No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (review)

In No Place Of Rest Susan Einbinder analyzes literary traces of the 1306 expulsion of the Jews from France. These traces, gathered from Jewish, primarily Hebrew sources, mingle with evidence of other traumas suffered by medieval Jewish communities in northern and southern France, especially other expulsions, such as the one from Gascony (1287-88), and the Black Death. Einbinder is also deeply concerned with collective memory, the French identity of Jews in exile (many of whom sought haven in Provence) and their descendents, debates between rationalists and traditionalists, the intersection of science and literature, and the transmission of texts. Many of the authors Einbinder discusses were born or worked in Occitania, in towns such as Aire, Avignon, Montpellier, and Perpignan, and spoke Occitan in their day-to-day life, even though they generally preferred to write in Hebrew. The well-travelled Isaac HaGorni, subject of the first chapter, dedicated songs "to the Jewish communities of Aix, Apt, Arles, Carpentras, Draguignan, and Manosque," and his rivals' writings place him also in "Narbonne, Perpignan, Luz, and Lucq" (21). The book consists of six chapters, framed by an introduction and epilogue. All are beautifully written, well-documented, varied, and original, with one moving gracefully into the next.

In Chapter 1, "Isaac b. Abraham HaGorni: The Myth, the Man, and the Manuscript," Einbinder offers a portrait of the Gascon Jewish poet Isaac HaGorni (Isaac b. Abraham of Aire). She relates HaGorni and the ways and contexts in which he and his poetry have been remembered to larger issues, such as the expulsion of the Jews from Gascony and Jewish intellectual engagement with science and philosophy in late-thirteenth-century Provence. In her characteristically thorough fashion, Einbinder works carefully through several sets of primary documents, including the sole surviving copy of HaGorni's poems (Munich 128), poems by his rival Abraham Bedersi, and comments by the fifteenth-century Jewish scholar Jacob Provençali, who counted HaGorni among the best Jewish poets of Provence. This chapter, like the rest of the book, is continually enriched by Einbinder's belief that "Hebrew manuscripts … are not just the purveyors of disembodied 'texts' to be copied, annotated and corrected, and naively read; they are physical objects, and the clues to their fabrication and transmission reinsert them into a moving historical narrative whose scenery changes over time" (9). For example, she devotes several pages to the copyist of Munich 128, perhaps a displaced Jew himself.

Einbinder sets the stage for her treatment of Isaac HaGorni and his poetry with the expulsions of the Jews from Gascony and other places. She suggests that although HaGorni seems to have left Gascony prior to the 1287 expulsion, he was nonetheless "directly or indirectly, a product of expulsion" (20), an interesting idea that would be worth pursuing. She also develops the idea that HaGorni was "something of a stranger in all the places that he wrote" and asks how HaGorni's status as a stranger makes him a precursor of other Jews who were expelled, a test case as it were, proposing, "What we know of Isaac's life and poetry … presents us with a rich opportunity to ask questions about the paths taken by dispossessed Jews, how they fared in new surroundings, and how history chose to remember them" (15). HaGorni adapted, and he carried his identity with him, just as scribes carried their handwriting with them from place to place, or émigrés brought their sense of French identity to other locales, as Einbinder discusses elsewhere (21, 31). On p. 19, read davantage 'more', not d'avantage (in a quotation from an article by Haim Schirmann).

In Chapter 2, "Form and History: Hebrew Pantograms and the Expulsion of 1306," Einbinder analyzes alliterative poems composed in Perpignan and Lerida by Yedaiah Bedersi and Joseph ben Sheshet Latimi that respond to catastrophe, and particularly the 1306 expulsion. She borrows the word "pantogram...