Book Reviews: A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 164 pp

Kfir first shows how the great poets of what has been termed the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus promoted the primacy of the Jewish culture of the Islamic West. [...]Samuel ha-Nagid asserted not only his literary prowess but also his independence from Hai Gaon of Baghdad in legal matters. The second part of the book presents a series of case studies of authors from Iraq, Egypt, Italy, and Provence during the thirteenth century in order to argue for a four-fold set of strategies used to cope with claims of Iberian supremacy (“competition, equilibration, vacillation, and de-territorialization”). The chapter on Isaac ha-Gorni and Abraham ha-Bedersi of Provence argues, based on the notion of “de-territorialization” as framed by Deleuze and Guattari (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986]), that the poets sought to “unravel the ties between language and territory which the majority literature takes for granted” (143).