Bracelets are for Hard Times:Economic Hardship, Sentimentalityand the Andalusi Hebrew Poetess

S. J. Pearce

fabric flowed like poems. Peter Cole, Things on Which Ive Stumbled1

A Yemeni proverb advises that bracelets are for hard times (al- .hada idli-l-awqat al-shaddah), that is, that jewellery fashioned from preciousmetals will retain value and purchasing power even during times ofeconomic distress when currency might be scarce or devalued. Avariety of documents found in the Cairo Genizah, including dowryarrangements, property lists and letters written on behalf of, about andaddressed to abandoned and impoverished wives confirm that theprinciple of this proverb held true in day-to-day life in medieval Cairoand its wider Mediterranean environs. There, many women converteddepreciable assets into jewellery in order to ensure their owncontinued solvency through their economic hardship and, in somecases, in the absence of their husbands. This fact of life made its wayinto poetry; in one case of particular interest it appears as a motif inthe single poem attributed to the only medieval female poet thoughtto have composed verse in Hebrew before the fifteenth century,a woman known to history only as the wife of her husband, Dunash benLabra.t, himself the tenth-century father of Arabizing Hebrew metricalpoetry. Reading the poem as a literary representation of details ofthe socio-economic reality faced by the poet as her husband preparedto depart Cordoba alters and expands the scope of her work. The valueof this poem, of this poets oeuvre, which is necessarily limited by

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virtue of its singularity, nonetheless contains more of historicallygrounded literary interest than has previously been recognized. Such areading allows the poem to be more than the curious and uniquetextual artefact of a daring and unusually well-educated womanand transforms it into literary evidence of historical realitiesrecounted over and over in more typically documentary texts,reminding the reader of the close ways in which sentimentality andeconomic considerations can be intertwined in related groups ofliterary and historical documents. That is to say: through its use ofimagery that would have been familiar, recognizable and meaningfulto its readers, the poem communicates the ability of a woman inclassical-period Genizah society2 to provide for herself and her familythrough shrewd economic moves cloaked as sentimental or generousexchanges of gifts.At four lines in length, the poem is short enough to be reproduced

here in full:

Ha-yizkor yaalat ha- .hen yedidahbe-yom perud u-vi-zeroah ye .hidah

Ve-sam .hotam yemino al-semolahu-vi-zeroo ha-lo samah .zemidah

Be-yom laq.hah le-zikaron redidove-hu laqa.h le-zikaron redidah

Ha-yishshaer behol ere.z sefarad

ve-lu laqa.h .ha.zi malhut negidah?3

Will her beloved remember the elegant doe, her only son in her arms atthe moment of his departure? On the day he placed the signet ring fromhis right hand on her left and she placed her bracelet on his arm, shetook his cloak as a memento and he took her cloak as a memento. Ifhe could hold half the princes kingdom, is there anywhere in Sefaradhe would remain?4

The text of the poem, preserved in twowitnesses (in T-SNS 143.46 andacross the joined fragments Mosseri VIII.202 and IV.387), recounts thetender goodbye between Dunash and his wife and their son, sealed withan apparently sentimental exchange of gifts: her bracelet for his signetring and the cloak of each to the other. Ezra Fleischer speculated thatthis was a poetic account of the fallout from some sort of intrigue in thecircle of .Hasdai ibn Shapru.t (d. c. 970) within the wider cadre ofcourtiers to the Umayyad neo-caliph Abd al-Ra.hman III (r. 91261). Hefurther speculated that this spat might have been what led to the exile of

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Dunash, known as a poet, a grammarian, a polemicist, and as avocal opponent of his contemporary and fellow at court, Mena.hemibn Saruq. Regardless of its background or occasion, however, the textat a minimum depicts the departure of Dunash from the IberianPeninsula. The meaning of the poem has long remained obscure.However, we may shed new light on this poem by reading it in lightof documentary sources that likewise come from the Genizah cacheand represent the lives of Andalusi Jews as well as the Cairene Jewswith whom they were in contact and whose community was, in manyimportant respects, analogous to theirs. In such a context this literary giftexchange begins to take on the appearance of a very practicalarrangement in addition to manifesting the more self-evidentlysentimental one. The poem does not just depict an exchange ofmemory tokens but rather represents a husband and wife ensuringeach others financial solvency as they prepare for an extended periodof time apart.

Delivered into the Hands of a Woman?The poem is as puzzling as it is brief, and as a consequence, previousscholarship has been somewhat limited and has largely beenconcerned with the personal and gender identities of the poet.Nehemiah Allony originally identified the poem as having been writtenby Dunash ben Labra.t himself.

5 Nearly half a century later, Fleischerdiscovered the second copy of the poem and on the basis of theheading complete for the first time and reading By the wife ofDunash ben Labra.t, to him

6 identified the poet as Dunashs wife.Shlomo Dov Goitein agreed with this identification, cautioning thatit is not even sure that the wife wrote it but ultimately concluding,I personally believe that she was the author, although the poemgives the impression of a perfection in composition and style notexpected at that early period (especially as compared with the stiffand unimaginative creations of her husband).7 Female authorshipof poetry in the medieval Islamicate world is not an unknownphenomenon,8 with identified women poets, both Jewish andMuslim, writing exclusively in Arabic. The attribution of the above-cited Hebrew-language poem to a female poet therefore makes itunique in the corpus. In her study of the representations of women inmedieval Hebrew literature, Tova Rosen focuses on the singlenessof Dunashs wife as a medieval Jewish writer, arguing that not only[is she] the first identifiable woman poet in the Hebrew languagesince the biblical poetesses Miriam and Deborah; she is also the onlyone for centuries to come.9 The enthusiasm over the ostensible

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discovery of the only medieval Hebrew poem written by a womanquickly overtook any other consideration and has come to dominatethe scholarly discourse on the text.10

Yet the notion that a female author necessarily corresponds toa female poetic voice is problematic, even in light of the scribalidentification of the poem as the words of Dunash ben Labra.t s wife. Inthe notes to the first chapter of the study Unveiling Eve, Rosen herselfcites Jane Burns and Roberta Krueger in cautioning that it must bekept in mind that given the uncertainties of medieval manuscripttransmission, the female signature of a text does not guarantee identitywith a historical woman author. It may invite us to read a femalevoice.11 Despite the uncertainty that still surrounds the identificationof Dunashs wife as the poet, scholarship and academic discourse sinceFleischers article have for the most part, despite whatever reservationsmay be held by students of the poem, accepted that identification as apoint of departure. That the poem found in T-S NS 143.46 appearsalongside another one dealing with themes of loss, estrangement,departure and longing that seems more securely to have been writtenby Dunash lends some credence to Fleischers acceptance of themedieval scribes description of the poem as a response by Dunashswife. In the first hemistich of the second line of that poem, the poeticvoice asks, Ve-eih

evgod bemaskelet kemotah

? (How could I betray a

cultured woman like you?).12 Although it may be tempting to readthis line as a suggestion that Dunash himself was married to awoman well-educated enough to write Hebrew poetry in her own right,it is imperative to avoid conflating the poetic voice with that of theauthor, female or male. In other words, that the voice in a poemwritten by Dunash would call his wife clever does not mean thatDunash himself was necessarily married to an especially clever oreducated woman.Ultimately, though, the question remains a long way from settled. As

such, for the purposes of the present discussion, the question ofwhether the poet we identify as Dunashs wife was not only Dunashswife but a woman at all should be considered to be set aside. That is notto say, however, that the identity of the poet and the identification ofthe poet as a woman ought never be revisited. I will continue to refer tothe poet as a woman here with the caveat that, even if it were to beproven with certainty in the future that the poem had been composedby a man, the fundamental conceit of this study would not changesince ultimately it is the understanding of the text and the poetic voicethat is at stake. The concern of the present study is the poem asa detailed textual artefact that reflects the lived material culture.

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Arabizing Hebrew poetry is a highly stylized form,13 making readingit for its historical value a special challenge. Nevertheless, a thickdescription of this poem in its context, made possible by readingpoetry in concert with documentary evidence found in the CairoGenizah, allows for a consideration of the poem as a literary record ofa historical reality.

The Poem in Light of the DocumentsAs noted briefly above, the poem describes the activities of Dunash benLabra.t and his wife at the very moment of his departure from Cordoba.The poetic voice describes herself holding the couples only son whileexchanging her bracelet for her husbands signet ring and her cloakfor his. The beginning and the end of the poem offer the readerglimpses of the questions that come to her mind as this takes place,namely whether Dunash would leave all memory of his wife behind ashe leaves her and whether anything could be done, even at the highestlevels, to keep him from leaving. The foregrounding of the poemsgift exchange against these evocations of loss and longing makesthe interpretation that most readily presents itself that of asentimental farewell between husband and wife, one in which theobjects exchanged function primarily as memory tokens. It would besufficient to interpret the text of the poem as a representation of atender and sentimental gift exchange that stands as a farewell betweenlovers. However, the specifics of the objects exchanged raise thepossibility that there is more to this scene than a close reading of thetext would suggest. Documents from the Cairo Genizah show thatclothing and other items of personal adornment, especially outerwearand jewellery, represented an important way in which people,particularly women separated from their families, could maintainfinancial solvency, support themselves and easily transport andpreserve the funds that were available to them.14

The literary representation of the exchanges between the figures ofDunash and his wife militates against the powerful contemporarytendency to regard the world of things as inert and mute, set inmotion and animated, indeed, knowable, only by persons and theirwords and instead conforms to the model that better serves manyhistorical societies [wherein] things have not been so divorcedfrom the capacity of persons to act and the power of words tocommunicate.15 The exchange itself is neither singularly economicnor sentimental but is, rather, able to communicate the latter becauseof the former. The items, recognizable to the reader, are particularlyrelevant because of the realization of their exchangeability, that is to

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say, the things-in-motion illuminate their human and socialcontext.16 That context and the exchanges set into it in the poemlook remarkably similar to what we find in the documentary texts. Themovement of the goods in both kinds of texts is reflective of the sameultimate socio-economic context. By imbuing a textually sentimentalact with a far more grounded historical setting, the poem attributed toDunashs wife represents a single exchange as a complex negotiationbetween sentimental and practical interests.The figure of Dunashs wife hands her bracelet to her husband in the

second line of the poem. But more than just serving as a reminder of hiswife, carrying the bracelet would have allowed Dunash to take a sizeableportion of the familys wealth with him in a form that was relativelyconvenient to transport. Bracelets made up important parts of dowriesand trousseaux and represented a way in which a newly marriedwoman could support herself in her role in her new household. Goiteinestablishes a specific cost correspondence that explains the importantplace of bracelets in a dowry: A weight of 20 mithqals and acorresponding price of 20 dinars represent a fair average for avaluable pair of bracelets, which often headed a trousseau list. Forthis sum one could acquire indispensable household help.17 While heultimately concludes that his investigation into the monetary value ofthe jewellery mentioned in the Genizah documents was necessary soas to assign each piece its proper place in the hierarchy of the artisticmeans of attraction,18 the body of his work in its entirety speaks tobroader concerns, including the monetary value of the pieces for itsown sake for the women whose lives are mentioned in the documents.One document in particular stands out as echoing a transaction

similar to the one described in the poem. In A Mediterranean Society,Goitein translates a letter (T-S 12 J 28.19) from a man to his niece,whose marriage he had arranged and who was, at the time of writing,resisting pressure from her husband to leave Fustat and join him in thesmall provincial town where he had taken up residence. In the letter,the writer advises the addressee that she would do well to sell or storeher belongings and relocate to her husbands town, lest he abandonher or take a second wife; one piece of this advice in particular helpsto make the argument that the silver bracelet represented more thansimple adornment in this time and place but rather served as aneconomic instrument that helped to sustain the finances of a long-distance marriage. The uncle writes, in part:

Take the articles that you wish to, and whatever is heavy for you put incustody with the judge and get a receipt for them. The wine should be

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sold and a silver bracelet purchased for your wrist. Get in touch with Abual- .Hajjaj b. al-.Tabb, may God the exalted have mercy upon him. He willundertake its sale and will purchase the bracelet for you.19

Although the text says nothing about the wife handing over thebracelet to her husband, it does illustrate a woman, separated from herhusband, converting the value of her property into a silver bracelet,thus making that fortune easier for her to carry as she travels to joinhim. The bracelet is, in effect, a portable medieval savings account,offering the woman a way to transport the value of her estate. In lightof that text, and especially in light of the idea that bracelets were arecognized way of keeping and moving funds particular, if not unique,to women, then the directionality of the gift to Dunash from his wife isparticularly significant. As in the correspondence between the uncleand niece quoted above, as well as in Goiteins observations about theimportance of bracelets in running an efficient household, we may seethat bracelets fashioned from precious metals were often a way forwomen to retain some measure of financial purchase even in theirmarried lives. In the poem, the figure of Dunashs wife gives him thevery economic instrument that was uniquely hers and would have beenreadily identifiable as the most significant means by which she couldsupport herself; in doing so, she literarily, rhetorically and literallybinds their fortunes together even as they separate.Even a seeming difference in the number of bracelets one in the

poem, versus the two typically worn together by historically identifiablewomen is explicable through the Genizah documents and furthercontributes to the interpretation of the poem in light of lived details.Bracelets were typically worn in pairs rather than singly, and whileGoitein argues speculatively that in the poem attributed to Dunashswife where a single one is referred to, must be meant the silverbracelet around the upper arm, worn as a sign of dignity andstrength,20 we may just as fairly speculate that the female figure in thepoem gives her husband one of her two wrist bracelets half herfortune while keeping the other one to sustain herself and theirchild. Drawing this interpretation out even further, it is possible toread this as a foreshadowing of the final rhetorical question in the lastline of the poem, which borrows its gift-giving rhetoric from thebiblical book of Esther: If he could hold half the princes kingdom,is there anywhere in Sefarad he would remain? Dunash could notreceive half the kingdom to stay so he accepts an alternative, halfthe family fortune in leaving. A large grant of property or otherofficial intervention is not possible, nor is remaining in Cordoba;

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and so instead, in leaving, he takes something smaller and personalbut parallel to the ideal that would have kept him in place. While thepoem should not be understood as the literal record of a specificeconomic transaction, it trades in imagery that its readers would haverecognized immediately as both a sentimental and economic backdropto the text.The wife figure in the poem gives a financially sustaining bracelet

to her beloved prior to travel in an act that is evocative of thoserecorded in the documents.21 The Dunash figure, too, makes a gift ofjewellery, offering his wife the signet ring that had been the physicaland practical manifestation of his power and station; he no longerhas any use for it. Genizah documents record much less detailedinformation about signet rings than about other types of jewellery. Thisis because, in general, gemstones of the type that were used to fashionthe face of the signet could not be authenticated as easily or as reliablyas other valuables and so were excluded by scribal convention frommost property lists and other official documents.22 This paucity ofrecords with respect to this particular item makes it more difficultto assess the representation of this transaction in Dunashs wifespoem. However, the evidence already presented here with respect tothe bracelet and the evidence that will be offered immediatelyfollowing for the cloaks carry the argument sufficiently that it ispossible to suggest that the gift of the signet ring may be a rare literaryrecord of some kind of other historical practice that was simplynot documented sufficiently to have any notice of it survive intomodernity in documentary sources. Or, more likely, it is the literaryembellishment of a practice recognizable to medieval readers, namelythe gifting and exchange of jewellery between family members inpreparation for a voyage. In any event, at the literary level, the poeticdepiction of the historically grounded gift of the bracelet and the plainsense of the gift of the signet ring as a symbol of power both serve toempower the woman possessed of the poetic voice; she has helped tofund her husbands travel by her own means and is left with an objectthat, as jewellery, retains some economic value that she could use tosupport herself and that, symbolically, is an emblem of the powerwielded, erstwhile, at the caliphal court.Like the gift of the bracelet, the practical and economic significance

of the second exchange in the poem the wifes mantle for herhusbands is brought into sharpest relief by the documentaryevidence. The cloaks that the husband and wife exchange in thepoem have many comparanda in various types of non-literarydocuments. Epistolary correspondence, purchase requests and

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receipts all depict not only the high monetary value of cloaks butalso the common practice of sharing them back and forth betweenhusbands and wives.23 Especially during the ninth and tenth centuries,that is, precisely during the lifetime of Dunash ben Labra.t and his wifeand the composition of his poetry as well as of the poem attributedto her, outerwear was costly, prized as a possession and put to a greatvariety of uses, even more so than jewellery.24

The type of cloaks that a historical Dunash and his wife would haveworn would typically have been unisex, not only in their constructionbut in their day-to-day usage. Although the Geniza differentiatesthroughout between clothing suitable for women and for men,25 itwas common practice both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Egypt forhusbands and wives to share outer garments, which were generallymaterially identical whether they were meant for a mans or a womansuse. Goitein traces this practice back to similar occurrences in pre-Islamic Jewish communities, but he also notes that the sharing of coats,cloaks and mantles between men and women was common in theMuslim populations amongst whom the Jews whose lives were recordedin the Genizah lived.26 One letter from a man writing while en route toAlexandria reports the doubled consequences of a robbery for ahusband and wife sharing the same coat: He stole my new cloak, worththree quarters of a dinar; by the Torah of the living God, I do notpossess another one for traveling or for town, nor does my wife, forgoing out on the street.27 The literary depiction of an exchange ofcloaks between husband and wife is not, therefore, necessarily arepresentation of gift-giving tokenism. That is to say, these are notsimply given le -zikaron (as a memento), as the poet tells the reader;rather, they are swapping garments that will indeed serve that purposebut will also still continue to be usable for each. Dunash is not simplyheading off into the great unknown with a womans coat so that he cankeep something of his wife with him on his travels but rather is takingwith him a coat that will remind him of her and also be something hecan wear himself.The absence of a cloak or mantle is an image in widespread use as a

metaphor in epistolary sources and can stand for a variety of negativestates or conditions that both men and women might encounter. Thegravity of the situation in which the above-cited traveller found himselfafter his cloak had been stolen, for example, is manifest in the urgencyof his rhetoric. Additional Genizah documents show that the lackof a cloak was considered to be a serious problem even in less diresituations. In one instance, amerchant wrote to a confederate asking fora cloak; in terms that resonate as surprisingly familiar to the modern

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reader, he substitutes the exclamation that he had absolutely nothing towear at all for the real and plain sense of his predicament, namely thathe lacked a good-quality cloak. Another document contains a requestfor additional material and suits so that the writer could change hisclothes frequently, both on the Sabbath and during the week, anddescribes the situation in strikingly recognizable terms, saying thathe has nothing to wear, rather than that he has too few choices:

When the Sicilian boats arrive, please buy me two narrow farkhas[lengths of cloth] of excellent quality, costing about 2.5 dinars, and twoattractive thawbs [lengths of cloth or chemises] worth about 1.5 dinars,and bring them with you. And if you, my lord, depart before the arrivalof the Sicilian [boats], bring me two attractive robes, which have someelegance, and give 2.5 dinars to Joseph for the purchase and forwardingof two farkhas, for I do not have anything to wear on weekdays.28

In another instance, in which a man is describing the fact that he ownscoarser, rather than finer, garments, Goitein writes, A man fromAlexandria, describing himself as naked writes, I have nothing onmy body except an Aleppo robe, no doubt meaning one made ofcotton.29 In these letters, we see the import placed on owning a goodcloak, something that each of the personae in the poem ensures forthe other.In contrast to these examples, which employ nudity as a metaphor

for lack of choice or quality, the rhetoric of nudity was also used as ametaphor for true and dire poverty: since classical and canonical textsof both Judaism and Islam praise clothing the naked as an especiallydesirable and worthy form of charity, the image of nudity as povertywould have been an especially compelling one within Islamicate Jewishcommunities; as such, where poverty is concerned, nakedness andhunger form a trope in the Geniza letters.30 In addition, the phrasekashf al-wajh (uncovering ones face) and other related idiomaticexpressions use the image of physically baring the human body to referto the last-resort humiliation of making oneself known as indigent andbegging for charity.31 The exchange of cloaks in the poem, viewed inlight of the documentary evidence, again lays bare a mutual attempt bythe two figures in the poem to attend to each others needs duringtheir separation and ensure that neither would be literally ormetaphorically naked.The preparations for Dunashs departure, as represented in the

poem ascribed to his wife, do not represent the only time that a poetwas implicated in the conversion of clothing and accessories into hardcurrency in preparation for a voyage. For further evidence of this

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practice, we may turn, not coincidentally, to documentary evidencefrom the life of another Arabizing Hebrew poet, namely Judah ha-Levi.A letter of introduction for a sea-trader contains a marginal note,added later, describing ha-Levis assistance to a cousin who had beenpreparing for his own voyage to Alexandria:

With respect to the turban and the cloak-cloth32 that you said belongedto our teacher Judah [Halevi], what you said is wrong and untrue.In fact, when the letters arrived with the messenger from al-Andalus,I carried them to the vessel. There was amongst them a letter from Judahibn Ezra noting that remaining there did not appeal to him and that hewas determined to go. But [Halevi] had handed over his turban to me.He said to me: If Judah arrives this year, hand it over to him to sell andto join me by means of it[s proceeds]. He wrote to him on a scrap whichI have, indicating that he ought not go to Egypt and that he not goagainst his opinion. Then he told me: If he does not arrive this year,then keep this until you receive a letter from me to sell them and withtheir proceeds buy some necessities that I require.33

This note, recorded shortly after ha-Levis death,34 shows a poet havingoffered his cloak and a personal accessory to a relative as a way ofhelping him economically on the eve of a voyage, even from a distance.In light of this corroboration of the practice, the notion that we mayread the poem attributed to Dunashs wife as a literary record of verypractical preparations for her husbands journey rather than justsentimental girding against the pain of his departure becomes thatmuch more plausible. Members of the Genizah society took and usedthe accessories and adornments of their relatives when they left, andthose who were able wrote poems about their travel saturated withdetails about the material lives they lived.

A Methodological PostscriptIn this final section of the article I would like to address the theoretical,methodological and programmatic background to reading poetryalongside documentary sources and seeing historical realia in whatwe know to be a literary form governed by a highly detailed anddelineated programme of poetics. This methodological discussion willtake place along two principal axes: first, the relationship for ArabizedHebrew poets during the classical Genizah period between perfecttextual reproductions of reality and literarily grounded mimeticrepresentation allows for a relationship between documentedrealities and their literary simulacra. One is among the sources forthe other; this is especially observable through a broader look at the

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very specific kind of images that occur in the poem attributed toDunashs wife (jewellery and clothing), since in Arabizing Hebrewpoetry and poetics they stand both for themselves and for love andliterature.35 Second, the very foundations of Genizah scholarship itselfmade room for a correlated reading of the documentary and poeticsources found within the Genizah cache.As noted above, in the medieval period Arabic and Arabizing

Hebrew poetry are highly stylized and conform to an almost rigid set ofstrictures that govern every element of the composition, from dictionto imagery to theme. Two of the functions that images of jewelleryserve in Arabic poetics are particularly salient here: gems and personaladornments can represent the beauty of and the longing for thebeloved. They can also represent the very textual ornamentationthat a poem uses to express a variety of ideas and sentiments. Theconsequence of this coincidence is that while the jewellery andclothing imagery in the poem is uniquely suited to the sentimentalthematic aspect of the poem, the subtle ways in which it departs fromthe poetics and seems to speak new meaning with this metaphoricalvocabulary simultaneously signals the identity of its cross-genreconversation partner. The poet and the poem breathe new life into aset of dead metaphors, allowing the reader to escape the poetic realmthrough its very devices, using a set of literary conventions ornamentas beloved and ornament as text to create an innovative mimeticportrayal of the world they both inhabit, in which a gift of jewellery cansimultaneously convey a specific poetic meaning and, paradoxically,represent an innovatively more mundane purpose.Just as Dunash ben Labra.t carried Arabic metres over into Hebrew

poetry, the development of Arabized Hebrew poetics allowed for thecarrying over, use and persistence of sets of conventional images andrhetorical devices from classical Arabic poetics. About a hundred yearslater, in his seminal Judaeo-Arabic language work on Hebrew poeticsand the literary history of Jews in Spain, Kitab al-mu.ha .dara wa-l-mudx akara, Moses Ibn Ezra describes bad , or linguistic ornamentation,in entirely concrete terms that resonate with the texts under discussionhere: Naked speech, when it is clad with the festive garments ofmetaphor, and wears the jewels of enigma and allusion, then its silkenembroidery is enriched, and its enamel enhanced. For ornate speechrelates to nakedness as eloquence relates to stammering.36 He evencites his own poetry in this theoretical work,37 verses in which heboasts about his skill as a poet using jewellery as a metaphor: Mypoems are gold necklaces; and where / is the man who can value thepearls that are my poems and words?38 The jewellery and fine

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garments represented in the poem stand for themselves and for thelove for a beloved but are also, crucially, an eloquent packaging for aliterary representation of mundane and eminently recognizabledetails.Ornamentation in poetics is very clearly tied to the lived reality that

poetry reflects; Rosen draws the analogy explicitly, pointing out thata woman, [like] poetry is required to be beautifully decorated.39 Inparticular, Andalusi and Andalusi-modelled epithalamia are suffusedwith literary depictions of the types of accessories that would havecomprised the brides possessions, made up their trousseaux andadorned their bodies as they prepared themselves for marriageand familial life, as evident in the dwans of poets ranging fromJudah ha-Levi to Moses Dar . And even as these poems primarilyconcern themselves with the jewellery and accessories and adornmentof the female subjects bodies, the poetic question is never far from thefore. Rosen summarizes the issue nicely:

In medieval Hebrew literature, the poetic description of Woman andthat of Poetry share in the ambivalent dualism of face and veil, body andclothing, essence and appearance, depth and surface Poetry isbeautiful, artificially ornamented, veiled, seducing, and deceiving.Poetrys veils or garments indicate its florid-but-deceitful figurativelanguage. In poetry (as in language at large) the signifiers cloak andbetray the true meanings of the signifieds. Hence, by means of theveil (itself a figure) both Poetry and Woman embody the problematic oflanguage and signification.40

In reading the poem attributed to Dunashs wife alongside correlatedGenizah documents, we might say that both of these functions are atwork. Naturally, this poetic principle is operative even in poetry thatdoes not make use of jewellery imagery, but in this instance it binds thepoetry and the poetics that much more closely together as they jointlycontribute to the texts representation of Genizah society realia.This representation is firmly grounded in medieval poets and their

readers understanding that poetry could deploy the rhetorical tools atthe poets disposal to create a mimetic vision rather than a perfectillustration; in other words, poetry refracts rather than renders reality.Through medieval commentaries, Ibn Ezra understood biblical,classical antique and classical Arabic poetics well, drew on those verydirectly in composing his own and recognized those principles in thework of his predecessors, including Dunash and the early poets ofhis generation. Aristotles notion of mimesis was thoroughlyeviscerated in translation in the Arabic (and ultimately, too, in the

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Latin) Middle Ages.41 Nevertheless, Arabic commentaries on thePoetics allow for many types of representation of life in literature; andcomparison between life and literature, as well as the subsidiary notionthat an Arabizing Hebrew poem might embody the universal inparticulars,42 persisted in a culturally translated form. All this impliesthat the notion that a Hebrew poem written in the Islamicate,Arabizing milieu of tenth-century Cordoba might say somethingbroadly applicable, using recognizable details without itself beinghistory or a representational illustration of historically-attested customsand practices, should be in no way strange, confounding orproblematic.43

Turning now to more modern considerations of poetics, we findno less a scholar than S. D. Goitein moving towards the use ofdocumentary and literary sources as reciprocal counterpoints andproof texts. For example, he comments on the poetic portrayal ofcertain colours of clothing and their appearance in documentarysources:

InAndalusianArabic poetry yellowwas a symbol of treachery, of separationfrom the beloved, and of unrequited love, which causes the suitor tolanguish to death. Poetry permeated the life even of comparatively simplepeople in those days and might well have influenced popular attitudesconcerning such delicate matters as female dress, which, as we remember,was mostly displayed in the intimacy of the house. Arabic poetry fromSpain, like its Hebrew counterparts, had found its way to Egypt by theeleventh century. And thepoetic symbolism itself probably had its origin inpopular superstitions. As far as the Geniza goes, yellow seems to have beenmore popular among males.44

Goiteins student Yedida Stillman made similar observations whilenoting the stylization of Arabic poetry and prose, as well as the relativelack of detail that such texts can be expected to yield:

The literary references from which data are obtainable are various Amajor problemwhich immediately confronts the researcher who wishes toseek out information onmedieval attire is the fact that the Arab historiansand geographers in their works did not dedicate any chapters or fullpassages to description of garments as a specific topic Books of adabliterature contain many references to clothing and to elegant fashion.45

Even scholars whose work was foundational in establishing the Genizahas a documentary cache saw the value in and potential for interfacewith poetry in the work of documenting life in the Genizah society.

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Later scholars have followed, modifying and finessing thismethodology. Mara Angeles Gallego, among others, has pointed outthe value of Genizah documents for studying the lives of women,46

but she does not go so far as to suggest that they could be of usein understanding their poetry, written either in Hebrew or in Arabic.By contrast, Teresa Garulo speculates about the documentary valueof classical Arabic poetry with regard to medieval womens lives.47

Methodologically speaking, then, the notion of pairing poetry withdocumentary sources can be found at the very foundations of the fieldof Genizah research. Whereas Goitein argues that the value of poetryfor historical writing is that it offers access to high-culture valuesthat might have influenced the lived experience of the individualswhose customs and practices are recorded in the documentaryevidence, I have preferred here to draw out Garulos line of thinkingfurther. Rather than arguing, as she does, that there is plain-sensedocumentary value to Hebrew poetry written in the Genizah society,my reading of the poem attributed to Dunashs wife shows thatthis type of poetry trades in images of interactions, gestures andobjects that are drawn not from formal poetic conventions butfrom day-to-day life. This imagery would have been familiar tomedieval readers, bringing additional layers of meaning to theirreading that are no longer immediately apparent to modern readers ofthe poem.The classic study of the institution of the gift exchange in the

premodern world was written in the middle of the last century byMarcel Mauss. Even though it has been, to a certain extent, supersededby Jacques Derridas reworking of its theories in his own book,Counterfeit Money,48 the original is still a useful theoretical cipher forthe discussion of the poem attributed to Dunashs wife in its historicalcontext. The gifts with which Mauss concerns himself are the

presentations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested andspontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested. The formusually taken is that of the gift generously offered but the accompanyingbehavior is formal pretense and social deception, while the transactionitself is based on obligation and economic self-interest.49

The gifts of jewellery and cloaks depicted in the poem are not offeredcompletely freely or generously but rather as part of the obligationbetween husband and wife, bound by an elaborate set of socio-economic conventions that governed gift-giving and obligation.Goitein himself allowed for the possibility of sentimental uses forgoods with economic value, and vice versa: The objects of the dowry,

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one at a time, could be easily turned into money, whereas the transferof real estate or, indeed, any action with it, was a clumsy affair. Thesentimental value of clothing was an additional and most cogentconsideration.50 While it would be too much to say that the actionsportrayed in the text of the poem itself were all pretence anddeception, the strictness of Arabic poetics certainly governs the way inwhich such transactions could be depicted literarily and imposesformality, pretence and even literarily licensed deception on thehistorical background.

ConclusionIt should go without saying that medieval Arabizing Hebrew poetrycannot be read as history, but it can be read for history. ReadingDunashs wifes poem in light of Genizah documents that detail thelives of women and of couples in similar, if not identical, situationstakes a sentimental exchange of gifts and uses it to illuminate twinmeanings of the action: the gifts would allow both the husband and thewife figures in the poem to support themselves and remember eachother during their forced separation. The exchange of objects betweenthe poet and her husband, refracted through the poem, reflects ahistorical reality in which women were able to support themselves andtheir families where needed. The poem is not and cannot beunderstood to be a documentary record of a historical exchange; thevalue of its relationship with the documentary record comes insteadfrom its appropriation of economic symbols to construct the imagerythat lends the text its meaning. The poet trades in economic images tocompose verse that simultaneously speaks to practical concerns andnostalgia. This is a poetic riff on concrete images taken from daily lifethat makes skilled use of a very constricted literary form in order todepict a single moment in family life that is as ornamented as it isrecognizably natural; as such, the relationship between the poem andthe lives reflected in the Genizah documents needs therefore to beregarded only as correlated and deeply evocative, not as a one-to-onecorrespondence. Or, to borrow and invert a turn of phrase fromanother recent study of poetry and material culture, a poem is not acastle or a robe;51 rather, it illuminates, playing and exaggeratingall the while, the life of the robe-wearer in the castle. In this case,that means that the poem attributed to the wife of Dunash lamentsthe loss of the beloved in keeping with Arabic and ArabizingHebrew modes but also signals the agency of the female persona byevoking images full of culturally specific economic and practicalmeaning.

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Medieval discourse about marriage, as Rosen writes, makes thatinstitution the place where male and female legitimately (though notunproblematically) meet, [becoming] a powerful metaphor for theparadoxical encounters of the two opposing metaphysical orders.52

When read in light of the documentary sources in the Cairo Genizah,the poem attributed to the wife of Dunash ben Labra.t adds yet moredichotomies to that list: generosity and interest, sentimentality andpracticality, and poetry and history. It is those dichotomies, and theprecise function of each element in each pair, that allow us to derivesome sense, in and from a wider historical context, from a marvellouslystrange and otherwise short, puzzling and dismissible poem.

Notes1. Peter Cole, Things on Which Ive Stumbled, in Things on Which Ive Stumbled

(New York: New Directions Press, 2008), pp. 729 (14). I am indebted and gratefulto Esperanza Alfonso, Ross Brann, Ruth Mazo Karras and Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman for their thoughtful readings of drafts of this study at various stages ofits development; to the anonymous reviewers for their engaged and detailedcomments on the piece; and to Damien Kempf for encouraging me to submit thiswork to Cultural History. It is customary, when writing about women in texts from theCairo Genizah, to honor the two women who helped to rediscover the Genizahcache; and so this study is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Agnes Lewis andMrs. Margaret Gibson, who, like the wife of Dunash, were far more than mere wivesof their husbands.

2. The term Genizah society originated with Shlomo Dov Goitein in the introduction tohis A Mediterranean Society and is typically used to refer to Cairo and other urbanareas that were home to Jewish communities in a reasonable amount of contact withCairo during the classical Genizah period, that is, the tenth, eleventh and twelfthcenturies. While one must always be careful not to construe a single, pan-Mediterranean culture, evidence in the Cairo Genizah is useful for talking aboutother Mediterranean sites such as Cordoba on two notable counts. First, the cachecontains many documents that originated in or deal materially with life in Cordoba;these include the poem attributed to Dunashs wife, a great many other examples ofSpanish Hebrew poetry, and records of business and personal transactions betweenindividuals in al-Andalus and individuals in Cairo. And, second, to a certain extentwe may observe cultural similarities between the Jewish communities in Cairo andin Cordoba, thereby making the Egyptian evidence, in the absence of good andspecifically Spanish evidence, valuable as a substitute (to be used with somecaution). Goitein himself delineates the points of contact and lines of similaritybetween al-Andalus and Egypt in the first chapter of the first volume of AMediterranean Society and then goes on to describe, in a section tellingly entitledThe Geniza People as Representative of Mediterranean Society (704), a highdegree of pan-Mediterranean congruity in which the Jews of Cairo were fullyintegrated into the wider Islamicate society.

3. Attributed to the wife of Dunash ben Labra.t, published in Ezra Fleischer,On Dunash ben Labra.t and his Wife and Son, Jerusalem Studies in HebrewLiterature, 5 (1984), pp. 189202 (196).

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4. I have translated the poem here into prose; for a good verse translation, see Willhis Love Remember? in The Dream of the Poem, Peter Cole (transl.) (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 27.

5. Nehemiah Allony, Four Poems, Jewish Quarterly Review, 35:1 (1944), pp. 7983(80). With respect to the historiography of this poem, it is interesting to note that in1957 Goitein authored an article in which he claimed that regardless of who mighthave recited a poem, it was always possible to identify the gender of the author fromthe text. Goiteins article originally appeared in the journal Studies in Scripture; anEnglish translation was published posthumously as Women as Creators of BiblicalGenres , Prooftexts, 8:1 (1988), pp. 133.

6. Fleischer, On Dunash, p. 199; see also fig. 1, between pp. 192 and 193. Allonyhad originally speculated that the poem was written to a friend of Dunashs onthe occasion of the friends wedding and reconstructed what we now know to bean Arabic-language heading as though it were Hebrew with a characteristicallyArabizing error to read: ve-katav dunash ben labrat aleihi (Dunash ben Labra.twrote to him). Fleischers discovery of the second half of the Mosseri manuscriptled to the reading: li-zawjat dunash ben labra.t ileihi (By the wife of Dunash benLabra.t, to him).

7. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (196785; Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2000), vol. 5, p. 469. Although Goitein is principally referring to the questionof temporality, the adversative relationship that is established between the twoclauses comprised in this sentence also begins to point to one roadblock that hashistorically slowed serious criticism of poetry written by women, namely the notionthat if a poem demonstrates a high degree of technical, stylistic or thematicproficiency, then the possibility that a woman could have written it ought to berevisited.

8. Specifically with reference to the Maghreb, the early seventeenth-century chroniclerA.hmad al-Maqqar s comprehensive literary and social history, Naf .h al-.tb minghusn al-Andalus al-ra.tb (The scent of perfume from the green flower-branch ofal-Andalus ), records the names and compositional exploits of many women poets.These references are compiled in Teresa Garulo, Sobre las poetisas de al-Andalus ,in Mara Jesus Viguera (ed.), La Mujer en al-Andalus (Seville: Ediciones dela Universidad Autonoma de Madrid y Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, 1989),pp. 1919. As a comparison for the poet identified as Dunashs wife, the mostsignificant and oft-cited of these women poets is Qasmuna bint Isma il, oftenidentified as the daughter of the poet Samuel the Nagid and read almost exclusivelybiographically as a consequence of that identification. For studies on Qasmuna, seeJ. M. Nichols, The Arabic Verses of Qasmuna bint Isma il , International Journal ofMiddle Eastern Studies, 13 (1981), pp. 1558; James Bellamy, The Poetess Qasmuna:Who was She? , Journal of the American Oriental Society, 103 (1983), pp. 4234; DavidWasserstein, Samuel ibn Naghrla ha-Nagid and Islamic Historiography inal-Andalus , Al-Qantara, 14 (1993), pp. 10925. In her article, Approaches to theStudy of Muslim and Jewish Women in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: The PoetessQasmuna bat Isma il , which appeared in Miscelaneo de estudios arabes y hebreos,48 (1999), pp. 6375, Mara Angeles Gallego offers a particularly trenchant critiqueof this approach, writing:

We can observe then two different perspectives in the analysis of Qasmuna bint Ismail:she has been seen either as an Arabic poetess or as a possible daughter of Samuel ibnNaghrla. Within the former perspective it is only her Arabic verses which have aroused

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attention, whereas within the latter the actual focus of research has been Samuel and notQasmuna herself. It is hence understandable that the image we get of this poetess isfairly incomplete and even distorted because only partial aspects have been examinedbut not her figure in the context of the situation of Andalusian women and, morespecifically, Jewish women. This sample of Jewish female writing reminds us again of thekind of work which still remains to be done, to get a more comprehensive idea ofmedieval Andalusian society. (72)

While conceding that the occasional exception might have existed Goitein hasexplained the lack of women writing poetry in Hebrew in the Middle Ages as aconsequence of the genres demand for familiarity and facility with the biblical textand of educational practices that would have largely left this skill out of the reach ofwomen; see in particular A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5, pp. 46870. This is a causalrelationship that may be worth reconsidering in the future.

9. Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 2. The poeticrelationship between the figures of Dunash and his wife is further enhanced bythe poems extensive quotation from the biblical Song of Songs. While this briefestof poems also alludes to the biblical books of Proverbs and Esther, it is packed tightwith phrases and images drawn from the Song of Songs: the second line alludes tothe descriptions of the jewellery in Song of Songs 8:6 by quoting from the text; thepoems juxtaposition of the words .hotam (signet ring) and zero ah (her arm) drawson an identical contraposition in the biblical text. The word for mantle thatappears in both hemistichs of the third line, radid, is drawn from and alludes toSong of Songs 5:7. And, finally, that same line bookends the biblical quotations witha return to Song of Songs 8:6 and 8:7, with a more oblique construction of thememory of a departed beloved. Not all biblical quotations or allusions in medievalpoetry devices referred to collectively by the technical term shibbu.zim can orshould be understood as imparting the significance of their biblical sources to thelater texts where they appear. For more on this phenomenon, see Ross Brann, TheCompunctious Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 245. Inthis case, however, the poem is not just replete with cherry-picked biblical citationsbut suffused so consistently with citations from a single biblical book and in thevoice of a single persona that can be identified with the poetic persona that themedieval poet created, so that this is one case in which the shibbu.zim in the textought to be understood as more than purely ornamental. And so we may go evenfurther than simply disputing the notion that Dunashs wife speaks as Deborah andgo as far as to say that if she speaks in the voice of any biblical figure, then it is thatof Shulamit.

10. As intimated in notes 79 above, I think it is important, when we speak about thispoem, to moderate more carefully the gendered language with which we describeDunashs wife. For example, even though this poem is rarely given scholarlyattention, when it is, some mention is always and invariably made of the gap inwomens Hebrew poetry between the biblical figure of Deborah, whose exploits arerecounted in the so-called song of Deborah expressed in her literary voice in Judges5, and the wife of Dunash; the latter is described as the literary heir to the former,the heritor or lamplight or bastion of Hebrew verse ostensibly written by women.Although it has recently been suggested to me that this is never intended asa serious comparison between the two, it seems that the persistence of thejuxtaposition in scholarship of Deborah and Dunashs wife ensures a certain,

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likewise persistent flattening out of the distinctions between the very limitednumber of women authors and womens voices in literature. Especially if thecomparison is superfluous or unserious and serves no real purpose but could,rather than illuminate our understanding of the text, have a deleterious effect onreading and interpreting it, I should think that it is an analogy best consigned, quitedeliberately, to the literary-critical scrapheap; when the identification of the poet asa woman remains in doubt, this is particularly important.

11. Rosen, Unveiling Eve, p. 193.12. Fleischer, On Dunash, p. 199.13. The implications of extracting history from such a stylized kind of literary writing

are discussed in greater detail in the methodological notes towards the end of thepresent article.

14. It is worth noting that the documents from the Genizah account for families of allsocial standings and classes. An investigation of personal ornamentation practicesand the uses of ornaments as monetary instruments with respect to socio-economicclass is beyond the scope of the present study, which is limiting itself to oneparticular case study and one specific methodological question that is moreconcerned with literary reading than with documentary unravelling. For adiscussion of the situations in which extremely poor women and those withoutfamilies to support them found themselves after the departures of their husbands whether they had fled, travelled away in search of work or died see the chapterWomen and Poverty , in Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Communityof Medieval Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), particularly thesections A Widow during his Lifetime: Wives of Absent Husbands and NeedyWomen on the Move (pp. 1437).

15. Arjun Appadurai, Commodities and the Politics of Value , in The Social Life ofThings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 362 (4).

16. Ibid. pp. 13, 5. For further information on the social context of objects andcommodities, see pp. 1516 of the same essay.

17. Goitein,Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, p. 201. See also S. D. Goitein, Three Trousseauxof Jewish Brides from the Fatimid Period, AJS Review, 2 (1977), pp. 77110.

18. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, p. 201.19. T-S 13 J 28.19, published in Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 3, pp. 1678, 779.

This text is also cited in Joel Kraemer, The Women Speak for Themselves , inStefan Reif (ed.), The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 178215 (1978).

20. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 5, p. 469.21. For more on the phenomenon of the absent husband and marriages sustained

across a distance, see ibid. vol. 3, pp. 189205.22. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, pp. 2067. The paucity of evidence did not stop

Goitein from speculating (see p. 221), additionally, on the basis of prices that theitem known as the h

atam (or, beginning in the eleventh century, the h

atim) the

item described in Genizah documents with the Arabic cognate for the word .hotamused by our Hebrew poet to describe Dunashs ring, a word that in Arabic, as inHebrew, typically does refer to a signet ring may not have referred consistently toa signet ring but may have sometimes been used to designate a plain filigree ring.

23. Yedida Stillman, Female Attire of Medieval Egypt: According to the Trousseau Lists andCognate Material from the Cairo Geniza (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania,1972). See, in particular, glossary entries for the following types of cloaks which

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were worn by both men and women: kisa (p. 51), mil .hafa (pp. 523), mula a (p. 55)and, crucially for our purposes, rida (pp. 5961), cognate with the radidmentionedby the poet.

24. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, p. 186.25. Ibid. p. 154.26. Ibid. p. 1534. Goitein is drawing on BT Nedarim 49b50a for this version of the

anecdote: It is reported of Rabbi Yehuda b. Ilay, the great teacher of Mishna(second century), that his wife wove for herself a woolen cloak which she worewhen going out and which he covered himself with when attending public prayer .He characterizes this account as hagiographic and antiestablishment .

27. T-S 8 J 20.5, translated by Goitein in ibid. p. 154.28. T-S 13 J 18.8, translated by Goitein in ibid. p. 157.29. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, p. 170.30. Cohen, Poverty and Charity, p. 157.31. Ibid. pp. 4151, 1545; Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 2, p. 142; vol. 5, p. 76.32. The word here is thawb, as in T-S 13 J 18.8, cited above. Goitein identifies the term

as referring to a single piece of cloth large enough that an entire cloak could be cutfrom it. Stillman identifies additional instances in which the term refers to a cloakor chemise (Female Attire).

33. T-S 10 J 24.4, recto, marginal note, continues onto verso. This English translationis my own. The letter and this addendum are transcribed by Goitein in The LastChapter of Judah ha-Levis Life , Tarbi.z, 24 (1955), pp. 3548 (445). Thetranslation into English is my own; the line breaks correspond to those in Goiteinstranscription. The letter also appears in facsimile in Moshe Gil and Ezra Fleischer,Judah ha-Levi and his Circle (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 2001), p. 594,and is transcribed and translated into Hebrew on pp. 4914 of that volume. Theletter of introduction to which this note is added is referred to briefly in OliviaRemie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 88, 93; and, for its documentary value with respect tosome of the maladies faced by sea travellers and traders, in Goitein, MediterraneanSociety, vol. 1, p. 113. It is also discussed in Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Song ofthe Distant Dove: Judah Halevis Pilgrimage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),p. 151.

34. Goitein, Last Chapter , p. 45. Scheindlin calls it historys first word to us thatHalevi is already dead (p. 151).

35. For background, see, inter alia, Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: TheDevelopment of its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998), p. 172 and following; Stefan Sperl, The Islamic Panegyric , in Mannerism inArabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 927; JaroslavStetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),especially pp. 527.

36. Moses Ibn Ezra, K. al-Mu.ha .dara wa-l-Mudakara, Abraham S. Halkin (ed.) (Jerusalem:

Mekizei Nirdamim, 1960), p. 225, quoted in Rosen, Unveiling Eve, p. 66.37. For a full accounting of Ibn Ezras self-citation, see Joseph Dana, Who is Moses Ibn

Ezras Jewish Poet? , Jewish Quarterly Review, 73:3 (1983), pp. 2813.38. Ibn Ezra, K. al-Mu.ha .dara, p. 102. For more on Ibn Ezras poetics and questions of

literary stylization, see Dan Pagis, The Secular Poetry and Poetics of Moses Ibn Ezra andhis Generation (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1970); Ross Brann, The RegeneratePoet , in The Compunctious Poet, pp. 5983. Pagis backtracks somewhat from the

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notion of stylization and attempts to identify individual experiences of love inpoetry in his brief Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1991).

39. Rosen, Unveiling Eve, p. 66.40. Ibid. p. 188.41. Karla Mallette, Beyond Mimesis: Aristotles Poetics in the Medieval

Mediterranean, PMLA 124:2 (2009), pp. 58391 (585).42. This is a paraphrase by Peter Heath that appears in the volume Poetry and History:

The Value of Poetry in Reconstructing Arab History, edited by Ramzi Baalbaki et al.(Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 2011). The full text to which Heathalludes, as translated by Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 5960, readsas follows:

It is also evident from what has been said that it is not the poets function to relate actualevents, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probabilityor necessity. The difference between the historian and the poet is not that betweenusing verse or prose; Herodotus work could be versified and would be just as much akind of history in verse as in prose. No, the difference is this: that the one relates actualevents, the other the kinds of things that might occur. Consequently, poetry is morephilosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal,while history relates particulars.

43. The methodologies for and problems associated with attempting to pull historicalor historicizing detail from such a highly stylized frame is one of the major concernsof the essays in the volume edited by Baalbaki et al., Poetry and History.

44. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, p. 175.45. Stillman, Female Attire, pp. 2930.46. Gallego, Study of Muslim and Jewish Women.47. Teresa Garulo, Women in Medieval Classical Arabic Poetry , in Manuela Marn

and Randi Deguilhem (eds), Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources (London:I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 2540 (278).

48. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, Peggy Kamuf (transl.) (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994).

49. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, Ian Cunnison (transl.) (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), p. 3.50. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, p. 190.51. Olga Bush, A Poem is a Robe and a Castle: Inscribing Verses on Textiles

and Architecture in the Alhambra , Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings,84 (2008), pp. 110, available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/84, withspecial attention to Bushs use of Jerome Clintons study on metaphors of craft ,Esthetics by Implication: What Metaphors of Craft Tell Us about the Unity of thePersian Qasida , Edebiyat 4:1 (1979), pp. 7396.

52. Tova Rosen, Sexual Politics in a Medieval Hebrew Marriage Debate , Exemplaria,12:1 (2000), pp. 15784 (158).

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