This Noble House
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This Noble House explores the preoccupation with biblical genealogy that emerged among Jews in the Islamic Near East between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Arnold Franklin looks to Jewish society's fascination with Davidic ancestry, examining the profusion of claims to the lineage that had already begun to appear by the year 1000, the attempts to chart the validity of such claims through elaborate genealogical lists, and the range of meanings that came to be ascribed to the House of David in this period. Jews and Muslims shared the perception that the Davidic line and the noble family of the Prophet Muhammad were counterparts to one another, but captivation with Davidic lineage was just one facet of a much broader Jewish concern with biblical ancestry. Based on documentary material from the Cairo Geniza, the book argues that this «genealogical turn» should be understood as a consequence of Jewish society's dynamic encounter with its Arab-Islamic milieu and constituted a selective adaptation to the importance of ancestry in the dominant cultural environment. While Jewish society surely had genealogical materials and preoccupations of its own upon which to draw, the Arab-Islamic regard for tracing the lineage of Muhammad provided the impetus for deploying those traditions in new and unprecedented ways. On the one hand, the increased focus on ancestry is an instance of medieval Jews reflexively and unselfconsciously making use of the cultural forms of their Muslim neighbors; on the other, it is an expression of cultural competitiveness or even resistance, an implicit response to the claim of Arab genealogical superiority that uses the very methods of the Arab «science of genealogy.» To be sure, Franklin notes, Jews were only one of several non-Arab minority groups to take up genealogy in this way. At the broadest level, then, This Noble House illuminates a strategy that various minority populations utilized as they sought legitimacy within the medieval Arab-Islamic world.
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This Noble House
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In his systematic perusal of documents from the Geniza, S. D. Goitein discovered an abundance of fresh material on nesiʾim, significantly adding to the information first examined by Poznanski and Mann. Yet despite the new sources at his disposal, Goitein did not substantially challenge the regnant explanation for the appearance of nesiʾim outside of the Abbasid heartland, nor did he deem their popular claim of Davidic ancestry to be, in and of itself, a matter worthy of further scholarly attention. Thus, while he edited numerous documents by or about nesiʾim that allowed him to adjust aspects of Mann’s treatment, Goitein did not produce an original, synthetic assessment of their importance in the Geniza society.49 Like Mann, he regarded the nesiʾim as aspiring rulers, a perspective evident in the decision to include the only sustained discussion of them in his magisterial Mediterranean Society, a mere two paragraphs in length, in a section on leadership in the Jewish community. “[I]t is not surprising,” he writes, “that some of [the exilarchal dynasty’s] more ambitious members should have tried to make capital of their dignity as ‘princes of the House of David.’ … We find them everywhere often trying to assume authority.” And like Mann, Goitein too determined that despite their aspirations, many nesiʾim seemed to possess little in the way of what he considered to be real political power. His conclusion was that nesiʾim were in fact “of no real significance, except when they were scholarly persons of renown.”50 At times Goitein could be even more emphatically judgmental in his description of the nesiʾim, as when he characterizes them as freeloaders who shamelessly took advantage of the generosity of local Jewish communities.51
Goitein’s dim view of the nesiʾim was undoubtedly informed by his low opinion of the Babylonian exilarchate, which, in his eyes, provided the inspiration for their own, more localized ambitions. In setting up an opposition between nesiʾim who, by virtue of their laudable scholarly pursuits, achieved social and historical significance, and those who were merely self-interested political opportunists and thus of little consequence, Goitein recycles a problematic dichotomy he used earlier to draw an unfavorable comparison between the gaonate and the exilarchate. “While the gaonate,” he writes, “was a force that penetrated the whole fabric of life … the secular head of the Jews, the so-called ‘head of the Diaspora,’ whose seat was in Baghdad, had only limited importance.”52
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