Power in the Portrayalunveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and lite.
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Despite such minor quibbles, this is an extremely important book and provides a new and highly original perspective on Jewish—Muslim relations in Islamic Spain. From the perspective of the history of religions, Brann is concerned with issues of self-definition, constructions of otherness, and the ways in which issues of power contribute to idealized inversions of selfhood. Showing linguistic acumen in both languages, Brann has created a thick description of the shifting and ambivalent attitudes that Jewish and Muslim elites had about one another at a particular historical moment.
By examining the construction of social meaning, he demonstrates how these representations are concerned primarily with the power and sovereignty of each group. The Journey of One Buddhist Nun: Even against the Wind. State University of New York Press, For me, the subtitle also evokes the obstacles Brown herself must have faced in writing the book. Directories Courses Discussion Groups.
Review of Power in the Portrayal: Journal of the American Academy of Religion. In the second chapter Brann focuses on the anti-Jewish writings of Ibn Hazm d. Ha-Nagid is described, for instance, as dressing the same as Journal of the American Academy of Religion Muslims, reading Muslim books in Arabic, and using the form of address reserved for Muslims. Set your country here to find out accurate prices.
United States United Kingdom Canada. Updated August 30th, Rating: Leiser - - Journal of Islamic Studies 15 2: Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Harvey - - Journal of Islamic Studies 25 3: Jews, Christians and Muslims: Jews, Christians and Muslims. Bloom - - Journal of Islamic Studies 15 2: Radding - - The European Legacy 2 8: Media Representations of British Muslims. Hardy - - Journal of Islamic Studies 15 1: Hamilton and Stefano Riccioni, Eds. V, ; 4 Black-and-White Figures and 5 Maps. The final two chapters of Power in the Portrayal examine Jewish representations of Muslims, a far smaller subject, as Jews, being in the minority, continued to protect their communal autonomy and its fragile parameters by remaining invisible.
Branns initial Jewish citation is the lengthy elegiac poem by Abraham ibn Ezra relating to his exile from Sepharad in , an exile that, paradoxically, served to disseminate Andalusian culture in Christian Europe, a Europe that was then living in its Dark Ages. If we recall the citation from his essay presented earlier, we see that Jews like Ibn Ezra thought of Spain as a new Israel, and the Spanish Jews as the elite of Jewry:.
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How was Cordoba plundered and become like the desolate sea? There sages and great men died in famine and Not a Jew besides me is left in Jaen or Almeria. Majorca and Malaga are without sustenance And the Jews who remained received a festering blow. That is why I mourn, learn to wail bitterly, and utter so grievous a lament! My howls in my anguish let them met away like water. Ibn Ezra continues the modes of ambivalence which permeate Andalusian literature: He loves his native land, but there is an objective tension lurking throughout the citation which leaves the Muslim persecutor unnamed yet still present.
Jews are a part of a larger society, a society which is led by Muslims, a society that both tolerates Jews and finds them to be a lesser people. This duality, the love of Spain and its culture split off by the pain of being a minority, is both a rhetorical as well as an existential fact of life for Sephardic Jewry. The deep ties that Ibn Ezra had toward Spain are in deep focus in this poem. He speaks of the topoi of Spain with an almost Biblical awe and familiarity.
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Spain is the sacred land, a land where God has sent His exiles and shown His concern for them. This good life went hand-in-hand with being dominated by the Muslim majority. In two different texts, Moses ibn Ezra, the great Andalusian poet and theoretician, and Judah Halevi, his disciple, recreate a nascent Hebrew culture, nay a Hebrew superiority, in the midst of the cross-cultural fertilization in the period.
Moses ibn Ezra, in his Kitab al-Mahadara w-al-Mudhakara, a book which laid the foundation for medieval Sephardic poetics, recounts what has by now become quite a famous anecdote. In a meeting with a Muslim who wishes to extol the virtues of the Arabic language and denigrate Hebrew scripture, we hear the Muslim asking Moses ibn Ezra to translate the Decalogue into Arabic. In this case we see the uselessness of this sort of cultural and linguistic one-upsmanship. It is as silly to try and render Hebrew into Arabic, as it would be to render Arabic into Latin.
In this sense, Ibn Ezra preserves the status of the Hebrew language and upholds its integrity in light of the supremacy of Arabic. Judah Halevi wishes to go one step further. In his book of religious disputation Kuzari, he sets up a Muslim to extol the virtues of the Jewish faith and its history, which is, as we know, the foundations of the Muslim narrative.
In the excerpt from Ibn Daud we read the story of the Nagid as presented by the court secretary Ibn al-Arif:. Samuel, however, fled to Malaga, where he occupied a shop as a spice-merchant. Consequently, when after a while, this vizier, Ibn al-Arif, was given leave by his King Habbus to return to his home in Malaga, he inquired among the people of his household: The Katib thereupon ordered that R.
Samuel ha-Levi be brought to him at once, and he said to him: Henceforth you are to stay at my side. Ibn Daud uses the testimony of a Muslim to proclaim the virtuousness of the great Ibn Naghrila. The Jew, paradoxically, is exalted by his Arab-Muslim master. Finally, Brann presents a text by the Nagid himself, the famous martial poem Eloah Oz. In this poem, a recounting of the battle between Granada and Almeria, the Nagid resets the battle as a Biblical war between Israel and its Amelekite enemy.
The reader will note that the Hebrew text actually refers to Zuhayr as Agag, and Almerias troops as Amaleq. Identifying Zuhayr with Agag, the ancestor of the biblical Haman, the poet establishes one of many ideologically ambitious and explicit links with his namesake, the prophet Samuel, with his Levite ancestor King David, and with the career and exploits of the late biblical character Mordechai, a Persian-Jewish courtier.
According to this analysis we see that the Nagid permitted himself the rhetorical hubris to superimpose, as Ibn Ezra had done topographically in his poem, a biblical and sacred configuration onto his secular role as a vizier in Granada. And while such hubris was short lived the Nagids son Joseph was murdered in a court intrigue which led to a sack of Jewish Granada in , the rhetorical and conceptual significance of such epic feelings became a crucial part of the essentialized concept of identity that took hold of the Sephardim through the ages.
Brann ends the book with a strange tale from the collection of maqamat by Judah al-Harizi called Tahkemoni. Al-Harizi is himself a very crucial figure in the development of Sephardic literature, as he inaugurates the new period that has Jews moving into Christian Spain after the Almohad expulsion of the Jews from Granada in the 11th century. Al-Harizi adopts a form of literature, the maqama rhymed prose interspersed with poems that has yet to be used by Hebrew writers in Spain. Al-Harizi is a belated figure who goes back into an earlier period of Arabic literature and asserts his own skill at mastering it and by transmitting it in pure, biblical Hebrew.
Judah al-Harizi is yet further proof, if proof were needed, of the intense bond that Jews felt for their adopted homeland. The tale that Brann chooses from the Tahkemoni is one that has the main protagonists Heman and Hever recount to one another an event which happened to Hever the previous day.
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While standing in a crowd that has gathered around an astrologer, Hever, who, like al-Harizi, is a staunch Maimonidean who believed that arstology was bunk, wishes to debunk the man in front of the crowd. What better way to do so than to ask the astrologer to solve the greatest mystery that Hever can think of - the date of the coming of the Jewish messiah. Hever and his friends become worried as the astrologer begins to tongue-whip them. The astrologer identifies the men as Jews and states the following:.
You inquire about a profound secret and ask a most difficult question for it is a secret as deep as the netherworld.
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Your question concerns the fallen tower [of David], whether it will be rebuilt with turrets; about the scattered sheep [of Israel] and whether they will escape the teeth of lions and go about among the beasts Your question concerns the ingathering of exiles, the destruction of kingdoms, and the resurrection of the dead. As the Lord lives, you deserve to die because your question concerns the destruction of the world; and you have spoken subversively and conspired against the government. Judah al-Harizi conceived of his book as a product of Jewish nationalism, a nationalism that was born in the context of the emergence of adab culture, a product of Arabo-Islamic learning.
This paradox of the superiority of a Hebraism which has been molded by Arabic poetics and aesthetics surfaces in this tale of the astrologer. The Jews here get cocky and think that they are going to triumph over this lowly astrologer. But in the denouement of the tale, the Jew is forced to remember that he is in Exile and that the Muslims rule over him. The great irony of all this is that al-Harizi is writing in a Christian environment and not a Muslim one.
The very memory of Jewish life in Islamic Spain, warts and all, is to be preferred over the tenuousness of life in Christian Toledo. It is this memory that has continued to lay buried in the heart of the Sephardic Jews; the ambivalence wedded to the glory is consistently sedimented into the cultural patrimony of this people. The work of Ross Brann is perhaps the only current scholarship that has presented before the educated reader as well as the specialist the vast panoply of Sephardic literature, situated in a studious yet sympathetic context.
His scholarship, as can be gleaned from each page of his books and articles, is impeccable; his mastery of the Hebrew and Arabic source material, with a clear cultural understanding of the various implications of both, is second to none. The literature of the Sephardim has become a kind-of political football that is manipulated, as I have continued to assert, by a host of interests that continually ignore or misapply its very trenchancy for our own culturally troubled times.
By grounding his research and criticism firmly within the sources, Ross Brann has delineated a scholarship that, like its Andalusian forbears, has tried to remain as inclusive as possible. This sense of inclusion makes works like Power in the Portrayal vital reading for all those who are interested in the Arab-Jewish past and its ramifications for the present.
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By tackling issues like modes of inter-ethnic representation and the existential links between Jewish culture and the adoption of non-Jewish modes of thinking and feeling, Ross Brann has begun to chip away at the chasm that is at the heart of modern Jewish culture. Within this terrain he never forgets that there is always another way of seeing things; he has himself internalized the very Andalusian poetics that he speaks about as an academic and made those poetics part of a larger intellectual continuum.
The objective and deeply contextual manner in which Power in the Portrayal and Branns other writings functions has served to redraw the map of Sephardic and Jewish studies in this country. Rather than ignore the detritus that has crept into the study of Sephardic Jewry and Arab High Culture in Spain and the East, Ross Brann has taken the most damning evidence and sought to re-read that evidence in light of what we have learned about the region and its civilization.
The key element in his reconstruction of this civilization is the creative potential inherent in ambiguity. So much of modern thought revolves around our predilection for certainty and absolutes. In the world of Muslim Spain there was room for creative tensions, tensions that produced some of the most lasting and explosive literary works that Western civilization has seen. In fact, as we have seen in the work of Philip Hitti and Maria Rosa Menocal, it was those very Arabo-Islamic works that served to create and define Western modernity.
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Now that Western civilization has reached yet another impasse with the Arab East, an Arab civilization that has largely forgotten its own highest cultural and ethical values, the scholarly reconstructions of Ross Brann and his deep and penetrating insights should be shared by scholars and laypeople of all stripes to begin to comprehend the riches of what Andalusia has bequeathed to us.
It is clear that everyone should know what has been stored in the Sephardi heart lo these many centuries. The opinions expressed on this webpage do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The American Muslim, nor can the American Muslim be held accountable for these views. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.
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