Jonathan P. Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature. Between Al-Andalus And

Book Reviews / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 579-591 589

Jonathan P. Decter, Iberian Jewish Literature. Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe, Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Univer- sity Press, 2007, 304 + xvi pp.

When Jews relocated from one geographical area to another, whether out of free will or from coercion, they invariably brought with them their pre- vious cultural baggage to which they clung loyally. For instance, Jews from central Europe (Ashkenaz) brought the German language with them to Eastern Europe; Jews from Christian Iberia brought Spanish with them to the far corners of the Sephardic diaspora. In the modern State of Israel there are many subcultures representing the different lands of origins of various immigrant Jewish groups. In similar fashion, Jews from Islamic Andalusia maintained many aspects of their Arabicized culture when they found themselves under Christian rule whether by migration or by con- quest. Although some Jews in Christian Spain preserved Arabic, classics of Judaeo-Arabic literature were translated into Hebrew so that Andalusian Jewish culture could be maintained by those Jews who no longer read or wrote the original language. Arabic and Islamic influence was not restricted to linguistic issues. Hence, even when fully removed geographically, culturally and linguisti- cally from Islam, Jewish philosophers writing in Hebrew in Christian countries seemed to have been more at home with Islamic thinkers such as Averroes and al-Ghazali than they were with contemporary Christian scholastics. Likewise, the earliest Jewish Hebrew anti-Christian polemics written in Christian Europe, composed in northern Spain or southern France, were highly indebted to Judaeo-Arabic models composed in Islamic countries and propagated in Andalusia. Given the diversity of fac- tors at a time of cultural transition, the student of Jewish literature is often confronted with the question of how to sort out the range of contexts in which various authors functioned and to identify the possible influences upon their works. Jonathan P. Decter’s innovative and insightful work concentrates on the cultural transition of Hebrew poetical forms from Andalusia to Chris- tian Iberia by authors who were steeped in Arabic culture but who composed most of their poetry in Hebrew. He focuses particularly on the poetry (the multipartite poem, qasīdạ , the mourning poem and the strophic form) of the twelfth-century Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, and Abraham ibn Ezra; and the rhymed prose narrative (the maqāma) of the thirteenth- century Judah al-Harizi and Jacob ben Elazar. By a judicious mix of

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI : 10.1163/157006711X598901 590 Book Reviews / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 579-591 internal analysis and contextualization, employing modern literary theory, Decter demonstrates that migrating Sephardic Jewish poets not only brought with them Arabic models (a well-known fact) but also adopted local Christian topoi and interests (not usually recognized). Although engaged in cultural transference, these authors were in themselves transformed by their new places of residence. Memories of Andalusia and its Arabic culture remained vivid as the Christian environment slowly began having an impact, despite Jewish feelings of estrangement and alienation. Decter investigates Iberian Jewish cultural transition first by presenting the various different forms of poetical writing and analyzing their con- tents, and second, by placing them into a wider framework, both Islamic and Christian. Thus, in the first part of the book, the Andalusian Hebrew poetry is examined for the repeated themes of space (landscape and transition), form (lamentation and estrangement), and imagery (the protean garden) all of which are used to exemplify the poets’ feeling of displace- ment. These themes appear along a wide continuum of poetry written by the Andalusian exiles, mostly the Ibn Ezras and Judah Halevi, thereby reinforcing the sense of loss those poets felt when forced to leave what they considered their natural habitats. Arabic models and imagery are employed and transformed in the new circumstances to express the specifically Jew- ish concerns of the poets. In Decter’s words, “without reducing poetry to biography, we can say that poetic imagery is an indispensable measure of shifting cultural mentalities across a corpus of highly conventional writing” (p. 95). The second part of the book is devoted to the Hebrew maqāma, a special genre of rhymed narrative originated in Arabic in which the author tells a series of stories in poetic form. The two protagonists here are the well known Judah al-Harizi, translator, world traveler and author of the Tahkemonị ; and the lesser known Jacob ben Elazar, the author of Sefer ha- meshalim, who lived and wrote in Toledo. The main themes are context (Arabic and European sources), structure, voice and, once again, space (landscape, geography and transition). While demonstrating the close con- nection between the Hebrew rhymed narratives and their Arabic models, Decter convincingly argues that for a full appreciation of these works, the Romance context of troubadour and lyric poetry cannot be ignored. What is especially attractive in Decter’s analyses is the eschewing of unnuanced claims of influence and borrowing in favor of a sophisticated evocation of the cultural trends which may have contributed to his authors’ intellectual profiles. Thus, he writes: “Rather than seeing Hebrew literary