Lyric (Anti-) Jewishness and Belonging in the Medieval Mediterranean

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.