This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes
toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing
intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the ...southward expansion of the
Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian
domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape,
and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from
tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment.
Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter
elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses
to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional
narratives. Published with the generous support of the Koret
Foundation.
This article argues that medieval Arabic-speaking Jews, unlike the rabbis of Late Antiquity, adopted a comparative framework for analyzing their beliefs, practices, laws, exegetical methods, and so ...on as analogous to those possessed by other groups. The paradigm shift is reflected in Judeo-Arabic writings that adopt al-yahūdiyya as the name of an independent entity that is a species of a broader genus. While it might be anachronistic to call this species “Judaism” and its genus “Religion,” the Jewish adoption of an entity that enfolds many of the elements scholars identify with the category Religion marks a milestone in Jewish thought. In the context of Islamic and Christian writing in Arabic, this article focuses on Judeo-Arabic sources composed between the tenth and twelfth centuries that present al-yahūdiyya as an emic term and then turns to Hebrew sources through the fifteenth century that also reflect a comparative framework.
Decter explores the semantic sense of the medieval Arabic (and Judeo-Arabic) word al-yahudiyya both as an extension of Daniel Boyarin's method - at heart a theoretically sensitive philology that ...maintains that unpacking the semantic senses of premodern words can reveal how speakers ordered the world - and as a challenge to some of his conclusions. Given Boyarin's claim that there is no premodern word in any language with the contours of the word "Judaism," the Arabic (and Judeo-Arabic) term that we need to grapple with, which is morphologically proximate to and whose use is more widespread in medieval Jewish writing than the Hebrew yahadut, is al-yahudiyya. The Jewish adoption of al-yahudiyya as an emic and self-identifying term marks a significant shift in Jewish thought as Jews came to view themselves as adhering to an independent entity that was structurally analogous to similar entities to which others adhered.
Abstract
This article studies two versions of an Arabic panegyric by the Jewish poet Judah al-Ḥarīzī, one preserved in Hebrew (Judeo-Arabic) script and the other in Arabic script in a biographical ...dictionary by al-Mubārak ibn Aḥmad al-Mawṣilī (1197-1256). The Judeo-Arabic version was dedicated to a Jewish physician. While the version transmitted by al-Mawṣilī does not have a named addressee, it was likely dedicated to a Muslim. By reading the two versions as iterations of the same basic text accommodated to specific circumstances, this article demonstrates the ways in which the author modulated rhetoric to fit the social positions of the respective addressees. The article studies the dynamics of inter-religious praise and the Jewish internalization of Islamic concepts of political legitimacy.
"A Remote Right to Entry" DECTER, JONATHAN
The Jewish quarterly review,
10/2020, Volume:
110, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Decter discusses the early years of the Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR). It had not yet been a decade since the editors of JQR set out to create an interest among English Jews in "Jewish Literature and ...Theology, History and Religion" while recognizing full well that they were not fulfilling any "long-felt want." The editors planned to comment not only on the Jewish past but also on "the present, in which we live, and through which the future is determined." By "the present," they probably meant issues in contemporary theology and current events, but the way in which the instability of the journal's disciplinary and linguistic boundaries reveals contested notions of its subject matter during the editors' "present," as well as debates over the essence of Judaism as a racial, national, religious, or linguistic construct. As though discussing national citizenship, contributors to the nascent JQR pondered or asserted what would be included by full right and remote right, and what would be excluded altogether.
Abstract
This article studies the use of adab and related terminology among medieval Jewish authors with particular attention to shifts in cultural and religious sensibilities, matters of group ...cohesion and self-definition, and the contours of adab discourse across religious boundaries. The article demonstrates that, although Jews in the Islamic East in the tenth century internalized adab as a cultural concept, it was in al-Andalus that Jews first self-consciously presented themselves as udabā. The article focuses on works of Judeo-Arabic biblical exegesis, grammar, and poetics as well as Hebrew poetry composed after the style of Arabic poetry.
The purpose of this article is to provide a close reading of a thirteenth-century Hebrew narrative by Jacob Ben El'azar of Toledo that recounts the tale of a "sodomite" who meets a violent end. The ...story focuses on the amorous affair of Sapir, an adult male, his beloved Shapir, a male youth around the age of puberty, and Birsha, a nefarious old man who lures Shapir away from Sapir, though Sapir ultimately seeks out Shapir and is reunited with him. Sapir and Birsha dispute over the boy and ultimately submit their case before a judge. The judge declares that Birsha deserves the death penalty, though he is spared this sentence and ordered only to forfeit the boy. Nevertheless, Sapir and Shapir take the law into their own hands and brutally murder Birsha. At the heart of the narrative is the tension between two models of eroticism between males, epitomized by the relationships of Sapir-Shapir and Birsha-Shapir, one sanctioned and the other condemned. The question that will be dealt with here is to determine what exactly distinguished the two relationships. Was Birsha considered a "sodomite" as opposed to Sapir, despite the fact that they both loved the male youth Shapir? Were they distinguished by their age, the nature of their desire, their sexual "identities," their sexual acts, or other behaviors? (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, argued that the notion of sexual "identity" did not emerge until the modern era and that pre-modern societies thought only in terms of sexual acts. I largely agree with this evaluation though I will maintain that the categorization in the narrative under discussion distinguished between individuals who desired males and females versus those who desired males only.) In order to unravel this complicated narrative, we must delve deeply into the construction of sexuality within medieval Hebrew literature and more broadly within medieval Jewish culture-so enmeshed within its Islamic and Christian environments. I will argue that the identification of Birsha as a "sodomite" resided in his obsessive, mendacious, and violent qualities and not in his choice of love object, much less his sexual "identity." Before presenting the narrative and my reading, I review some of the history of scholarship on homoeroticism in medieval Hebrew literature in order to provide a counterpoint to the methodological underpinnings of the present study. Throughout the study, I engage a variety of source types-Arabic homoerotic poems and narratives, Andalusi Hebrew poems, Christian reports of Muslim sexuality, exegetic and legal sources-in order to convey the highly specific and culturally circumscribed forms of homoeroticism assumed in Ben El'azar's story.
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