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Eleazar ben Jacob ha-Bavli, known as Eleazar the Gnostic, lived in Baghdad in the first half of the thirteenth century. He was a productive poet during the years before the Mongol invasion, but only recently has scholarly interest in his oeuvre revived. Eleazar’s impressive poetic output consisted of more than four hundred secular compositions, with a striking preponderance of panegyrics, laments, epigrams, and homonymic poems. Other genres, such as gnomic aphorisms and girdle poems, are virtual…