll of Love’ (literally ‘The Scroll of Lust’), were also widely disseminated, angering rabbis of subsequent generations. The text was very successful across the Jewish world, to the point that the author of the Shulchan Aruch,Footnote ¹² Joseph Karo (1488–1575), who lived in the Ottoman Empire, issued a ban (herem) on anyone who read Immanuel’s work, and even generalized the ruling in the Shulchan Aruch.

Immanuel was the so-called court poet of Daniel, his benefactor. We do not know how long he remained with his prince (ha’Sar). Courtly poets were sometimes a category of troubadours: itinerant Jewish poets who could stay for a period of time in one court, and then move on. Haim Shirman describes the status of the court poets during the golden age of Spanish Jewry, and then broadens the context to include Italy:

In eleventh- and twelfth-century Spain, a courtly culture emerged among local Jews who held positions within the ruling system. Members of distinguished Jewish families who served in public roles established their own courts similar to those of the Muslim princes, gathering cultural figures engaged in astronomy, music, philosophy, medicine and other scientific disciplines. In addition to disseminating writings in praise of his sponsor, the role of the court poet involved holding cultural events for his benefactor and his select guests. Joseph Weiss, who coined the concept of ‘Jewish courtly culture’, explains how in Spain Jewish poets gathered in these courts, to the joy of the courtiers:

Therefore, in Spain, Hebrew poetry served as a central ornament of courtly social life and was the mainstay of a social setting organized around intellectual pleasure: ‘The form of literature is identical to that of social life’,Footnote ¹⁵ observes Weiss. Literary depictions of courtly life constitute a constant and recurring theme in this poetry, which provides us with a broad picture of life in which a culture of form ruled supreme: sophisticated social gatherings and celebrations at court, singing, poetry, games and competitions, performances, and light and cultured conversation. In other words, the lyrics serve as a metonymy of these elitist events.

Shirman indicates that the influence of the Jewish Spanish school reached other Jewish communities, particularly in the Muslim world, but also in Christian lands. The Spanish style, which took root in Italy, remained dominant even when, around 1300 (in Immanuel’s time), Hebrew poetry began to absorb principles from Italian Renaissance poetry. One cannot overestimate the social and cultural importance of such Hebrew poetry assemblies: cognoscenti, learned individuals and those who knew Hebrew to a high level – all would gather at the home of one or other court poet’s patron to see and hear a Hebrew performance based on poetry. The recital would probably be accompanied by music. We learn that the poems were aimed at the aural as well as the intellectual pleasures of those who came to hear the poets read: ‘Poets of that era would frequently enhance the sonic attractiveness of their poems. It could be that this cultivation of the aural pleasure of poetry was derived from Arab aesthetics.’Footnote ¹⁶ In the Arab world the tradition of spoken poetry was ancient: the rāwī (reciter) had a principal role in preserving poetry, until it was written down in the eighth century. I will address this influence on Italian Jews, regarding both the style of writing and the setting (cushions used as seats).

Performative entanglement: poetry becomes history

The poetic depiction of a performative praxis raises the question of how a poem might function as conceptual starting point for our study of theatre and performance history. How can this written poetry be regarded as an artefact associated with the occurrence of a historical performance? In Immanuel’s case, we should probe two issues: first, how poetry functions in both performative and constative mode, describing its own performance in a reflexive manner; and second, how could the poem be used as a primary source for theatre historiography?

Immanuel begins his prologue by using the third person singular, thus distancing himself from the position of a subjective chronicler. He attests to the occurrence as if someone else, his proxy, had witnessed the occasion, possibly investing the poem with the objective amplitude of historians: ‘Thus spake Immanuel, the son of Rabbi Shlomo, blessed be the memory of that righteous man: …’. It was a common practice in the maqāma poems for the poet to write about himself in the third person, and Immanuel made use of it in most of his Machberot chapters, positioning himself as if he were an objective narrator. Maqāma is a literary genre first found in Arabic literature, used both in its literary and its social sense: from the tenth century, maqāmat (the plural of maqāma) were written everywhere in Arabic-speaking countries. The custom penetrated the courts of the wealthy Jews of Spain and was subsequently borrowed by Immanuel, who was considerably engaged with the famous Tachkemoni and Machberot Iti’el, maqāmat writings of the Spanish Jew Judah Alharizi,Footnote ¹⁷ who lived some 100 years before him. Not for nothing did Immanuel give his work the title of Machberot, from the expression for ‘group’ (cḥavura – חבורה) or ‘session’, a translation of the Arabic مقامة (maqāma) – a term derived from the Arabic word for ‘assembly’, from a root which means ‘he stood’, and in this case meaning to stand up in a literary discussion to give an oration. The genre was characterized by a fusion of rhymed prose and metred poems united by a cohesive narrative. Immanuel borrowed the term machberet even though his poem cycles were crafted in the sonnet form (the first attempt to use this classic poetic form in a language other than Italian).

What Immanuel’s Machberot had in common with Spanish Hebrew maqāmat was mainly the second meaning: they were recited before those assembled at Jewish courtly events. Unfortunately, we do not have detailed documentation of how the Hebrew maqāmat were performed. Most of what we know about the custom of public maqāma readings in the Middle Ages comes from Arab culture. We know that the performances were popular, a kind of entanglement of homiletic lesson and storytelling in Arabic. Like other cultural forms that developed and travelled in complex patterns in the medieval Islamic world, maqāmat survive in manuscripts, in rituals of today, in paintings. Visual depictions show groups of men around a reciter in a palace garden, or inside the palace. Maqāma events in the Muslim world also took place in the street. By contrast, the Jewish maqāma could not happen in open public places, says Revital Refael-Vivante:

As mentioned, the maqāma was not only a literary genre. It was part of the court culture, a performative moment emerging at the end of convivial gatherings (known as moshav in Hebrew and magles in Arabic).Footnote ¹⁹ The Hebrew maqāma, as a literary genre, is theatrical by nature, explains Refael-Vivante: ‘The maqāma, whose origins are rooted in religious preaching, later evolved into a kind of street theatre. Wandering clergy told and presented maqāmat outdoors, in markets, and at public gatherings, eventually charging a fee for their performances.’Footnote ²⁰

After referring in the prologue to himself in the third person, Immanuel continues in the first person: ‘I was living in the city of Fermo, which is in the province of the Marche.’ This is not sheer pragmatism; talking to us directly he turns us into his live audience, imagining the illusive outlines of something that no longer exists, positing himself already in the future of the event, as are we, the readers. Rather than make use of figurative language in his description of the gathering, Immanuel reports what was going on:

The reader of Immanuel’s prologue could experience the sensory happening: the smell, colour and taste of wine; the sound of glasses; the softness of cushions. ‘Although the experience that can be gained from a record is not identical to that of attending a live event, [Philip Auslander] argues that it must nonetheless be acknowledged as a cogent experience of the performance, on the basis of which a valid understanding of it can be gained.’Footnote ²¹ Certainly, the decor constitutes part of the experience of both its live spectators and today’s readers. Philip Auslander maintains, ‘The performance experienced through documentation is the performance, not just a secondary reproduction of it.’Footnote ²² This shift from an ontological to a phenomenological approach, as Tancredi Gusman would have it, reinforces the argument that Immanuel’s prologue operates as a relic of the performance in metonymic vein, and reactivates it for the contemporary reader.

Since we are exploring here ‘“theatrical things” which shed light on how unassuming features of performance practice constitute critical apertures for the study of theatre historiography, telling us something vital about theatre-making and sense-making’,Footnote ²³ I would like to examine the physicality of the cushions, as embedded in the poem, and what we can learn from them about the performances they served.

‘We sat together on broad cushions’, writes Immanuel, yet the Hebrew original of the poem offers a double meaning and a biblical reference, of which undoubtedly the learned guests were aware: the term כר נרחב (car nirchav) is directly quoted from Isaiah 30:23. In Hebrew the word כר (car) serves both for cushion (or pillow) and for meadow. Thus, in the King James Version of the Hebrew Bible the translation reads ‘large pastures’ while in the New International Version it reads ‘broad meadows’. In the biblical context of the verse, it does not make sense to adhere to the meaning of pillow or cushion. Immanuel’s description requires the second meaning. However, we do not know whether the prologue was recited or only read by readers. If it was recited, the poem mirrored the very cushions used by the audience, leaving little room for double entendre. If it was merely a written text, we can assume that the readers encountered the dilemma of the double meaning, yet likely consistently came down in favour of cushions. The English translation has spared today’s readers such a puzzling encounter with the text. But it is not as if the meanings cannot usefully inform one another. A meadow has pleasant associations, unlike the more neutral ‘field’. A meadow or pasture is fertile, and may even be soft and comfortable to lie down in. And the fantasy of being transported to rural environments at urban events is not unheard of. But it is intriguing to note the similarity of the reader’s position vis-à-vis the metonymic status of the prologue: both those who read it in Hebrew in the fourteenth century and contemporary readers in English experience the performance by means of Immanuel’s poetry, which reactivates it. There is, though, one difference: in Hebrew there is richer significance, context and therefore emotional response.

Sitting on cushions was a widespread cultural practice in the medieval Orient, as in Spain. Cushions in palaces were valued for their softness, luxurious covers and beautiful colours. They were stuffed with feathers, wool or other fabrics, and could be covered with various textiles: brocade, satin, velvet, embroidery with untwisted floss silk in brick stitch, and more.Footnote ²⁴ They were not only functional and comfortable seats, but rather textured objects, positioned low, in sensuous contact with the body, and allowing various forms of movement. From the information Immanuel offers, it seemed quite natural to him that the assembly used wide, luxurious, soft cushions. The reference to wide cushions helps infuse the text with a physical quality, by introducing the likely nonchalant and casual posture of the participants, reclining, perhaps somewhat drunk, and obviously in good spirits. The broad cushions are vital, then, in telling us about the hedonistic attitude of the spectators, who were not necessarily quiet, alert or attentive listeners.Footnote ²⁵

After using the third and first person singular in his practice of documentation, Immanuel uses the plural ‘we’, reporting on a group of men whom he positions as witnesses and participants, with himself as their chronicler and representative. He does not, however, introduce them, and does not operate as a conscious historian, but rather as an autobiographer whose intention, apparently, is to record his own life circumstances, to praise the signori in whose palace the event took place, and probably to convey a certain ambience that was background to the poetry recital.

The oscillation between ‘I’, ‘he’ and ‘we’ calls for attention to the dual aspect of Immanuel’s prologue: on the one hand, historical record (‘he’, ‘we’), and on the other hand, a potentially performative text (‘I’). What is the phenomenological relationship between the performative and the constative mode? Gusman points at this plausibly inherent duality in the context of documenting performance art: ‘documents have conveyed knowledge and information about past events to those who have not witnessed them. But they have also been used by artists as the medium and site of performance works’.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, I argue that the characteristics of performance art documentation may apply to Immanuel’s prologue as well, and that we can harness the potential of poetic representation as a means of analysing social and cultural worlds and communicating their findings to others. That is to say, poetic description which generates ‘entanglements’, a blurring of the boundaries between the ephemeral nature of live events and their poetic description, serve as a metonymy of performance.

Immanuel continues his report,

Again, we do not get any details about the form of recitations, but in this portrayal there is the sense of something like a rhythmic poetry-slam: as if we can hear the enthusiasm, laughter and applauses. Then Immanuel takes a leap in time, depicting the future, when a man will collect the handwritten poems, and show them to the signori: ‘And the prince said: “And now rise up, tongue of gold and splendour, and make for yourself a name of glory, and collect the hosts of your poems into machberot.”’ Why would this patron of arts ask for documentation of the (probably costly) events he had hosted? There might be a number of reasons, beginning with self-glorification, competition with other Jewish literary salons of the time, and ending with the possibility that he genuinely admired and knew how to appreciate the poems, and wanted to ensure their preservation. Yet Immanuel provides an additional and surprising explanation, not belonging to the performance itself (which is why I did not adduce it earlier):

In other words, Immanuel proceeds to explain that it was important to publish the manuscripts in order to avoid unwanted reproduction or manipulation of his oeuvre. This consideration has some important implications for the event described above: among other things, public recitation served as a sort of establishment of rights and remembrance, both for Immanuel and for his patron. Obviously, the aesthetic space of the patron’s house and his presence during the gatherings are very much sensed in the prologue, conveyed and negotiated in the poet’s choice of words. We should definitely look at the politics of remembrance associated with the text, which on the one hand meant establishing who wrote the poems and on the other hand meant praising the patron, making sure not to criticize him in any way, and mentioning his concern with the poet’s rights. This might make Immanuel’s description less metonymically trustworthy, since he was overly concerned with the need to pay tribute to his benefactor.

In what ways does this poem ‘bear witness to practice’ and what does it teach us about performance relics? It bears witness to common, even trivial emotions, rooted in everydayness, and characteristic of the Hebrew gatherings of fourteenth-century Italy. The poem makes tangible the bodies, voices and desires of those times. As a written remnant of the performance it includes additional metonymic traces: the emotions of sympathy for the writer and criticism of his rivals, along with the poetry-slam rhythm already mentioned, or the intricate relations between the participants who operated as both spectators and actors. What makes this poem a unique case study (and in this respect differs from any dramatic play or score) is the fact that the writer/actor is at the same time a self-reflexive chronicler of the event.

Epilogue

Immanuel’s Machberot are in fact, a sort of archive of performances that the prince advised him to put together. Intriguingly enough, what his benefactor was concerned about was in a way historiographical: he wanted to document and preserve Immanuel’s writings. And the prince did more than encourage his court poet: he also advised him how to edit the various writings, at a time when Immanuel was puzzled and insecure about their eclectic character:

With the help of his sponsor, Immanuel edited his famous Machberot. Even though extensively discussed and analysed as poetry, the Machberot have not been seen as a historiographic record. Assuming that many, if not all, of the chapters and the prologue were recited in front of an audience, we need to address the dichotomy between embodied knowledge and archival preservation. As its reciter (or spectator), Immanuel undoubtedly acquired embodied knowledge of the performative value of his prologue. Yet as a preserver of that knowledge by means of a written document, he had to retroactively secure its remains, while at the same time minimizing the loss of parts of it. Here the poet is also the archivist, chronicler and biographer. As we have seen, there is room to perceive Immanuel’s prologue as a metonymy of performance, a remnant and mechanism that reactivates the performance itself for the future reader.

The poem, as a time-based artwork, is no mere passive description in a fixed space; rather, as Kobialka would have it, it is ‘imbued with the objective conditions that engendered [it] in time and space’.Footnote ²⁷ In a dialectical vein, this means that not only the conditions of the poem’s original composition, recitation and reception, but also the circumstances of our reading it today, are a continuous process of performance, in a particular NOW.