Love and Race in a Thirteenth-Century Romance in Hebrew, with a Translation of <i>The Story of Maskil and Peninah</i> by Jacob Ben El‘azar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This romance, composed by a thirteenth-century Jewish author living in Christian Toledo, is written in biblical Hebrew and cast it in the form of the Arabic maqamāh. The plot (an army invades an Arab territory; its commander, the "King of Beauty," falls in love with a female captive; the couple encounter a giant black warrior, kill him, and live happily ever after) invites a three-tiered reading: (a) a literal reading of the work as a conventional romance, in which the lovers are young and noble, the geography is mythical, and the hero wins his beloved after slaying a giant; (b) an allegorical reading of the union of Maskil (representing Intellect) and Peninah (signifying Beauty) as illustrative of the Platonic nexus of Eros, Beauty, Intellect, and the Good, while the monstrous Cushan represents unbridled sexuality, ugliness, bestiality, and evil; and (c) a historicized reading, anchoring the work in the religio-ethnic politics of the Reconquista (according to which Maskil is Christian, Peninah is an Andalusian Arab, and the giant Cushan is in an Almohad warrior, either a dark-skinned Berber or a sub-Saharan African). Read thus, the story problematizes historical issues of territory, border, conflict, contact, relocation, cultural transition, and hybridity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".