This article examines the idea of Jewish poetic community and communal belonging in the multilingual and multiconfessional lyric arena of the medieval Mediterranean. The article presents early fourteenth-century Italian-Jewish thinker Immanuel of Rome as a case study for how to go about rethinking lyric communities in premodern worlds. Set within a broader historical discussion of the lyric positioning of Jewish authors in al-Andalus, Christian Spain, and the Islamic East, the article considers how non-Jewish contemporaries viewed non-Hebrew lyric experiments by Jews. In analyzing how Immanuel's Italian-Christian contemporaries regarded him, his poetry, and his Jewishness as it relates to the lyric, the article assesses the degree to which Immanuel precipitated a new model for Jewish poetic belonging in the medieval literary community.
Isabelle Lévy (Thu,) studied this question.