Jewish Literary Eros: Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean by Isabelle Levy (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Literary Eros: Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean by Isabelle Levy Jonathan Decter Isabelle Levy. Jewish Literary Eros: Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 210 pp. One remarkable text that I have seen is a handwritten draft of Shaul Tchernichowsky's 1925 book on Immanuel of Rome. The published edition was clearly typed from this version, which is full of cross outs and corrections, including many by the poet's friend and fellow Zionist (of a different type) Simon Rawidowicz. While both were in Berlin, Rawidowicz seems to have contributed to the work by translating German quotations into Hebrew, making numerous stylistic suggestions, and even correcting the renowned poet's grammar on occasion. For Tchernichowsky, Immanuel was a trailblazer in the invention of the Hebrew "novella" and a master of the Hebrew sonnet, a form in which the modern poet also labored; Immanuel seemed to be the standard bearer of the Iberian Hebrew tradition with its attending social values while also embodying the new spirit of the Renaissance. When the book was published, a review in Jewish Quarterly Review critiqued that Tchernichowsky was only concerned with the literary dimensions of Immanuel's Maḥbarot but contributed nothing to knowledge of the life of the author. Given the interest that surrounded Immanuel's work a full century ago (and before), it is somewhat surprising that scholarship on this brilliant figure—who wrote stunning and sometimes ribald poetry and prose in Hebrew, poetry in Italian, and thousands of pages of biblical commentary—has progressed at a trickle with a few major milestones, most importantly Dov Jarden's critical edition of the Maḥbarot in 1957. While Immanuel is not the only figure treated in Isabelle Levy's Jewish Literary Eros, he does bookend the project and, in many ways, the broader study is a buildup to illuminating his uniquely complex literary work. In this path-breaking and sensitive book, Levy explores a highly varied corpus of literary works, mostly prosimetra (combining poetry and prose, including the maqāma form), by Jewish authors across the medieval Mediterranean and within the context of contemporary literatures in Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance languages. Levy is one of very few scholars who can traverse such variegated works with philological skill while bringing to bear the tools of comparative literature. Her work contributes to a growing body of scholarship that understands Mediterranean literature as the product of encounters that are translingual and interreligious even as she is careful to critique some of that scholarship's overly facile analytic categories. End Page 221 The overall argument of the book is that, by focusing on the prosimetric writings of Jewish authors from Arabic and Latinate Romance regions of the Mediterranean alongside adjacent literatures in Arabic and Romance, one can glean specialized modes of rhetoric and poetics that explore linkages between poetry and love. Rather than viewing the prosimetric form as mere ornament or as incidental to content, in Levy's skilled hands formal elements occupy the core of a serious inquiry. How do we explain the particular affinity of this form for themes of Eros across Mediterranean literatures? How are meaning and authorial voice created in this medium in a way that distinguishes them from their place in poetry or prose in isolation? Levy produces readings that foreground matters of form, metaphor, and metapoetics that teach us something new about this literature qua literature and about the place of Jews in Mediterranean culture. The writing throughout is extremely elegant. The introduction sets up the content of the book well and includes accessible synopses of chapters and their central arguments. The chapters are organized according to a well-conceived trajectory that brings the reader through topics of form and metaphor, while also proceeding chronologically and geographically. The book can be dense at times but in this respect is also concise and economical. A foreword by Raymond Scheindlin prepares the reader to digest the riches of the book's first paragraphs. The first chapter provides a close reading of an episode by Jacob ben Elazar that considers the merits of poetry versus prose, a theme well traversed in Arabic and...