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

This is the author’s preprint manuscript version of an article that appears in the Edinburgh University Press’ journal Cultural History, vol. 3:2 (2014): 148-69 (http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/cult.2014.0068). Citations must refer to the version of record.

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

S.J. Pearce1

New York University

Abstract: Of thousands of poems written in Hebrew between the closure of the canon of the Hebrew Bible and the dawn of modernity, a single exemplar is identified as having been written by a woman. Modern scholarship concerning this poem has primarily been interested in it as a unique and curious artifact of a woman writer working in Hebrew. The present article will reconsider that poem in light of documents in the Cairo Genizah that deal, from a documentary perspective, with the same concerns and activities that the poet treats in verse, specifically the ways in which women supported themselves financially in the absence of their husbands. This study will argue that the work of the supposed Andalusi Hebrew poetess reflects economic and social realities faced by women in Muslim Spain and more broadly in the Mediterranean society documented in the Genizah. The exchange of personal effects between the woman depicted in the poem and her husband stands as a literary comparison for records of similar exchanges and calls for both a more historicized reading of Genizah poetry and for studies of this poem that move beyond the question of the poet’s gender.

Keywords: Cairo Genizah, Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, women, poetry, jewelry, gift exchange

“…fabric flowed like poems.” — Peter Cole, “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled”

In memory of Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson,

who were far more than the wives of their husbands

A Yemeni proverb advises that “bracelets are for hard times (al-ḥadā’id li-l-awqāt al-

shadīda)” that is, that jewelry fashioned from precious metals will retain value and purchasing

power even during times of economic distress when currency might be scarce or devalued. A

variety of documents found in the Cairo Genizah, including dowry arrangements, property lists,

1 I am indebted and grateful to Esperanza Alfonso, Ross Brann, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman for their thoughtful readings of drafts of this study at various stages of its development; to the anonymous reviewers for their engaged and detailed comments on the piece; and to Damien Kempf for his encouragement in my submitting this work to Cultural History.

Bracelets are for Hard Times (Accepted Manuscript Version) 2

and letters written on behalf of, about, and addressed to abandoned and impoverished wives

confirm that the principle of this proverb held true in day-to-day life in medieval Cairo and its

wider Mediterranean environs, with many women converting depreciable assets into jewelry in

order to ensure their own continued solvency through their economic hardship and, in some

cases, in the absence of their husbands. This fact of life makes its way into poetry; in one case of

particular interest it appears as a motif in the single poem attributed to the only female poet

thought to have composed verse in Hebrew during the Middle Ages prior to the fifteenth century,

a woman known to history only as the wife of her husband, Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, himself the

tenth-century father of Arabizing Hebrew metrical poetry. Reading the poem as a literary

representation of details of the socio-economic reality faced by the poet as her husband prepared

to depart Cordoba alters and expands the value of her work which is necessarily limited by virtue

of its singularity but which nonetheless contains more of historically-grounded literary interest

than has previously been recognized. Such a reading allows the poem to be more than the curious

and unique textual artifact of a daring and unusually well-educated woman and transforms it into

literary evidence of historical realities recounted over and over in the more typically

documentary texts, reminding the reader that neither are sentimentality and economics as

diametrically opposed as aesthetic considerations as they might first appear to be; nor is the gulf

between literary and historical texts as wide as it can often seem. That is to say: through its use

of imagery that would have been familiar, recognizable and meaningful to its readers, the poem

communicates the ability of a woman in classical-period Genizah society2 to provide for herself

2 The term “Genizah society” originated with Goitein and is typically used to refer to Cairo and other urban areas that were home to Jewish communities in a reasonable amount of contact with Cairo during the “classical Genizah period,” that is, the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. While one must always be careful not to construe a single, pan-Mediterranean culture, evidence in the Cairo Genizah is useful for talking about other Mediterranean sites such as Cordoba on two notable counts: First, the cache contains many documents that originated in or deal materially with life in Cordoba; these include the poem attributed to Dūnash’s wife, a great many other examples of Spanish


and her family through shrewd economic moves cloaked as sentimental or generous exchanges

of gifts.

The poem is, at four lines in length, short enough to be reproduced here in full in order to

facilitate commentary upon it:

Ha-yizkor ya‘alat ha-ḥen yedidah be-yom perud u-vi-zero‘ah yeḥidah Ve-sam ḥotam yemino ‘al-semolah u-vi-zero‘o ha-lo’ samah ẓemidah Be-yom laqḥah le-zikaron redido ve-hu’ laqaḥ le-zikaron redidah Ha-yishsha’er beḫol ereẓ sefarad ve-lu laqaḥ ḥaẓi malḫut negidah?3

Will her beloved remember the elegant doe, her only son in her arms at the moment of his departure? On the day he placed the signet ring from his right hand on her left and she placed her bracelet on his arm, she took his cloak as a memento and he took her cloak as a memento. If he could hold half the prince’s kingdom, is there anywhere in Sefarad he would remain?4

The text of the poem, preserved in two witnesses (in T-S NS 143.46 and across the joined

fragments Mosseri VIII.202 and VIII.387), recounts the tender goodbye between Dūnash and his

wife and their son sealed with an apparently sentimental exchange of gifts: her bracelet for his

signet ring and the cloak of each to the other. Ezra Fleischer speculated that this was a poetic

account of the fallout from some sort of intrigue in the circle of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut (d.c. 970) in

Hebrew poetry, and records of business and personal transactions between individuals in al-Andalus and individuals in Cairo. And second, to a certain extent we may observe cultural similarities between the Jewish communities in Cairo and in Cordoba, thereby making the Egyptian evidence, in the absence of good and specifically-Spanish evidence valuable as a substitute (to be used with some caution). Goitein himself delinates the points of contact and lines of similarity between al-Andalus and Egypt in the first chapter of the first volume of A Mediterranean Society, and then goes on to describe, in a section tellingly entitled “The Geniza People as Representative of Mediterranean Society” (70-74), Jews in Cairo fully integrated into the wider Islamicate society and a high degree of pan-Mediterranean congruity.

3 Attributed to the wife of Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, published in Ezra Fleischer, “On Dūnash ben Labrāṭ and His Wife and Son,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 5 (1984): 196. 4 I have translated the poem here into prose; for a good verse translation, see: “Will His Love Remember?” trans. Peter Cole. The Dream of the Poem (Princeton, 2007): 27.


the wider cadre of courtiers to the Umayyad neo-caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (r. 912-961), a spat

that led to the exile of Dūnash ben Labrāṭ (d.c. 990), known as a courtier of Ḥasdai; a vocal

opponent of his contemporary, Menaḥem ibn Sarūq; a poet; a grammarian; and a polemicist.

Regardless of the background or the reason, though, the text, at a minimum, depicts the departure

of Dūnash from the Iberian Peninsula. The sense of the poem has long remained obscure;

however, by reading this particular text in light of documentary sources that likewise come from

the Genizah cache and represent the lives of Andalusi Jews as well as the Cairene Jews with

whom they were in contact and whose community was, in many important respects, largely

analogous to theirs, this literary gift exchange begins to take on the appearance of a very

practical arrangement in addition to manifesting the more sentimental one that is more self-

evident on the surface of the text. The poem does not just depict an exchange of memory tokens

but rather represents a husband and wife ensuring each other’s financial solvency as they prepare

for an extended period of time apart.

Delivered Into the Hands of a Woman?

The poem is puzzling as it is brief, and as a consequence, previous scholarship has been

somewhat limited and has largely been concerned with the personal and gender identities of the

poet. Nehemia Allony originally identified the poem as having been written by Dūnash ben

Labrāṭ himself.5 Nearly half a century later, Ezra Fleischer discovered the second copy of the

poem and, on the basis of the heading — complete for the first time and reading “By the wife of

5 Nehemiah Allony, “Four Poems.” Jewish Quarterly Review 35:1 (1944): 80. With respect to the historiography of this poem, it is interesting to note that in 1957, Goitein authored an article in which he claimed that regardless of who might have recited a poem, it was always possible to identify the gender of the author from the text. The article originally appeared in Studies in Scripture; an English translation was published posthumously as “Women as Creators of Biblical Genres” Prooftexts 8:1 (1988), 1-33.


Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, to him”6 — identified the poet as Dūnash’s wife. S.D. Goitein signed on to

this identification, cautioning that that “it is not even sure that the wife wrote it” but ultimately

concluding that “I personally believe that she was the author, although the poem gives the

impression of a perfection in composition and style not expected at that early period (especially

as compared with the stiff and unimaginative creations of her husband).”7 Female authorship of

poetry in the medieval Islamicate world is not an unknown phenomenon,8 with identified

women poets, both Jewish and Muslim, writing exclusively in Arabic; thus, the attribution of the

above-cited Hebrew-language poem to a female poet makes it completely unique in the corpus. 6 Ezra Fleischer, “On Dūnash …,” 199; see also fig. 1, between pages 192 and 193. Allony had originally speculated that the poem was written to a friend of Dūnash’s on the occasion of the friend’s wedding and reconstructed what we now know to be Arabic-language heading as though it were Hebrew with characteristically Arabizing features to read: “ve-katav dunash ben labrat eleihi. (Dūnash ben Labrāṭ wrote to him).” Fleischer’s discovery of the second half of the Mosseri manuscript led to the reading: “li-zawjat dūnash ben labraṭ ileihi. (By the wife of Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, to him).” 7 S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol V. (Berkeley: 1967-1985, 2000 reprint): 469. Although Goitein is principally referring to the question of temporality, the adversative relationship that is established between the two clauses comprised in this sentence also begins to point to one road block that has historically slowed serious criticism of poetry written by women, namely the notion that if a poem demonstrates a high degree of technical, stylistic or thematic proficiency, then the possibility that a woman could have written it ought to be revisited. 8 Specifically with reference to the Maghreb, the early seventeenth-century chronicler Aḥmad al-Maqqarī’s comprehensive literary and social history, Nafḥ al-ṭīb min ghusn al-Andalus al-raṭīb (The Scent of Perfume from the Green Flower-Branch of al-Andalus), records the names and compositional exploits of many women poets. These references are compiled in Teresa Garulo, “Sobre las poetisas de al-Andalus,” La Mujer en al-Andalus, ed. María Jesus Viguera. (Seville, 1989): 191-9. As a comparison for the poet identified as Dūnash’s wife, the most significant and oft-cited of these women poets is Qasmuna bint Ismā‘il, often identified as the daughter of the poet Samuel the Nagid and read almost exclusively biographically as a consequence of that identification. For studies on Qasmuna, see: J.M. Nichols, “The Arabic Verses of Qasmūna bint Ismā‘il.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 13 (1981): 155-8; James Bellamy, “The Poetess Qasmūna: Who Was She?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103 (1983): 423-4; and David Wasserstein, “Samuel ibn Naghrila ha-Nagid and Islamic Historiography in al-Andalus.” Al-Qantara 14 (1993): 109-25. In her article, “Approaches to the Study of Muslim and Jewish Women in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: The Poetess Qasmūna bat Ismā‘il,” which appeared in Misceláneo de estudios árabes y hebreos 48 (1999), María Angeles Gallego offers a particularly trenchant critique of this approach, writing: “We can observe then two different perspectives in the analysis of Qasmūna bint Isma’il: she has been seen either as an Arabic poetess or as a possible daughter of Samuel ibn Naghrilah. Within the former perspective it is only her Arabic verses which have aroused attention, whereas within the latter the actual focus of research has been Samuel and not Qasmūna herself. It is hence understandable that the image we get of this poetess is fairly incomplete and even distorted because only partial aspects have been examined but not her figure in the context of the situation of Andalusian women and, more specifically, Jewish women. This sample of Jewish female writing reminds us again of the kind of work which still remains to be done, to get a more comprehensive idea of medieval Andalusian society” (72). While conceding that the occasional exception might have existed (Med. Soc. V: 470) Goitein has explained the lack of women writing poetry in Hebrew in the Middle Ages as a consequence of the genre’s demand for familiarity and facility with the biblical text and education practices that would have largely left this skill out of the reach of women (Med. Soc. V:468). This is a causal relationship that may be worth reconsidering in the future.


In her study of the representations of women in medieval Hebrew literature, Tova Rosen focuses

on “the singleness of Dūnash’s wife as a medieval Jewish writer,” characterizing her as being

“not only…the first identifiable woman poet in the Hebrew language since the biblical poetesses

Miriam and Deborah;9 she is also the only one for centuries to come.”10 The enthusiasm over the

ostensible discovery of the only medieval poem written by a woman quickly overtook and came

to dominate the scholarly discourse on the text.11

Furthermore, the notion of a female author necessarily corresponding to a female poetic

voice borders on the absurd, even in light of the scribal identification of the poem as the words of

Dūnash ben Labrāṭ’s wife. In the notes to the first chapter of that study, Unveiling Eve, Rosen

herself cites Jane Burns and Roberta Krueger in cautioning that “it must be kept in mind that

9 This poetic relationship between the figures of Dūnash and his wife is further enhanced by the poem’s extensive quotation from the biblical Song of Songs. While this briefest of poems also alludes to the biblical books of Proverbs and Esther, it is packed tight with phrases and images drawn from the Song of Songs: The second line alludes to the descriptions of the jewelry in Song of Songs 8:6 by quoting from the text; the poem’s juxtaposition of the words ḥotam (signet ring) and zero‘ah (her arm) draws upon an identical contraposition in the biblical text. The word for mantle that appears in both hemistichs of the third line, radid, is drawn from and alludes to Song of Songs 5:7. And finally, that same line bookends the biblical quotations with a return to Song of Songs 8:6 and 8:7, with a more oblique construction of the memory of a departed beloved. Not all biblical quotations or allusions in medieval poetry — devices referred to collectively by the technical term shibbuẓim — can or should be understood as imparting the significance of their biblical sources to the later texts where they appear. (For more on this phenomenon, see Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet. (Baltimore, 1992): 24-5.) In this case, however, that the poem is not just replete with cherry-picked biblical citations but suffused so consistently with citations from a single biblical book and in the voice of a single persona that can be identified with the poetic persona that the medieval poet created, that this is one case in which the shibbuẓim in the text ought to be understood as more than purely ornamental. And so we may go even farther than simply disputing the notion that Dūnash’s wife speaks as Deborah and go as far as to say that if she speaks in the voice of any biblical figure, then it is that of Shulamit. 10 Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve. (Philadelphia, 2007): 2. 11 As intimated in footnotes seven, eight, and nine, I think it is important that when we speak about this poem we moderate more carefully the gendered language with which we describe Dūnash’s wife. For example, even though this poem is rarely given scholarly attention, when it is, some mention is always and invariably made to the gap in women’s Hebrew poetry between the biblical figure of Deborah, whose exploits are recounted in the so-called “song of Deborah” expressed in her literary voice in Judges 5 and the wife of Dūnash; 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 as a serious comparison between the two, it seems that the persistence of the juxtaposition in scholarship of Deborah and Dūnash’s wife ensures a certain, likewise persistent, flattening out of the distictions between the very limited number of women authors and women’s voices in literature. Especially if the comparison is superfluous or unserious and serves no real purpose but could, rather than illuminate our understanding of the text have a deleterious effect on reading and interpreting it, I should think that it is an analogy best consigned, quite deliberately, to the the literary-critical scrapheap; when the identificaiton of the poet as a woman remains in doubt, this is particularly important.


‘given the uncertainties of medieval manuscript transmission, the female signature of a text does

not guarantee identity with a historical woman author. It may invite us to read a female voice.’” 12

Despite the uncertainty that still surrounds this identification of Dūnash’s wife as the poet — that

is to say, despite the inability to argue compellingly that the poet is a woman, let alone a specific

woman, as much as that the poetic voice is a woman’s — scholarship and academic discourse

since Fleischer’s article has, for the most part and despite whatever reservations may be held by

students of the poem, accepted that identification as a point of departure for scholarly discourse.

That the poem found in T-S NS 143.46 appears alongside another one dealing with themes of

loss, estrangement, departure and longing that seems more securely to have been written by

Dūnash lends some credence to Fleischer’s acceptance of the medieval scribe’s description of the

poem as a response by Dūnash’s wife. Additionally, in the first hemistich of the second line of

that poem, the poetic voice asks: “Ve-eiḫ evgod bemaskelet kemotaḫ? (How could I betray a

cultured woman like you?)”13; it is tempting to read this rhetorical question as a suggestion that

Dūnash himself was married to a woman well-educated enough to write Hebrew poetry in her

own right, though it is imperative to avoid conflating the poetic voice with that of the author,

female or male. In other words, that the voice in a poem written by Dūnash would call his wife

cultured or clever does not mean that Dūnash himself was necessarily married to an especially

clever or educated woman.

Ultimately, though, the question remains a long way from settled. As such, for the

purposes of the present discussion the question of whether the poet we identify as Dūnash’s wife

was not only Dūnash’s wife but a woman at all should be considered to be completely tabled.

That is not to say, however, that in another context the identity of the poet and the identification 12 Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve: 193. 13 Ezra Fleischer, “On Dūnash …,” 199.


of the poet as a woman ought never be revisited. I will continue to refer to the poet as a woman

here with the caveat that, even if it were to be proven with certainty in the future that the poem

had been authored by a man the fundamental conceit of this study would not change since

ultimately it is the understanding of the text and the poetic voice that is at stake. The concern of

the present study is the poem as a detailed textual artifact that reflects the lived material culture.

Arabizing Hebrew poetry is a highly stylized form,14 making reading it for its historical value a

special challenge; nevertheless, a thick description of this poem in its context, made possible by

reading poetry in concert with documentary evidence found in the Cairo Genizah, allows for a

consideration of the poem as a literary record of a historical reality.

The Poem in Light of the Documents

The poem describes, as noted briefly above, the activities of Dūnash ben Labrāṭ and his

wife at the very moment of his departure from Cordoba. The poet describes herself holding the

couple’s only son while exchanging her bracelet for her husband’s signet ring and her cloak for

his. The beginning and the end of the poem offer the reader glimpses of the questions that come

to her mind as this takes place, namely whether Dūnash would leave all memory of his wife

behind as he leaves her, and whether anything could be done, even at the highest levels, to keep

him from leaving. The foregrounding of the poem’s gift exchange against these evocations of

loss and longing makes the interpretation that most readily presents itself one of an exchange of

gifts or memory tokens between a husband and wife. It would be sufficient to interpret the text of

the poem as a tender and sentimental gift exchange that stands as a farewell between lovers.

However, the specifics of the objects exchanged raise the possibility that there is more to this

14 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 the present paper.


scene than a close reading of the text would suggest. Documents from the Cairo Genizah show

that clothing and other items of personal adornment, especially outerwear and jewelry,

represented an important way in which people, particularly women separated from their families,

could maintain financial solvency, support themselves, and easily transport and preserve the

funds that were available to them.15

The literary representation of the exchanges between the figures of Dūnash and his wife

militates against “the powerful contemporary tendency… to regard the world of things as inert

and mute, set in motion and animated, indeed, knowable, only by persons and their words” and

instead conforms to the model that better serves “many historical societies [wherein] things have

not been so divorced from the capacity of persons to act and the power of words to

communicate.”16 The exchange itself is neither singularly economic nor sentimental but is,

rather, able to communicate the latter because of the former. The items, recognizable to the

reader, are particularly relevant because of the realization of their “exhangeability,”17 that is to

say, the “things-in-motion… illuminate their human and social context.”18 And that context and

the exchanges set into it in the poem look remarkably like the one that we also find in the

documentary texts. The movement of the goods in both kinds of texts is reflective of the same

ultimate socio-economic context. By imbuing a textually sentimental act with a far more 15 It is worth noting that the documents from the Genizah account for families of all social standings and classes. An investigation of personal ornamentation practices and the uses of those ornaments as monetary instruments with respect to socio-economic class is beyond the scope of the present study, which is limiting itself to one particular case study and one specific methodological question that is more concerned with literary reading than with documentary unraveling. For a discussion of the situations in which extremely poor women and those without families to support them found themselves after the departures of their husbands — whether they had fled, traveled away in search of work or died — see Mark Cohen, “Women and Poverty,” in Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt. (Princeton, 2005); and particularly the sections “‘A Widow During his Lifetime’: Wives of Absent Husbands,” and “Needy Women on the Move” (pp. 143-7). 16 Arjun Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things, (Cambridge, 1986): 4. 17 Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value”: 13. 18 Appadurai, “Commodities and the Politics of Value”: 5. For further on the social context of objects and commodities, see pp. 15-16 of the same essay.


grounded historical setting, the poem attributed to Dūnash’s wife represents a single exchange as

complex negotiation between sentimental and practical interests.

The figure of Dūnash’s wife hands her bracelet to her husband in the second line of the

poem. But more than just serving as a reminder of his wife, carrying the bracelet would have

allowed Dūnash to take a sizable portion of the family’s wealth with him in a form that was

relatively convenient to transport. Bracelets made up important parts of dowries and trousseaus

and represented a way in which a newly married woman could support herself and her role in her

new household. Goitein establishes a specific cost correspondence that explains the important

place of bracelets in a dowry: “A weight of 20 mithqāls and a corresponding price of 20 dinars

represent a fair average for a valuable pair of bracelets, which often headed a trousseau list. For

this sum one could acquire indispensable household help.”19 While he ultimately concludes that

his investigation into the monetary value of the jewelry mentioned in the Genizah documents

was “necessary… so as to assign each piece its proper place in the hierarchy of the artistic means

of attraction,”20 the body of his work in its entirety speaks to broader concerns, including the

monetary value of the pieces for its own 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 (TS 12 J 28.19)

from a man to his niece, whose marriage he arranged and who was, at the time of the writing,

resisting pressure from her husband to leave Fustat and join him in the small provincial town

where here had taken up residence. In the letter, the writer advises the addressee that she would

19 Goitein, Med. Soc. IV, 201. See also: S.D. Goitein, “Three Trousseaux of Jewish Brides from the Fatimid Period,” AJS Review 2 (1977): 77-110. 20 Goitein, Med. Soc. IV, 201.


do well to sell or store her belongings and relocate to her husband’s town, lest he abandon her or

take a second wife; and one piece of this advice in particular helps to make the argument that the

silver bracelet was more than simple adornment in this time and place but rather served as an

economic 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 in custody with the judge and get a receipt for them. The wine should be sold and a silver bracelet purchased for your wrist. Get in touch with Abū al-Ḥajjāj b. al-Ṭabīb, may God the exalted have mercy upon him. He will undertake its sale and will purchase the bracelet for you.21

Although the text says nothing about the wife handing over the bracelet to her husband, it does

illustrate a woman, separated from her husband, converting the value of her property into a silver

bracelet, thus making that fortune easier for her to carry as she travels to join her husband. The

bracelet is, in effect, a portable medieval savings account, offering the woman a way to transport

the value of her estate. In light of that text, and especially in light of the idea that bracelets were

a way of keeping and moving funds particular, if not unique, to women, then the directionality of

the gift to Dūnash from his wife is particularly significant. As in the correspondence between the

uncle and niece quoted above as well as in Goitein’s observations about the importance of the

bracelets in running an efficient household, we may see that bracelets fashioned from precious

metals were often a way for women to retain some measure of financial purchase even in their

married lives. In the poem, the figure Dūnash’s wife gives him the very economic instrument

that was uniquely hers and would have been readily identifiable as the most significant means by

which she could support herself; and in doing so, she literarily, rhetorically, and literally binds

21 TS 13 J 28.19, published in Goitein, Med. Soc. III , pp. 167-8, 77-9. This text is also cited in Joel Kraemer, “The Women Speak for Themselves,” in The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance, ed. Stefan Reif. (Cambridge, 2002): 197-8.


their fortunes together even as they separate.

Even a seeming difference in the number of bracelets, one, in the poem, and the number

typically worn together by historical women, two, is explicable through the Genizah documents

and further contributes to the interpretation of the poem in light of lived details. Bracelets were

typically worn in pairs rather than singly; and while Goitein argues that “here [in the poem

attributed to Dūnash’s wife], where a single one is referred to, must be meant the silver bracelet

around the upper arm, worn as a sign of dignity and strength,”22 we may also as fairly speculate

that the female figure in the poem gives her husband one of her two wrist bracelets — half her

fortune — while keeping the other one to sustain herself and their child. Drawing this reading

out even further, it is possible to then read this as a foreshadowing of the final rhetorical question

in the last line of the poem that borrows its gift-giving rhetoric from the biblical book of Esther:

“If he could hold half the prince’s kingdom, is there anywhere in Sefarad he would remain?”

Dūnash could not receive half the kingdom to stay, so he accepts half the family fortune in

leaving. A large official grant of property is not possible nor is remaining in Cordoba; and so

instead, in leaving, he takes something smaller and personal but parallel to the ideal that would

have kept him in place. While the poem should not be understood as the literal record of a

specific economic transaction, it trades in imagery that its readers would have recognized

immediately as both a sentimental and economic backdrop to the text.

The wife figure in the poem gifts a financially-sustaining bracelet to her beloved prior to

travel in an act that is evocative of the acts recorded in the documents. 23 The Dūnash figure, too,

makes a gift of jewelry, offering his wife the signet ring that had been the physical and practical

22 Goitein, Med. Soc. V:469. 23 For more on the phenomenon of the absent husband and marriages sustained across a distance, see Goitein, Med. Soc. III, 189-205.


manifestation of his power and station; he no longer has any use for it. Genizah documents

appear to record much less detailed information about signet rings than about other types of

jewelry; this is because in general, gemstones of the type that were used to fashion the face of the

signet could not be authenticated as easily or as reliably as other valuables and so may have been

excluded by scribal convention from most property lists and other official documents, such as

trousseaus and dowry contracts.24 This paucity of records with respect to this particular item

make it more difficult to assess the representation of this transaction in Dūnash’s wife’s poem;

however, the evidence already presented here with respect to the bracelet and the evidence that

will be offered immediately following for the cloaks carry the argument sufficiently that it is

then possible to suggest that the gift of the signet ring may be a rare literary record of some kind

of other historical practice that was simply not documented sufficiently to have any notice of it

survive in documentary sources into modernity; or, more likely, it is the literary embellishment

of a practice recognizable to medieval readers, namely the gifting and exchange of jewelry

between family members in preparation for a voyage. In any event, at the literary level, the

poetic depiction of the historically-grounded gift of the bracelet and the plain sense of the gift of

the signet ring as a symbol of power both serve to empower the woman possessed of the poetic

voice; she has helped to fund her husband’s travel by her own means and is left with an object

that, as jewelry, retains some economic value that she could use to support herself and that,

symbolically, is an emblem of the power wielded, erstwhile, at the caliphal court.

The practical and economic significance of the second exchange in the poem — the

poet’s mantle for her husband’s — is, like the gift of the bracelet, brought into sharpest relief by 24 Med. Soc. IV, 206-7. The paucity of evidence did not stop Goitein from speculating (see Med. Soc. IV, 221), additionally, on the basis of prices, that the item known as the ḫātam (or, beginning in the eleventh century, the ḫātim) — the item described in Genizah documents with the Arabic cognate for the word ḥotam used by our Hebrew poet to describe Dūnash’s ring, a word that in Arabic, as in Hebrew, typically does refer to a signet ring — may not have referred consistently to a signet ring but may have sometimes been used to designate a plain filigree ring.


the documentary evidence. The cloaks that husband and wife exchange in the poem have many

comparanda in various types of non-literary documents. Epistolary correspondence, purchase

requests, and receipts all depict not only the high monetary value of cloaks but also the common

practice of sharing them back and forth between husbands and wives.25 Especially during the

ninth and tenth centuries, that is, precisely during the lifetime of Dūnash ben Labrāṭ and his wife

and the composition of his poetry as well as the poem attributed to her, outerwear was costly,

prized as a possession and put to a great variety of uses, even more so than jewelry.26

The type of cloaks that a historical Dūnash and his wife would have worn would typically

have been unisex, not only in their construction but in their day-to-day usage. Although “the

Geniza differentiates throughout between clothing suitable for women and… for men”27 it was

common practice in both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Cairo for husbands and wives to share

outer garments, which were generally materially identical whether they were meant for a man’s

or a woman’s use. Goitein traces this practice back to similar occurrences in pre-Islamic Jewish

communities — “It is reported of Rabbi Yehuda b. Il‘ay, the great teacher of Mishna (second

century), that his wife wove for herself a woolen cloak which she wore when going out and

which he covered himself with when attending public prayer.”28 — but he also notes that the

sharing of coats, cloaks and mantles between men and women was common in the Muslim

populations amongst which the Jews whose lives were recorded in the Genizah lived.29 One letter

25 Yedida Stillman. Female Attire of Medieval Egypt: According to the Trousseau Lists and Cognate Material from the Cairo Geniza. PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1972. See, in particular, glossary entries for the following types of cloaks, which were worn by both men and women: kisā’ (51), milḥafa (52-3), mulā’a (55), and crucially for our purposes, ridā’ (59-61) cognate with the radid mentioned by the poet. 26 Goitein, Med. Soc. IV, 186. 27 Goitein, Med. Soc. IV, 154. 28 Goitien, Med. Soc. IV, 153. Goitein is drawing upon BT Nedarim 49b-50a for this version of the anecdote, which he characterizes as “hagiographic and antiestablishment.” 29 Goitein, Med. Soc. IV, 153-4


from a man writing while en route to Alexandria reports the doubled consequences of a robbery

for a husband and wife sharing the same coat: “He stole my new cloak, worth three quarters of a

dinar; by the Torah of the living God, I do not possess another one for traveling or for town, nor

does my wife, for going out on the street.”30 The literary depiction, then, of an exchange of

cloaks between husband and wife is not, therefore, a representation of gift-giving tokenism. That

is to say, these are not simply, as the poet tells the reader, given “le-zikaron” (as a memento);

rather, they are swapping garments that will indeed serve that purpose but will also still continue

to be usable for each. Dūnash is not simply heading off into the great unknown with a woman’s

coat so that he can keep something of his wife with him on his travels but is rather taking with

him a coat that will both remind him of her and that he will be able to 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 negative states or conditions that both men and

women might encounter. The gravity of the situation in which the above-cited traveler found

himself after his cloak had been stolen, for example, is manifest in the urgency of his request.

Additional Genizah documents show that a lack of a cloak was considered to be a serious

problem even in less dire situations. In one instance, a merchant wrote to a confederate asking

for a cloak; in terms that resonate as surprisingly familiar to the modern reader, he substitutes the

exclamation that he had absolutely nothing to wear at all for the real and plain sense of his

predicament, namely that he lacked a good-quality cloak. Another document contains a request

for additional suits so that the writer could change his clothes frequently, both on the Sabbath

and during the week, and describes the situation in strikingly recognizable terms, saying that he

has nothing to wear, rather than of having too few choices:

30 T-S 8 J 20.5, translated by Goitein in Med. Soc. IV, 154.


“When the Sicilian boats arrive, please buy me two narrow farkhas of excellent quality, costing about 2.5 dinars, and two attractive thawbs worth about 1.5 dinars, and bring them with you. And if you, my lord, depart before the arrival of the Sicilian [boats], bring me two attractive robes, which have some elegance, and give 2.5 dinars to Joseph for the purchase and forwarding of two farkhas, for I do not have anything to wear on weekdays.”31

In another instance, in which a man uses it to describe the fact that he owns courser, rather than

finer, garments, Goitein writes: “A man from Alexandria, describing himself as ‘naked’ writes, ‘I

have nothing on my body except an Aleppo robe,’ no doubt meaning one made of cotton.”32 In

these letters, we see the import placed upon owning a good cloak, something that each of the

personae in the poem ensures for the 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 a metaphor for true and dire poverty: Since

classical and canonical texts of both Judaism and Islam praise clothing the naked as an especially

desirable and worthy form of charity, the image of nudity as poverty would have been an

especially compelling one within Islamicate Jewish communities; and as such, where poverty is

concerned “nakedness and hunger form a trope in the Geniza letters.”33 Additionally, the phrase

kashf al-wajh (uncovering one’s face) and other related ones use the image of physically baring

the human body to refer to the last-resort humiliation of making oneself known as indigent and

begging for charity.34 The exchange of cloaks in the poem, viewed in light of the documentary

evidence, again lays bare a mutual attempt by the two figures in the poem to attend to each

other’s needs during their separation and ensure that neither would be literally or metaphorically

naked.

31 TS 13 J 18.8, translated by Goitein in Med. Soc. IV, 157. 32 Goitein, Med. Soc. IV, 170. 33 Mark Cohen, Poverty and Charity: 157. 34 Mark Cohen, Poverty and Charity: 41-51 and 154-5; and S.D. Goitein, Med. Soc. II:142 and Med. Soc. V:76.


The preparations for Dūnash’s departure, as represented in the poem ascribed to his wife,

do not represent the only time that a poet was implicated in the conversion of clothing and

accessories into hard currency in preparation for a voyage. For further evidence of this practice,

we may turn, not coincidentally, to documentary evidence from 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-Levi’s assistance to a cousin who had been preparing for his own

voyage to Alexandria:

With respect to the turban and the cloak-cloth35 that you said belonged to 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 Judah ibn Ezra noting that remaining there did not appeal to him and that he was/ 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 and to join me by means of it[s proceeds].” He wrote to him on a scrap which I have, indicating that he ought not go to Egypt and that he not go against 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 with their proceeds buy some necessities that I require.”36

This note, recorded shortly after ha-Levi’s death,37 shows a poet having offered his cloak and a

personal accessory to a relative as a way of helping him economically on the eve of a voyage,

even from a distance. In light of this corroboration of the practice, the notion that we may read

the poem attributed to Dūnash’s wife as a literary record of very practical preparations for her

35 The word here is thawb, as in TS 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 cut from it. Stillman identifies additional instances in which the term refers to a cloak or chemise. 36 TS 10 J 24.4, recto, marginal note, continues onto verso. This English translation is my own. The letter and this addendum are transcribed in Goitein in “The Last Chapter of Judah ha-Levi’s Life,” Tarbiẓ 24 (1955): 44-5. The translation into English is my own. The line breaks correspond to those in Goitein’s transcription. 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): 594, and transcribed and translated into Hebrew on pp. 491-494 of that volume. The letter of introduction to which this note is added is referred to briefly in Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain (Cambridge, 1996): 88 and 93; and, for its documentary value with respect to some of the maladies faced by sea travelers and traders, in Med. Soc. I: 113. It is also discussed in Raymond P. Scheindlin. The Song of the Distant Dove. (Oxford, 2007): 151. 37 Goitein, “The Last Chapter…” ##. Scheindlin calls it “history’s first word to us that Halevi is already dead” (151).


husband’s journey rather than just sentimental girding against the pain of his departure becomes

that much more plausible. Members of the Genizah society took and used the accessories and

adornments of their relatives before they left; and those who were able wrote poems about their

travel saturated with details about the material lives they lived.

A Methodological Postscript

In this final section of the paper I would like to address the theoretical, methodological

and programmatic background to such a reading of poetry alongside documentary sources and

seeing historical realia in what we know to be a literary form governed by a highly detailed and

delineated program of poetics. This methodological discussion will take place along two

principal axes: First, the relationship for Arabized Hebrew poets during the classical Genizah

period between perfect textual reproductions of reality and literarily-grounded mimetic

representation allows for a relationship between documented realities and their literary

simulacra. The one is among the sources for the other; and this is especially observable through a

broader look at the very specific kind of images that occur in the poem attributed to Dūnash’s

wife — jewelry and clothing — as they stand both for themselves and for love and literature in

Arabizing Hebrew poetry and poetics.38 And second, the very foundations of Genizah

scholarship itself made room for correlated reading of the documents and poetry found within.

As noted above, Arabic and Arabizing Hebrew poetry are highly stylized in the medieval

period and conform to an almost-rigid set of strictures that govern every element of the

composition, from diction to imagery to theme. Two of the functions that images of jewelry

38 For background, see, inter alia, Roger Allen. The Arabic Literary Heritage. (Cambridge, 1998): 172 and following; Stefan Sperl. “The Islamic Panegyric,” in Mannerism in Arabic Poetry. (Cambridge, 1986): 9-27; and Jaroslav Stetkevych. The Zephyrs of Najd. (Chicago, 1998): especially 52-7.


serve in Arabic poetics are particularly salient here: Gems and personal adornments can

represent the beauty of and the longing for the beloved. They can also stand to represent the very

textual ornamentation that a poem uses to express a variety of ideas and sentiments. The

consequence of this coincidence is that the jewelry and clothing imagery in the poem is at once

uniquely suited to the sentimental thematic aspect of the poem; yet the subtle ways in which it

departs from the poetics and seems to speak new meaning with the metaphorical vocabulary

signals the identity of its cross-genre conversation partner. The poet and the poem breathe new

life into a set of dead metaphors, allowing the reader to escape the poetic realm through its very

devices, using a set of literary conventions — ornament as beloved and ornament as text — to

create an innovative mimetic portrayal of the world they both inhabit in which a gift of jewelry

can simultaneously convey a specific poetic meaning and, paradoxically, represent an

innovatively more mundane purpose.

Just as Dūnash ben Labrāṭ carried Arabic meters over into Hebrew poetry, the

development of Arabized Hebrew poetics allowed for the carrying over, use and persistence of

sets of conventional images and rhetorical devices from classical Arabic poetics. About a

hundred years later, in his seminal Judaeo-Arabic language work on Hebrew poetics and the

literary history of Jews in Spain, Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa-l-muḏākara, Moses Ibn Ezra describes

badī‘, or linguistic ornamentation, in entirely concrete terms that resonate with the texts under

discussion here: “Naked speech, when it is clad with the festive garments of metaphor, and wears

the jewels of enigma and allusion, then its silken embroidery is enriched, and its enamel

enhanced. For ornate speech relates to nakedness as eloquence relates to stammering.”39 He even

39 Moses ibn Ezra. K. al-Muḥāḍara wa-l-Muḏākara, ed. A.S. Halkin. (Jerusalem: 1960), 225. Trans., Tova Rosen. Unveiling Eve: 66.


cites his own poetry in this theoretical work,40 verses in which he boasts about his skill as a poet

using jewelry as a metaphor: “My poems are gold necklaces; and where/ is the man who can

value the pearls that are my poems and words?”41 The jewelry and fine garments represented in

the poem stand for themselves and for the love for a beloved but are also, crucially, an eloquent

packaging for a literary representation of mundane and eminently recognizable details.

Ornamentation in poetics is very clearly tied, by that very poetics, to the lived reality that

poetry reflects; Rosen draws the analogy explicitly, pointing out that “a woman, [like] poetry is

required to be beautifully decorated.”42 In particular, Andalusi and Andalusi-modeled

epithalamia are suffused with literary depictions of the types of accessories that would have

comprised the brides’ possessions, made up their trousseaux, and adorned their bodies as they

prepared themselves for marriage and familial life, as evident in the diwāns of poets ranging

from Judah ha-Levi to Moses Dar‘ī. And even as these poems primarily concern themselves with

the jewelry and accessories and adornment of the female subjects’ bodies, the poetic question is

never far from the fore. Rosen summarizes the issue nicely:

“In medieval Hebrew literature, the poetic description of Woman and that of Poetry share in the ambivalent dualism of face and veil, body and clothing, essence and appearance, depth and surface… Poetry is beautiful, artificially ornamented, veiled, seducing, and deceiving. Poetry’s veils or garments indicate its florid-but-deceitful figurative language. In poetry (as in language at large) the signifiers cloak and betray the “true” meanings of the signifieds. Hence, by means of the veil (itself a figure) both Poetry and Woman embody the problematic of language and signification.”43

40 For a full accounting of Ibn Ezra’s self-citation, see Joseph Dana. “Who Is Moses Ibn Ezra’s ‘Jewish Poet’?” Jewish Quarterly Review 73:3 (1983): 281-3. 41 Moses ibn Ezra. K. al-Muḥāḍara. (Jerusalem: 1960), 102. For more on Ibn Ezra’s poetics and questions of literary stylization, see Dan Pagis. The Secular Poetry and Poetics of Moses Ibn Ezra and his Generation. (Jerusalem, 1970); and Ross Brann. “The Regenrate Poet,” The Compunctious Poet: 59-83. Pagis backtracks somewhat from the notion of stylization and attempts to identify individual experiences of love in poetry in his brief Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (Berkeley:1991). 42 Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve. (Philadelphia, 2007): 66. 43 Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve. (Philadelphia, 2007): 188.


In reading the poem attributed to Dūnash’s wife alongside correlated Genizah documents, we

might say that both of these functions are at work. Naturally, this poetic principle is operative

even in poetry that does not make use of jewelry imagery, but in this instance, it binds the poetry

and the poetics that much more close together as they jointly contribute to the text’s

representation of Genizah society realia.

This representation is firmly grounded in medieval poets’ and their readers’

understanding that poetry could deploy the rhetorical tools at the poets’ disposal to create a

mimetic vision rather than a perfect illustration, in other words that poetry refracts rather than

renders reality. Through medieval commentaries, Ibn Ezra understood biblical, classical antique

and classical Arabic poetics well, drew upon those very directly in composing his own, and

recognized those principles in the work of his predecessors, including Dūnash and those early

poets of his generation. Aristotle’s notion of mimesis was thoroughly eviscerated in translation in

the Arabic (and ultimately, too, the in the Latin) Middle Ages44; nevertheless, Arabic

commentaries on the Poetics allow for many types representation of life in literature and

comparison between those two things, and the subsidiary notion that an Arabizing Hebrew poem

might “embody the universal in particulars,”45 persisted in a culturally translated form. This is all

to say that the notion that a Hebrew poem written in the Islamicate, Arabizing milieu of tenth-

century Cordoba might say something broadly applicable using recognizable details without

44 Karla Mallette. “Beyond Mimesis: Aristotle’s Poetics in the Medieval Mediterranean,” PMLA 124:2 (2009): 585. 45 This is a paraphrase by Peter Heath that appears in the volume, edited by Ramzi Baalbaki, cited in footnote forty-three. The full text to which Heath alludes, as translated by Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA, 1995): 59-60, reads as follows: “It is also evident from what has been said that it is not the poet’s function to relate actual events, but the kinds of things that might occur and are possible in terms of probability or necessity. The difference between the historian and the poet is not that between using verse or prose; Herodotus’ work could be versified and would be just as much a kind of history in verse as in prose. No, the difference is this: that the one relates actual events, the other the kinds of things that might occur. Consequently, poetry is more philosophical and more elevated than history, since poetry relates more of the universal, which history relates particulars.”


itself being history or a perfect, representational illustration of historically-attested customs and

practices, should be in no way strange or confounding or problematic.46

Turning, now, to more modern considerations of poetics, we find no less than S.D.

Goitein moving towards the use of documentary and literary sources, each to each, as

counterpoints and prooftexts. For example, he commented upon the poetic portrayal of certain

colors of clothing and their appearance in documentary sources:

“In Andalusian Arabic poetry yellow was a symbol of treachery, of separation from the beloved, and of unrequited love, which causes the suitor to languish to death. Poetry permeated the life even of comparatively simple people in those days and might well have influenced popular attitudes concerning such delicate matters as female dress, which, as we remember, was mostly displayed in the intimacy of the house. Arabic poetry from Spain, like its Hebrew counterparts, had found its way to Egypt by the eleventh century. And the poetic symbolism itself probably had its origin in popular superstitions. As far as the Geniza goes, yellow seems to have been more popular among males.”47

Goitein’s student, Yedida Stillman, made similar observations while noting the stylization of

Arabic poetry and prose, as well as the relative lack of detail that such texts can be expected to

yield:

“The literary references from which data are obtainable are of various … A major problem which immediately confronts the researcher who wishes to seek out information on medieval attire is the fact that the Arab historians and geographers in their works did not dedicate any chapters or full passages to description of garments as a specific topic… Books of adab literature contain many references to clothing and to elegant fashion.”48

Even the scholars whose work was foundational in establishing the Genizah as a documentary

cache saw the value in and potential for interface with poetry in the work of documenting life in

the Genizah society.

46 The methodologies for and problems associated with attempting to pull historical or historicizing detail from such a highly stylized frame is one of the major concerns of the essays in the volume edited by Ramzi Baalbaki, et al. Poetry and History: The Value of Poetry in Reconstructing Arab History. (Beirut, 2011). 47 Med. Soc. IV, 175. 48 Stillman, Female Attire: 29-30.


Later scholars have followed, modifying and finessing this methodology. María Ángeles

Gallego, among others, has pointed out the value of Genizah documents for studying the lives of

women,49 but does not go as far as to suggest that they could be of use in understanding their

poetry, written either in Hebrew or in Arabic. By contrast, though, Teresa Garulo speculates

about the “documentary value” of classical Arabic poetry for writing about medieval women’s

lives.50 Methodologically speaking, then, the notion of pairing poetry with documentary sources

can be found at the very foundations of the field of Genizah research. Whereas Goitein argues

that the value of poetry for historical writing is that it offers access to high-culture values that

might have influenced the lived experience of individuals whose customs and practices are

recorded in the documentary evidence, I have preferred here to draw Garulo’s line of thinking

farther out. Rather than arguing, as she does, that there is plain-sense documentary value to

Hebrew poetry written in the Genizah society, my reading of the poem attributed to Dūnash’s

wife shows that this type of poetry trades in images of interactions, gestures, and objects that are

drawn not from formal poetic conventions but from day-to-day life; this imagery would have

been familiar to medieval readers, bringing additional layers of meaning to their reading that are

no longer immediately apparent to modern readers of the poem.

The classic study of the institution of the gift exchange in the pre-modern world was

written in the middle of the last century by Marcel Mauss; and even though it has been, to a

certain extent, superseded by Jacques Derrida’s reworking of its theories in his own book,

Counterfeit Money,51 the original is still a useful theoretical cipher for the discussion of the poem

49 María Angeles Gallego. “Approaches to the Study of Muslim and Jewish Women in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: The Poetess Qasmūna bat Ismā‘il,” Misceláneo de estudios árabes y hebreos 48 (1999): 63-75. 50 Teresa Garulo, “Women in Medieval Classical Arabic Poetry,” in Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources, eds. Manuela Marín and Randi Deguilhem (London, 2002): 27-8. 51 Jacques Derrida. Counterfeit Money. (Chicago: 1994).


attributed to Dūnash’s wife in its historical context. The gifts with which Mauss concerns

himself are the

presentations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested. The form usually taken is that of the gift generously offered but the accompanying behavior is formal pretense and social deception, while the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest.52

The gifts of jewelry and cloaks depicted in the poem are not offered completely freely or

generously but rather as part of the obligation between husband and wife and bound by an

elaborate set of socio-economic conventions that governed gift-giving and obligation. Goitein

himself allowed for the possibility of sentimental uses for goods with economic value, and vice

versa: “The objects of the dowry, one at a time, could be easily turned into money, whereas the

transfer of real estate or, indeed, any action with it, was a clumsy affair. The sentimental value of

clothing was an additional and most cogent consideration.”53 And while it would be too much to

say that the actions portrayed in text of poem itself were all pretense and deception, the strictness

of Arabic poetics certainly governs the way in which such transactions could be depicted

literarily and imposes formality, pretense and even literarily-licensed deception upon the

historical background.

Conclusions

It should go without saying that medieval Arabizing Hebrew poetry cannot be read as

history; but it can be read for history. Reading Dūnash’s wife’s poem in light of Genizah

documents that detail the lives of women and of couples in similar, if not identical, situations

takes a sentimental exchange of gifts and uses it to signal and signify a twin meaning of the 52 Marcel Mauss. The Gift. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954. 53 Goitein. Med. Soc. IV, p. 190.


action, of a gift that would allow both husband and wife figures in the poem to support

themselves and remember each other during their forced separation. The exchange of objects

refracted through the poem between the poet and her husband reflects a historical reality

whereby women were able to support themselves and their families where needed. The poem is

not and cannot be understood to be a documentary record of a historical exchange; the value of

its relationship with the documentary record comes instead from its appropriation of economic

symbols to construct the imagery that lends the text its meaning. The poet trades in economic

images to compose verse that simultaneously speaks to practical and nostalgic concerns. This is a

poetic riff on concrete images taken from daily life that makes skilled use of a very constricted

literary form in order to depict a single moment in family life that is as ornamented as it is

recognizably natural; as such, a one-to-one correspondence between the poem and the lives

reflected in the Genizah documents need not be perfect, only correlated and deeply evocative.

Or, to borrow and invert a turn of phrase from another recent study of poetry and material

culture, a poem is not a castle or a robe;54 rather, it illuminates, playing and exaggerating all the

while, the life of the robe-wearer in the castle. To reiterate: In this case, that means that the poem

attributed to the wife of Dūnash is a poem that laments the loss of the beloved in keeping with

Arabic and Arabizing Hebrew modes but also signals the agency of the female persona by

evoking images full of culturally-specific economic and practical meaning.

Medieval discourse about marriage, as Tova Rosen writes, makes that institution “the

place where male and female legitimately (though not unproblematically) meet, [becoming] a

powerful metaphor for the paradoxical encounters of the two opposing metaphysical orders.”55

54 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). http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/84; with special attention to Bush’s use of Jerome Clinton’s study on “metaphors of craft” in Edebiyat 4:1 (1979). 55 Tova Rosen, “Sexual Politics in a Medieval Hebrew Marriage Debate,” Exemplaria 12:1 (2000): 158.


The poem attributed to the wife of Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, when read in light of the documentary

sources in the Cairo Genizah, adds yet more dichotomies to that list: generosity and interest;

sentimentality and practicality; and poetry and history. It is those dichotomies, and the precise

function of each element in each pair, that allows us to derive some sense, in and from a wider

historical context, of a marvelously strange and otherwise short, puzzling, and dismissible poem.

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

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