Iberian Jewish Literature. Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe by Jonathan P. Decter (review)

139 Reseñas ! ! ! ! ! sorprendentes (y tantas veces subestimadas) capacidades efectivas de participación e incidencia social, política e intelectual que mujeres como María de Guevara ejercieron en su época. Sus extraordinarias estrategias de validación y auto representación textual no son, después de todo, un mal lugar para empezar. Nicolás M. Vivalda Vassar College Decter, Jonathan P. Iberian Jewish Literature. Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe. Indiana UP, 2007. HB. xvi + 214 pp. + 90 pp. ISBN10 : 0253349133; ISBN-13: 978-0253349132. Beginning in the tenth century, Andalusi Jews, who were highly educated in classical Arabic poetics and linguistic theory, began to write poetry that took its poetic personality from Classical Arabic tradition, and its language from the Hebrew Bible. The great writers of this tradition, such as Samuel ibn Naghrela, Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah Halevi, came to be the bane of high school students throughout Israel, as did Berceo, Jorge Manrique, and Garcilaso in the Spanish-speaking world. In Spain (and among hispanófilos), however, these indigenous Hebrew authors are virtually unknown except by professional Hebraists and a few general readers with an interest in Jewish Spain. Hispanists interested in the Hebrew literature of Spain are fortunate to have at their disposal a number of excellent works on the topic in both Spanish and English, to which we may now add Iberian Jewish Literature. At first glance, Jonathan Decter’s book on the Hispano-Hebrew literature of the eleventh-thirteenth centuries may not seem required reading for Hispanists specializing in Early Modernity. Despite a recent spike in popular interest in the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain, and notwithstanding the obvious importance of converso (but not Jewish) writers, Early modernists do not typically go out of their way to read academic studies of HispanoHebrew literature. With Iberian Jewish Literature, Decter gives us a few good reasons to read outside the box. Paying careful attention to the endnotes, a Hispanist lacking Hebrew stands to learn from him a great deal about Hebrew poetics and poetic sensibilities in Spain. His study is the first to focus on the poorly understood transitional period between Muslim and Christian rule. He is also the first Hebraist working in English to give serious consideration to the Romance context of Hispano-Hebrew authors writing in Christian Iberia. For Hispanists, Decter challenges us not only to rethink the relationship between the Romance and Hebrew literatures of medieval Iberia; he also calls us to expand our notion of the novel in Spain by studying the thirteenth-century Hebrew rhymed prose narrative in terms of novelistic discourse. 140 Reviews ! ! ! ! ! Decter presents Hispano-Hebrew literature en su salsa, that is, in the context of the Andalusi tradition from which it springs, and to which it reacts in the new sociopolitical context of Jewish life under Christian rule. His book complements recent interest in the role of Islam in early modern Spain (B. Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities; M. Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain; M. Quinn, “Handless Maidens, Modern Texts: A New Reading of Cervantes’s the Captive’s Tale”) and the more popular interest in Hispano-Hebrew poetry (P. Cole, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492; M. Menocal, The Ornament of the World). Hispanists specialized in the early modern period will appreciate Decter’s insistence on breaking with some of the less productive critical habits of his predecessors, particularly when it comes to categories of cultural identity and literary influences. One of his main (and most important) arguments is that the entire question of “Islamic” or “Christian” influence on the Hebrew authors he studies is in itself problematic, and he warns us against “pigeonholing authors into singularly Islamic or Christian contexts” (15). We might further interrogate the idea that the official religion of a governing power is a reliable indicator of cultural practice within the realm. After all, what does it mean to be a monarch of a “Christian Spain” when at least some of your subjects are practicing Islam and speakingArabic well into the sixteenth century? Although this is clearly a book...