Читать книгу This Noble House - Arnold E. Franklin - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIntroduction
In the second half of the twelfth century, almost a hundred years before Marco Polo’s celebrated exploration of the Silk Route, two Jewish travelers made their ways, separately, to the city of Baghdad. Benjamin of Tudela, the first and more famous of the two, arrived in about the year 1168 after setting out from northern Spain and traveling through southern France, Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, Palestine, and Syria. Leaving Baghdad, Benjamin would continue on to the city of Basra and the Persian Gulf, visit Egypt, and eventually make his way back to Spain in 1173. Two or three years later, Petaḥya ben Jacob of Regensburg, unaware of his predecessor’s journey, also visited the Abbasid capital in the midst of a similarly long and arduous circuit that took him east from Prague, through parts of Poland and Russia, south across the Crimea and Armenia, into Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, and finally back to Bohemia and Regensburg.1
The two came from very different backgrounds. Though Benjamin hailed from the Christian Iberian crown of Navarre, he was in many ways a direct heir to the cultural legacy of Muslim-dominated al-Andalus.2 What few details we know of Petaḥya’s origins, on the other hand, suggest that he came from a family steeped in the unique intellectual currents and religious patterns that were then coming to dominate northern European Jewry. His brother Isaac, we know, studied in France with the important twelfth-century Tosafist Jacob ben Meir and was among the first generation of scholars to develop the dialectic method of talmudic analysis in Bohemia.3
Despite these differences, though, the two were struck by many of the same things. Each of the travelers left behind a record of his remarkable wanderings, and in both accounts the city of Baghdad looms large, taking up nearly a tenth of Benjamin’s Sefer ha-massaʿot (Book of Travels) and roughly the same proportion of Petaḥya’s itinerary. Though the city was beginning to show signs of decline by the end of the twelfth century, there was still much there to dazzle the eyes of a weary traveler. Muslim visitors to Baghdad in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were impressed, among other things, by the sheer size of the city, by its bustling markets, and by the many schools, mosques, and richly decorated bathhouses that could be found in practically every neighborhood.4 Religious differences notwithstanding, Benjamin and Petaḥya had more or less the same reaction.
Benjamin’s narrative reveals that like other twelfth-century visitors he was captivated by the city, and at the center of his account is a glowing depiction of the Abbasid caliph, whom he likens to the pope since “all of the kings of Islam obey him.” Repeatedly noting the caliph’s distinguished descent from Muḥammad, Benjamin also stresses his moral and ethical virtues. “He will not partake of anything unless he has earned it by the work of his own hand,” Benjamin reports; moreover, “he is truthful and trusty, speaking peace to all men.” Most significantly, Benjamin describes the caliph as a ruler who is respectful toward the Jews of his domain and their religion. “He is kind unto Israel and many belonging to the people of Israel are among his attendants. He knows all languages and is well-versed in the law of Israel. He reads and writes the Holy Language.” In sum, Benjamin writes, “the caliph is a righteous man [ish ḥasid] and all his actions are for good.”5
Benjamin was also moved by Baghdad’s architecture. He describes the caliphal palace, located in the eastern portion of the city, with discernible awe. Comprising “great buildings made of marble with columns of silver and gold,” the massive complex encompassed a lake fed by the Tigris and “a great forest with all manner of trees … and animals.” In the western half of the city Benjamin was taken with one of Baghdad’s celebrated hospitals, perhaps the bīmāristān founded by the Buwayhid prince ʿAḍūd al-Dawla in the late tenth century. According to Benjamin’s reckoning, it boasted a staff of some sixty physicians and supported a sanitarium to care for the insane. With apparent admiration he notes that “every sick man who comes is maintained at the expense of the caliph.”6
Petaḥya of Regensburg, on the other hand, has relatively little to say about the topography of Baghdad, its magnificent edifices, or its Muslim inhabitants. And though he mentions the city’s expansive size and briefly comments on its newly restored walls, “standing a hundred cubits high … made of polished, ornamented copper,” he was most interested in Baghdad’s Jews, whose numbers he estimated at about 1000, a far more likely estimate than Benjamin’s figure of 40,000.7 Jews appear to have inhabited several sections of the city. Sources from the mid- and late tenth century suggest that the hub of Jewish communal life was located in the ʿAtīqa section of Baghdad—an area situated west of the Tigris between Tāq al-ḥarrānī and Bāb al-shaʿīr—but there are indications that Jews could be found in other areas of the city as well.8
Petaḥya notes with keen interest the local Jews’ impressive mastery of the biblical text. “Even those who are ignorant,” he observes, “know all twenty-four books according to their proper vocalization, the rules of grammar, and the traditions concerning pronunciation and spelling.” He also comments admiringly on their concern for the modesty of their women. “None there looks upon any woman,” he writes. “Nor does anyone enter the house of his friend out of concern that he might see his wife improperly.”9 The peaceful relations that existed between the Jews of Baghdad and their Muslim neighbors drew Petaḥya’s attention as well. Using the region’s biblical name as medieval Jews were wont to do for many areas of the Near East, Petaḥya concludes: “There is great peace for the Jews in the land of Babylon, and they do not experience exile [galut] at all.”10
In both travelers’ romanticized visions of the city—and for that matter, of the Islamic East more broadly—the theme of Jewish empowerment looms especially large. Both Petaḥya and Benjamin left pointedly enthusiastic descriptions of the ecumenical Jewish leaders in Baghdad. Petaḥya describes the gaʾon Samuel ben ʿEli, head of the yeshiva in Baghdad, with evident delight. “He is full of wisdom,” Petaḥya writes, “both in the written and the oral law, and in all the wisdom of Egypt. Nothing at all is hidden from him.” Samuel is also depicted as a captivating teacher: throngs of disciples, each one an accomplished scholar in his own right, sit at his feet, eager to imbibe his lectures.11 But to Petaḥya the gaʾon was more than a scholar; he also embodied Jewish political power. “The head of the academy,” he writes, “has about sixty servants, and they flog anyone who does not immediately execute his orders. Therefore, the people fear him…. And he is clothed in gold and colored garments like the king, and his palace also is hung with costly tapestries like the king’s.”12 And the same impression is conveyed in Petaḥya’s description of the extent of the gaʾon’s dominion: “In all the lands of Assyria and Damascus, in the cities of Persia and Media, as well as in the land of Babylon,” he insists, “they have no judge that has not been appointed by Rabbi Samuel, the head of the academy. It is he who gives license in every city to judge and to teach. His authority is acknowledged in all countries, and also in the land of Israel. They all respect him.”13
But Samuel ben ʿEli was not the only Iraqi leader to provide a stirring image of Jewish political might or to be worthy of comparison to the Abbasid rulers. In fact, in Petaḥya’s own words, “a higher authority” than the gaʾon was to be found in the exilarch (rosh ha-gola). Benjamin was evidently taken with the exilarch as well, devoting a long and admiring passage to him while passing over Samuel ben ʿEli with no more than a few perfunctory observations.
Like the gaonate, the office of exilarch emerged from barely perceptible origins at the beginning of the Islamic period to become an important institution of centralized Jewish communal leadership in the Middle Ages.14 While it is evident that exilarchs played an important role in administering the affairs of the Jewish minority population under the Abbasid caliphs and their successors, it is frustratingly difficult to delineate the precise functions that were entrusted to them. Not only do we lack the kinds of reliable sources that might afford such a reconstruction, the authority of the exilarchate appears to have fluctuated over the course of the medieval period, in particular in relation to that exercised by the geʾonim. An idealized picture of the office, its prerogatives, and its relationship to the gaonate two centuries prior to Benjamin and Petaḥya’s arrival in Baghdad is presented in the so-called “Account of Rabbi Nathan ha-Bavli,” a tenth-century work possibly composed to pacify a Jewish audience in North Africa that was concerned about recent reports of conflict among Jewish leaders and elites in Iraq.15 According to Nathan, the exilarch, like each of the geʾonim, functioned as the exclusive head of an administrative district (reshut). Nathan locates the regions under the authority of the exilarch in the lands to the east of the Tigris, and claims that within this territory he was entitled to appoint judges and collect internal taxes. Critical to Nathan’s account is the portrayal of relations between the Iraqi geʾonim and the exilarchate as mutually respectful and collaborative, a theme that is masterfully underscored in his description of the installation ceremony for the exilarch.16 The reality, of course, was a great deal messier: boundaries between the exilarchate’s and the gaonate’s spheres of influence, geographical and otherwise, remained in flux throughout the Middle Ages, frequently generating competition and conflict.
Nonetheless, a few points are fairly well established. At least in certain periods exilarchs do appear to have appointed Jewish officials in some local communities and to have collected revenues from them, although there are conflicting indications as to the extent of the area that fell under their jurisdiction. They also presided over a judicial apparatus referred to from time to time as a yeshiva. Additionally, they may also have represented the Jewish community before the Muslim authorities, though the generally held view that they were formally appointed in that capacity still remains a matter of conjecture.17 But the exilarchs’ prestige in the eyes of Benjamin, Petaḥya, and other medieval Jews did not derive merely—or even primarily—from their administrative powers or their access to the highest echelons of the Islamic state. Rather, it was based on their alleged ancestry—for the exilarchate, unlike the gaonate, was a hereditary office that was transferred among members of a dynasty that claimed descent from King David. Thus did the office enjoy a symbolic meaning for medieval Jews that transcended the particular functions exercised by it. The exilarchate was understood to be in a very real sense a living remnant of the ancient biblical monarchy, a notion that is captured in the bold assertion of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) that “the exilarchs of Babylonia stand in place of the king.”18 It should come as little surprise, then, that medieval Jews regarded the exilarchate as a potent symbol of national survival as well as an implicit rejoinder to those who saw in the dissolution of the ancient Judean monarchy clear evidence of God’s displeasure with the Jewish people.
In their narratives Benjamin and Petaḥya have left us revealing impressions of both the office of exilarch and of Daniel ben Ḥisday (d. ca. 1175), its long-reigning incumbent who died shortly after Benjamin’s visit and evidently had not yet been replaced at the time of Petaḥya’s.19 Benjamin’s portrayal of the exilarch follows closely on his earlier description of the caliph and suggests a deliberate pairing of the two figures. The exilarch is described as wise, rich, and generous, and like the caliph has in his possession “hospices, gardens, and plantations.” The great synagogue of the exilarch, with its “columns of marble of various colors overlaid with silver and gold,” recalls Benjamin’s depiction of the caliphal palace. Lineage constitutes another critical point of comparison: the caliph is introduced as a member “of the family of Muḥammad,” while the exilarch has a “pedigree going back as far as David, King of Israel.” At the center of this portion of Benjamin’s narrative is a description of the visit he claims the exilarch made to the caliph’s residence every Thursday—a rather improbable occurrence, but a device that nonetheless allowed Benjamin to bring his two subjects face-to-face. Here again the exilarch’s genealogy assumes importance. The exilarch was escorted to the caliph’s palace by an entourage on horseback comprising Jews and Muslims, and as he made his way through the streets of the city, heralds would proclaim in Arabic: “Make way for our lord, the son of David [sayyidunā ibn Dāʾūd]!”20 Benjamin emphasizes that this was the Muslims’ own appellation for the exilarch; the Jews, he says, referred to him in Hebrew as “our lord, the head of the exile.” Once inside the palace the exilarch would be seated on a special throne that stood opposite the caliph’s and that was reserved for the exilarch’s use on such visits. Benjamin concludes by explaining that the unusual display of deference toward the exilarch was in keeping with the wishes of Muḥammad himself, who recognized the exilarchs as legitimate successors to the Davidic monarchy and accordingly commanded his caliphal heirs to uphold the injunction in Genesis 49:10 that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet.”21
Petaḥya’s account of the exilarchate is much shorter than Benjamin’s. Yet in his brief notes Petaḥya relates a telling bit of information that brings into sharper focus the juxtaposition of the caliphal and Davidic dynasties suggested in Benjamin’s longer and more carefully crafted presentation. The caliph, he writes, had great affection for the exilarch because he “is of the seed of Muḥammad and the exilarch is of the seed of King David.”
A New Fascination with Biblical Ancestry
The city of Baghdad described by Benjamin and Petaḥya is, in many respects, an imaginary landscape—a mythical place where Jews are powerful, wealthy, and pious, but more important, where they are treated with respect by their non-Jewish neighbors. In conjuring up such an idealized scene these writers offer a comforting counterpoint to the perceived conditions of Jewish life in Latin Europe. The subject of the Jews’ loss of sovereignty had become an increasingly important element in medieval polemical exchanges between Jews and non-Jews; and not infrequently these exchanges centered on the scope of the exilarch’s authority, drawing from it broader theological conclusions. In the first half of the eleventh century, the Andalusian Muslim polymath ʿAlī Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) claimed to have debated the status of the exilarchate with the Jewish scholar and courtier Samuel Ibn Naghrīla (d. 1055). Ibn Naghrīla maintained that “to this day the exilarchs are descendants of David and thus the offspring of Judah, and they possess authority, kingship and rule.” While Ibn Ḥazm did not dispute the purported ancestry of the exilarchs, he insisted that they enjoyed no real authority and argued on that basis that the scriptural promise that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah” was clear evidence of the Bible’s mendaciousness.22 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Jewish theologians and exegetes worked vigorously to refute Christian arguments that began with the observable “facts” of Jewish powerlessness and degradation and, buttressed with scriptural prooftexts, went on to explain them as divine punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Jesus.23 The travel accounts of Benjamin and Petaḥya counter such arguments, though not, as did Jewish biblical scholars, by challenging Christian and Muslim readings of scripture, but rather by bringing an alternative set of visible data to bear on the question of Jewish power.24 The conditions of Jewish life in the Islamic East generally, and the stature of the exilarch in particular, thus undermined the view so succinctly expressed by the fictional Christian adversary in Joseph Qimḥi’s (d. 1170) polemical treatise Sefer ha-berit (Book of the Covenant), when he insists that the Jews lack “power and kingship, indeed [they] have lost everything.”25
And yet if the general contours of Benjamin’s and Petaḥya’s perceptions of Baghdad were shaped by the kinds of arguments that confronted Jews in eleventh-century al-Andalus and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Christendom, in at least one respect they accurately attest to a fascinating but underappreciated transformation that had taken place within Near Eastern Jewish society itself. Both travelers, we have noted, took an interest in the exilarch’s purported descent from King David. More important, however, they recognized in that ancestry a counterpart to the Abbasid caliphs’ claim of descent from Muḥammad.26 The equivalence of the two dynastic lines is striking, and, as it is presented by the two travelers, helps to make the case that Jews in the East were deemed worthy of honor by the dominant religious population. But their impressions also attest to a new emphasis on the value of biblical lineage that had taken hold among Eastern Jews, an emphasis itself reflective of attitudes about noble ancestry that were prevalent in the surrounding Arab-Islamic cultural environment. Their observations are suggestive therefore precisely because they hint at a connection between the genealogical concerns of Near Eastern Jews and the Islamic society in which they lived.
Taking these observations as its point of departure, this book explores the preoccupation with biblical genealogy that characterized Jewish society in the Islamic Near East between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Focusing initially on Jewish society’s fascination with Davidic ancestry, it examines the profusion of claims to that lineage that had already begun to appear by the end of the first millennium, the attempts to chart such claims through elaborate genealogical lists, and the range of meanings that had come to be ascribed to the House of David as a whole in that period—in particular the perception, shared by Jews and Muslims alike, that the Davidic line was a counterpart to the noble family of Muḥammad, the ahl al-bayt.
The coherence of such an endeavor depends, of course, on the ability to show that Jewish society did indeed undergo a perceptible change in the way it regarded Davidic ancestry, and that an intensification of ancestral claims to the biblical monarch is detectible. In Chapter 1 I undertake to establish these points in some detail. My conclusion is that by the tenth century new layers of significance as well as a new urgency were evident in the way Jewish claims of descent from King David were articulated and understood. This change in the manifestation and meaning of Davidic ancestry can be understood as the response to a variety of pressures on Jewish society, some emanating from within the community and others from without.
Veneration of the Davidic family did not, of course, originate in the Islamic period. Indeed, concern with King David and his royal line can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible, and, in one form or another, has remained a more or less constant feature of Jewish society’s historical and spiritual self-perception ever since. Yet if Jews have remained loyal to the House of David throughout the ages, their reasons for doing so have not necessarily been so unvarying, nor have their ways of expressing that allegiance been so consistent. Moreover, the very persistence of Jewish preoccupation with the Davidic line can obscure the subtle ways in which its signification in fact shifted over time. The existence of the exilarchate is well attested in rabbinic sources, and its origins may go back to the third century CE. But Jews continued to develop new impressions of the dynastic office that were colored by later realities, its ancient roots notwithstanding. The present work deals not with origins, then, but with the culturally specific nuances that inflected the meaning of Davidic lineage for Jews living in the Islamic Near East. It explores how medieval Jews regarded and venerated the line of David, and seeks, in part, to situate those attitudes within a broader matrix of responses to minority status in the Islamic world. In proposing a cultural and historical context for understanding medieval Jews’ attitudes toward the Davidic dynasty, the present work accentuates the capacity for adaptation and reinterpretation that even timeless religious symbols possess. The tendency to view the Jewish Middle Ages as simply the playing out of earlier forms of Judaism fails to acknowledge the extent to which the meaning of cultural and religious constants like the Davidic line could vary even as the constants themselves endured.
That Jewish society indeed came to invest the Davidic family with new significance during the Middle Ages is most readily observable in the rise in the number of claimants to that lineage during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Sources from that period make frequent mention of individuals with the Hebrew title nasi (“prince,” plural nesiʾim), a biblical designation that signified, with only rare exception, membership in the House of David. And as references to nesiʾim begin to multiply, a clan of Davidic dynasts, from whose ranks the exilarchs were chosen, begins to come into focus, emerging for the first time as a recognizable kinship group within medieval Jewish society, a collective defined entirely by its presumed descent from the biblical monarch. Thus, while the title exilarch signals appointment to an office of authority, nasi implies an inherited genealogical status; and while every exilarch was a nasi, very few nesiʾim would become exilarchs. The proliferation of nesiʾim—understood in this fashion—implies both an increase in the social importance of Davidic ancestry, as well as a widening of the perimeters of the Davidic patrilineage, whose cachet had for centuries been largely limited to those specific individuals who attained the office of exilarch. The appearance of this broader descent group, I argue, reflects changing attitudes within Jewish society and is the outgrowth of a new set of attitudes toward the House of David. At its core this book is a study of the forces that led to the emergence and the consolidation of that medieval collective.
But fascination with the House of David was, I argue, just one facet of what was in reality a much broader concern with biblical ancestry, evidence of which can be found in parallel developments among a number of other segments of Jewish society. Priests, Levites, and others began to focus more emphatically on their biblical forebears, and, like Davidic dynasts, began as well to produce genealogical records to substantiate their descent from them. And as we shall see, Benjamin and Petaḥya will once again prove helpful as we explore this wider connection. Genealogical concerns also influenced the way the Jewish past was conceptualized, and they played an important role in the way historical figures were viewed.
In many respects this “genealogical turn” was a consequence of Jewish society’s dynamic encounter with the surrounding Arab-Islamic milieu, a selective adaptation to the value placed on nasab (ancestry) in the dominant cultural environment.27 While Jewish society surely had sufficient genealogical materials and preoccupations of its own upon which to draw, Arab-Islamic society and its valorization of documented—as opposed to merely asserted—ancestry ultimately provided the impetus for accessing those traditions anew and deploying them in ways that were unprecedented.
The Jewish embrace of nasab was, however, a complex and multi-vocal phenomenon. On one hand it reflects Jewish acculturation; it is an instance of medieval Jews reflexively and unselfconsciously making use of the cultural forms of their Muslim neighbors. At the same time, it also entails an element of cultural competitiveness or perhaps even resistance, an implicit response to claims of Arab genealogical superiority using the very methods of the Arab “science of genealogy” (ʿilm al-nasab) itself. In fact, as we shall see, Jews were one of several non-Arab minority groups to take up genealogy in this particular way. At the broadest level, then, this work, in investigating Jewish genealogical claims, illuminates a strategy that various populations utilized as they sought cultural legitimacy within the medieval Arab-Islamic world. Individual and societal interests converged, as an ennobling lineage could benefit at one and the same time both the specific dynast and the larger community of which he was a member.
It is my hope that the cultural insights gained through the kind of critical evaluation of genealogies undertaken in this work will encourage further research along such lines in the field of medieval Jewish history. Few will quibble with the premise that ancestral claims can tell us as much, if not more, about the period in which they were asserted as they can about the succession of past generations they putatively record. Historians of medieval Europe have been particularly attentive to connections between social developments and genealogical claims. Georges Duby correlated the extensive genealogical literature produced in France during the twelfth century with a number of critical changes that were then affecting the French nobility, among them a profound shift in its very conception of the family.28 Others have made similar efforts at contextualizing genealogical activity.29 Historians of Islamic civilization have demonstrated a comparable sophistication in dealing with genealogical sources, paying close attention to the social and political factors that lay behind the efforts to systematically document Arab lineages in the early Abbasid period.30 Historians of medieval Jewish society have, by contrast, been relatively uncritical in their approach to these materials, often treating genealogical sources as no more than reserves of data to be selectively pillaged for the purposes of reconstructing family histories.31 In so doing, they have tended to avoid a consideration of the motives that prompted medieval Jews to record at certain moments and in particular ways the lineages of specific individual members of their society. And though recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in collecting and sorting genealogical information, relatively little effort has been given to understanding the social and cultural factors that determine both how such knowledge is acquired and how it is ultimately presented. Indeed, inquiries of this sort are sometimes viewed as entirely peripheral to what is deemed the proper practice of genealogical research. I hope the present work will succeed in demonstrating that the problematization of Jewish genealogical claims is both relevant and important—and not merely for individuals narrowly engaged in research on genealogical materials but for those broadly interested in understanding medieval Jewish culture as well.
The Sources
The most important materials on the nesiʾim come from the Cairo Geniza, an enormous and highly varied corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts that came to the attention of Western scholars in the late nineteenth century. Jewish tradition prohibits the destruction of sacred documents so as to prevent desecrating the written name of God. When such writings became worn out or were no longer of use, medieval Jews, following an ancient custom, either buried them in a cemetery or stored them in a special repository called a geniza.32 In practice, this courtesy was often extended to texts that we might regard as “secular” in nature as well, especially when written in Hebrew characters. One such repository was located on the premises of the Ben Ezra synagogue, a Jewish prayer house dating to the Middle Ages in what was formerly the town of Fustat (and today is the neighborhood of Old Cairo).33 The contents of that repository make up what is commonly known today as the Cairo Geniza. Accumulated over roughly a thousand years and now dispersed among some thirty libraries and private collections across the globe, the Geniza materials comprise roughly quarter million paper and parchment folio pages. The largest collection of these materials, amounting to roughly three-fourths of the total, was acquired in 1898 by Cambridge University Library at the instigation of Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), Reader in Rabbinics at the university.34
As one might expect, the vast majority of the Geniza manuscripts contain pages of biblical codices, rabbinic texts, legal codes, and works of Jewish philosophy, mysticism, and liturgical poetry. Subjects as disparate as the history of Jewish sectarianism, the vocalization of the biblical text, the development of halakha, Jewish thought and Hebrew literature have benefited from the discovery of these works, many of which were previously unknown. But preserved among these literary remains are also some 15,000 pages of documentary materials, sources that include business contracts, court dockets, marriage and divorce certificates, correspondence of all sorts, and records of the local Jewish community. These documents, written in Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, are most abundant for the years between 1000 and 1250, dubbed the “classical Geniza period,” and constitute, in the absence of the kinds of archives available for medieval Europe and the Ottoman Empire, an unparalleled resource for the social, religious, and economic history of the Near East in the high Middle Ages. And because Fustat was home to one of the most important Jewish communities in the period covered by the documents, a community that served among other things as the hub of a commercial network stretching from India to Spain, the Cairo Geniza records offer a panoramic view of Jewish life in the Islamic world, shedding light on people, places, and events far beyond the borders of Egypt. It is these documents that provide the majority of the source material utilized in this study.35
Overlapping with and complementing the Cairo Geniza sources are two manuscript collections that were amassed by the Karaite bibliophile Abraham Firkovich (1786–1874). Currently housed in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, these collections contain over 15,000 Arabic and Hebrew items.36 Some of Firkovich’s hoard was procured in Aleppo, Damascus, and Jerusalem; but the majority of the manuscripts, many of which date from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, were likely taken from the geniza of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo.37 As we would expect given their provenance, these manuscripts have proven to be of immeasurable importance for the study of the history and literature of the Karaites, a distinct group within medieval Jewish society about which more will be said below. While the Firkovich collections contain fewer documentary sources than the Geniza, they are nonetheless an important source of information regarding Jews’ genealogical concerns, as many prominent Karaite figures, including authors and religious leaders, were themselves nesiʾim. The first Firkovich collection was sold to the Imperial Library in 1862, the second in 1876—decades before Schechter’s acquisition of the Cairo Geniza manuscripts for Cambridge. But because scholars outside of Russia were not permitted regular access to the materials during the Soviet era, research on its contents is still in its earliest stages. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, new efforts have been made to catalog and publish some of these important manuscripts.
The recovery of these various manuscript materials has transformed our understanding of the history of Near Eastern Jewish society in dramatic ways. Yet research involving them is often painstaking and slow. As a repository for worn-out writings, the Geniza was not designed to safeguard documents for future consultation, but rather was intended to be a place where they could be respectfully discarded. Its contents, therefore, are highly uneven, the result of haphazard and unpredictable processes of disposal. Furthermore, the manuscripts themselves are frequently in poor condition. Most are torn, and many are mere fragments. And even when one is fortunate enough to be able to make out several clear lines of writing, language and style can present further obstacles. Personal correspondence, one of the most important genres used in this study, is characteristically obscure, allusive, and lax in its adherence to the rules of Arabic grammar. Posing a particular challenge to the historian are the difficulties involved in properly dating documents; many make no mention of the day, month, or year when they were written. Only by means of careful comparison with other, more firmly datable materials can such documents be placed in a chronological sequence.
Despite these limitations, however, the Geniza materials and the related manuscripts from the Firkovich collections constitute an unrivaled source for measuring and evaluating the importance of biblical genealogies for Jews in the Islamic East. The present study is based on over 400 of these texts, a corpus that includes correspondence, court records, communal records, genealogical lists, liturgical compositions, poetry, chronicles, biblical commentaries, and responsa. Offering a window onto the lives and mentalities of common men and women, this wealth of material reveals that Benjamin’s and Petaḥya’s descriptions of the exilarch in Baghdad were not merely the idiosyncratic adulations of outsiders, but echoes of a collective concern with the Davidic line that ran strong and deep within Near Eastern Jewish society itself. And so if, because of their vagueness or their poor state of preservation, many a Geniza text can do little more than attest to the existence of a nasi in some otherwise unspecified context, such materials should nonetheless be seen as meaningful, for in aggregate they strengthen our central contention that a visible and symbolically significant family of Davidic dynasts emerged during the Middle Ages to occupy a crucial place in Jewish society.
From the earliest days of research on the Geniza, scholars recognized that its materials could shed fresh light on already familiar historical events and individuals. Over the past century the biographies of Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, to name only two of the most illustrious examples, have been considerably enriched by such newly discovered materials, enabling us to follow with greater precision the course of their respective careers, to situate them within larger social networks, and to comprehend the genesis and evolution of their writings. But the intersection of Geniza sources with well-known medieval texts has also permitted entirely new issues to come the fore, in some cases even leading to some rather significant revisions in the historiography. Such was the case with the nesiʾim. Though familiar with medieval texts that mentioned nesiʾim—texts like Benjamin’s travel account or Judah al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni, both of which had been printed as early as the sixteenth century—Jewish historians working before the systematic study of the Geniza paid scant attention to them. As documents from the Geniza began to be edited, however, and a wealth of new information on Davidic dynasts surfaced, interest began to grow. The newly available manuscripts not only directed attention to the nesi’im as a subject worthy of investigation, they also encouraged the rereading of printed texts containing hitherto unappreciated references to them. In such a manner the Geniza supplied the contextual background for more nuanced interpretations of some well-known medieval sources.
Therefore, while Geniza and Geniza-related manuscript materials loom large in the present study, providing not only the catalyst for my research but also the lion’s share of my sources, they do not define the parameters of this work. Rather, like many working on the Jewish community reflected in those documents, I have also made use of contemporary “non-Geniza” materials wherever relevant, following the lead of my subject matter and not the provenance of my sources. And in fact a surprisingly wide range of non-Geniza texts relate in one way or another to the subject of the nesiʾim, providing a broad array of perspectives from which to evaluate the meaning of Davidic ancestry for medieval Jews and Muslims. These sources include printed chronicles, poetic compositions, halakhic literature, and, as we have already seen, travel accounts. Yet another important body of material comes from a variety of medieval Islamic sources, including reports in biographical dictionaries, chronicles, belletristic writings, collections of ḥadīth, and documents preserved in formularies prepared for use by government secretaries. In its stunning diversity this rich corpus of material demonstrates the importance as well as the pervasiveness of Jewish fascination with biblical lineage.
The nature of these materials has determined to a great extent both the approach and the scope of this book. Given the inherent vagueness and the still tenuous dating of many of the relevant sources, not to mention the unresolved debates concerning the biographical details of quite a few nesiʾim, I have adopted what I believe is the prudent course of synchronic analysis, concentrating my efforts on providing an outline of a broad cultural pattern rather than trying to identify its development over the course of the period covered. The termini of this study are similarly a function of the Geniza sources, which are most abundant for the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. While in a few instances I have introduced texts that lie outside of those temporal parameters, I have done so with a view to demonstrating the depth and persistence of the conceptual shift that lies at the heart of this study and that is most readily glimpsed in the classical Geniza period. The physical setting of this book has in like manner been determined by the geographical dimensions of the Geniza world, with Egypt, Palestine, and Syria standing at its center, Iraq and Yemen in flanking positions, and Spain and North Africa receding to the margins.
Previous Scholarship
Reminiscent of their twelfth-century forerunners, the first modern scholars to direct their attention to the House of David in the Middle Ages were captivated by the idea of Jewish power and tended to approach the nesiʾim in terms of the authority they exercised within the medieval Jewish community. The first sustained treatment appeared in 1914 as an appendix to Samuel Poznanski’s important study of the gaonate in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was titled “The Exilarchs in the Post-Gaonic Period.”38 Poznanski, a rabbi and scholar whose primary research interests lay in the field of Karaite history, brought together in these twenty-some pages scattered bits of information culled from literary sources as well as a few recently published Geniza materials to reconstruct the history of the Davidic line over the course of a period that was barely discussed in any of the extant medieval chronicles. As the title of the appendix suggests, Poznanski’s efforts were focused on Davidic rulers and dealt primarily with individuals who held the office of exilarch. Poznanski’s work is significant not only for its pioneering effort to organize isolated references into a chronological framework, but also for developing the broad picture of a centralized exilarchate based in Baghdad, which, in the middle of the eleventh century, splintered into what would become several successor institutions located in cities throughout the Near East. Poznanski took the year 1038, the year Hayya gaʾon died and the traditional terminus of the Babylonian gaonate, as the pivotal moment in this process. Among other things, Poznanski must also be credited for the decision to include in his study Karaites who held the title exilarch, a reflection of his deep interest in that community and an acknowledgment of the important connections underlying claims to royal ancestry in various segments of Jewish society.
Poznanski’s presentation was carried forward and significantly nuanced in a series of studies undertaken by Jacob Mann, one of the first historians to rely primarily on the newly available manuscript materials.39 Though generally averse to drawing broad conclusions, Mann nevertheless offered a comprehensive account of the emergence of local exilarchal offices in an important article written in 1927 that went significantly beyond the biographical data gathered by Poznanski. Its title, “The Exilarchal Office in Babylonia and Its Ramifications at the End of the Gaonic Age,” reveals that Mann, like Poznanski, understood his subject to be the effects of decentralization on an institution of Jewish communal authority.40 In it Mann discussed several families of nesiʾim and the dynastic offices of leadership they established, beginning in the eleventh century, in places like Mosul, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Mann portrayed these nesiʾim as political pretenders who sought to replicate the exilarchal office beyond the borders of Iraq, and offered as causal explanations for their dispersion both external and internal factors. On the one hand, he attributed their appearance to the disintegration of Abbasid authority in the tenth and eleventh centuries, arguing that as local Muslim governors asserted their independence from Baghdad it became both necessary and expedient for Jews living in their lands to establish autonomous political institutions of their own. Local exilarchal offices were thus understood to be small-scale replacements for the Babylonian exilarchate, which was sustained up until that point by a strong and centralized Abbasid state.41 At the same time, Mann also saw the establishment of these offices as the result of a rivalry within the exilarchal dynasty itself—between the descendants of the brothers David ben Zakkay and Josiah ben Zakkay—that began in the first half of the tenth century and dragged on for almost a century.42 According to Mann, tensions between the two families for control of the exilarchate reached the breaking point with the nomination of Hezekiah ben David as exilarch sometime before the year 1021. Hezekiah’s appointment marked the restoration of the exilarchate to the line of David ben Zakkay, his great-grandfather, and the displacement of the descendants of Josiah ben Zakkay, who had had been in possession of the office for two generations. Mann proposed that Josiah’s descendants, deprived of their patrimony, decided to abandon Baghdad in order to establish rival exilarchal courts in towns in the newly autonomous outlying provinces. The impression that Josiah’s descendants were striving to create local political institutions was reinforced by the discovery in the Geniza of a variety of titles bestowed by these nesiʾim on their supporters, titles that were patterned after those dispensed by the yeshivot and the Babylonian exilarchate.43
Mann’s theory made shrewd use of the new manuscript sources that were then coming to light—in particular the genealogical information they contained for eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century nesiʾim—and ingeniously integrated broad political developments in the Islamic world with the appearance of new institutions of local leadership in the Jewish community. It also solved what was becoming a growing problem with Poznanski’s explanatory model as more and more Geniza sources became available to scholars—namely, the fact that nesiʾim were evidently to be found in towns other than Baghdad before the year 1038.
What Mann’s explanation failed to address, however, is the extent to which the emergence of local exilarchal offices also marked a significant break with earlier conceptions of the Davidic line, a diffusion of the esteem that was once reserved for the Babylonian exilarchate alone. Is it not reasonable to assume that, in addition to the institutional and geopolitical factors identified by Poznanski and Mann, a new understanding of the status of the House of David had also come into play? And would not such a conceptual reorientation have in fact been a critical precondition for the eleventh-century reconfiguration of Davidic authority documented by both historians? Such questions become all the more urgent when we realize that Mann’s emphasis on the emergence of new exilarchal offices actually addresses only part of the phenomenon that is reflected in the manuscript sources. For, as we will see, not all individuals identified in the Geniza by the title nasi can legitimately be described as aspiring local exilarchs. Finally, Mann’s heavy reliance on personal grievance to explain the fragmentation of the exilarchate in the eleventh century appears overly reductive, attributing, as it does, complex and enduring historical developments to ultimately trivial causes.44 The inadequacy of similar kinds of arguments to account for the emergence of the Karaite movement—arguments that saw Karaism as the consequence of ʿAnan ben David’s rejection by the Jewish aristocracy in Iraq—should caution us against putting too much faith in explanatory models that would hang structural change on the petty jealousies of disgruntled individuals.45
In fact, Mann himself acknowledged that in many cases nesiʾim seemed to be most influential within Jewish society in realms other than the political. He noted, for instance, that nesiʾim in several areas, including Egypt, seemed to enjoy “only a spiritual hold on the people,” their authority possessing “more of a moral than a political character.”46 Under careful examination, then, Mann’s position appears somewhat ambivalent. While he approached the nesiʾim principally as a manifestation of Jewish communal leadership and situated them within the history of Jewish political authority in the Near East, he also conceded that political success was not necessarily the most accurate measure of their popularity or importance.47 Is it possible that in emphasizing the (largely unrealized) political ambitions of nesiʾim in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries Mann was confusing consequence and cause? Perhaps at the root of this phenomenon lay a new and more widespread veneration for Davidic ancestry within Jewish society—a respect that in turn allowed some members of that lineage to achieve influence in a variety of guises.48
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
Goitein’s assessment of the nesiʾim may also be understood in terms of the broad critique of his work proposed by Miriam Frenkel.53 Frenkel observes that in Goitein’s reconstruction the classical Geniza period was characterized, above all, by a harmonious blending of Mediterranean and Hellenic elements. It was, moreover, an essentially capitalist and meritocratic society whose leaders were, appropriately, pragmatic and hardworking businessmen. As she puts it, Goitein viewed the Geniza society as “democratic, liberal, open and rationalist … the perfect embodiment of the western ideal.” As such, she notes, it was also “by necessity the complete antithesis of everything the west considered ‘oriental.’” Frenkel concludes that Goitein’s commitment to such a view led him at times to downplay or dismiss altogether what might have appeared as eastern characteristics in the Geniza sources.54
Recently, Frenkel’s insights were productively extended in a new direction to help explain Goitein’s evident minimization of magic and magical texts in the Geniza.55 Her work may also be of assistance in accounting for Goitein’s treatment of the nesiʾim, whose preponderance in the Geniza could have called into question some of the central values that Goitein associated with its Jewish community. Popular enthusiasm for their royal ancestry would appear to run counter to his vision of the Geniza society as embodying a democratic and egalitarian spirit. The principle of dynastic privilege, underscored by their celebrated genealogies, would seem to challenge his notion of the world of the Geniza as a place where men could make of themselves what they wished. And the strong affinities that existed between the popularity of the nesiʾim and the veneration of the family of Muḥammad among Muslims might suggest that Mediterranean Jewish society was very much a part of its eastern, “oriental” environment. By focusing on the nesiʾim as failed aspirants to political power Goitein would thus have been justified in downplaying their historical importance and affirming the rational, meritocratic, and democratic elements that he identified at the core of the Geniza society.
A number of Goitein’s students, chief among them Mark R. Cohen and Moshe Gil, have added considerably to the biographies of individual nesiʾim through both the identification of new materials and the reinterpretation of previously known ones. Cohen’s main contributions have come by way of his revisionist study of the origins of the post of the head of the Jews (raʾīs al-yahūd) in Egypt, in which he demonstrated that the office emerged gradually in the second half of the eleventh century, and not, as earlier historians (including Mann) had assumed, in the middle of the tenth. Among other things, Cohen highlighted the crucial role played by the politically ambitious and divisive nasi David ben Daniel (d. 1094) in the consolidation of the office of the head of the Jews.56 In a separate study Cohen also explored the political career of David’s father, the nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya (d. 1062), who served as gaʾon of the Palestinian yeshiva from 1051 to 1062.57 In writing about father and son Cohen noted the powerful symbolism of their ancestry, recognizing its broad appeal for medieval Jews and Muslims alike. Cohen’s conclusions not only transformed our understanding of the beginnings of local Jewish leadership in Egypt, they also dealt an indirect blow to one of Mann’s central claims about the nesiʾim. Mann had argued that the failure of nesiʾim to establish themselves as leaders in cities like Fustat and Qayrawān could be explained by the presence of alternate and pre-existing forms of local Jewish leadership in Egypt and Tunisia, respectively. In the case of Fustat, Mann pointed to the office of the head of the Jews, which he and others presumed was founded by the Fatimid authorities shortly after their conquest of Egypt in 969. Cohen’s findings, which delayed the emergence of that institution by over a century, thus inadvertently reopened the puzzling question of why nesiʾim were so often unsuccessful in Egypt as political figures, and suggested that the received analytic paradigm was in need of reconsideration. Despite wide recognition for Cohen’s work, its implications for the significance of the nesiʾim were left unrealized.
Gil’s voluminous writings, culminating in his monumental histories of the Jewish communities in Palestine and Iraq, have dealt with virtually every available source on the Davidic family in the Middle Ages.58 Through painstaking efforts he has extracted from them a wealth of detail, greatly expanding and complicating what we know about exilarchs and nesiʾim in the Near East. Gil’s contributions have not been limited to the accumulation of biographical data, however; he has also analyzed a number of literary texts that provide insight into the social and cultural meaning of the House of David for medieval Jews. His studies of the so-called “Scroll of Evyatar” and the Judeo-Arabic story of the exilarch Bustanay, two polemical tracts from the Geniza attacking the Davidic line, draw attention to the deep passions, both positive and negative, which enveloped claimants to that legacy and made them subjects of community-wide fixation.59 In these studies, as in his biographical sketches, Gil has performed an invaluable service for future scholars, providing the raw materials and the necessary foundation for further levels of synthetic research. Gil’s own work, however, has shied away from such analysis, tending instead to make adjustments to the framework set forth by Mann and later modified by Goitein and Cohen.
Despite the accumulation of a substantial body of new information, Mann’s reconstruction thus continued to provide the basic framework for evaluating the significance of the nesiʾim in medieval Jewish society through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.60 Subsequent research has drawn from Mann’s work two important conclusions concerning the nesiʾim: first, that they are most appropriately understood as a topic within Jewish political history; and second, that their general lack of success as political leaders indicates that they constituted a relatively unimportant phenomenon within Jewish society.61 Taken together these impressions have understandably provided little incentive for a reexamination of the nesiʾim. As historical appraisals, however, they would seem to tell only part of the story. Most significantly, they fail to acknowledge the considerable effort that medieval Jews invested in celebrating, documenting, and occasionally resisting claims to Davidic ancestry. If nesiʾim only occasionally achieved positions of real political power, as official appointees or otherwise, their ubiquitous presence in the Geniza society nonetheless bears witness to the potency of the concept of the Davidic line that they embodied for their contemporaries.
My treatment thus differs from that of previous scholars in approaching the widespread appearance of the nesiʾim as symptomatic of deeper, more fundamental processes operative within Jewish society in the medieval Near East—concerns over how Judaism could stake a unique claim to a scriptural heritage that it shared with Islam and Christianity, and anxieties about how to resolve the apparent contradiction between the Jewish people’s divine election and its second-class status in the eyes of the dominant society. From this perspective, preoccupation with biblical lineage appears as an adaptive response to the challenges of minority existence in the Islamic world, a reaction fueled by Jewish associations of King David with a golden age free of “the domination of foreign rule,” whether in the remote biblical past, the messianic future, or both.62 But the fact that these collective worries should so readily have found an answer in the celebration of a sacred lineage also reveals the operation of another process, one that pulls in the opposite direction, blurring rather than underscoring the lines between minority and majority culture. For Jewish veneration of the Davidic line was articulated through a vocabulary of respect for noble ancestors native to the Arab-Islamic environment, and the elevated importance of Davidic dynasts closely mirrored contemporary Islamic admiration for members of the family of Muḥammad. In its renewed interest in King David’s family, then, Near Eastern Jewry also demonstrated the extent to which it had become integrated into its religious and cultural environment, an instance of what Bernard Lewis has described as the Jewish community’s “Islamicization.”63
Davidic ancestry served, most immediately, the interests of its claimants, distinguishing them from their fellow Jews, conferring upon them social status, and in some cases even entitling them to positions of political power. Integral to my approach, however, is the notion that, besides its obvious relevance for the individual dynast, Davidic ancestry was also, fundamentally, a matter of collective concern. In one way or another all the sources upon which this study is based reflect a community-wide investment in the claims of descent from David, an interdependence of dynasts and their supporters. The reverence that claimants to the Davidic legacy found among their coreligionists attests to the fact that medieval Jews had a shared stake in ancient Israel’s royal line, its continuation and prestige stirring even those who were not direct heirs to its nobility. To be sure, there were also cries of opposition as individuals and factions sought, from time to time, to minimize the importance of the contemporary Davidic line or to challenge claims to authority within the Jewish community based on membership in its ranks. In the final analysis, however, these represent exceptions to the general rule, isolated voices, which, in their dissent, only call greater attention to the otherwise pervasive enthusiasm for the Davidic dynasty. Approached in this manner—as the expression of collectively held concerns—the importance attached to the House of David becomes a valuable measure of the attitudes and the anxieties, the wishes and the fears of medieval Jewish society generally, not merely the story of a select few within that community.
The Jewish Community
I have referred to the minority status of Jews living in the medieval Islamic world, and a word about that population and its status is in order. Jews constituted a numerical minority of the total population among which they lived, though precise figures are notoriously hard to come by. We can get a very general sense of their numbers, however, by considering the population estimates arrived at by historians working on various regions in or about our period. Rough estimates place the total population of Egypt in the beginning of the fourteenth century at about three million.64 Working with data from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when overall population figures were probably slightly higher, historians have suggested that the Jewish population ranged between ten and twenty thousand. It would seem, then, that the Jews probably numbered less than one percent of the total population of the country.65 In cities such as Fustat and Cairo, however, their numbers represented a much greater portion of the urban population, perhaps exceeding ten percent of the total.66 The situation appears to have been similar in Muslim Spain. Eliyahu Ashtor estimated that Jews represented little more than one half of one percent of the total population of the country, but a considerably larger percentage in the urban centers.67 Unfortunately, comparable statistics are not available for the Jewish populations in Iraq and Iran, though it seems unlikely that the situation there would have been considerably different.68
But Jewish minority status was not simply an issue of population size; it was also a matter of law. In the eyes of the Islamic legal tradition Jews were a dhimmī people, a category that applied to Christians and various other non-Muslim religious communities as well.69 Dhimmī populations were to be protected in their person and property, were guaranteed the right to practice their religion, and were extended a wide measure for self-government. In return, they were expected to pay the jizya, an annual poll tax, and to comply with various discriminatory restrictions that are enumerated, in their best-known form, in the so-called Pact of ʿUmar. Collectively, these regulations reinforced Islam’s preeminence within the social order and established a hierarchical relationship between its adherents and the dhimmī populations.70 More than a numerical inferiority to Muslims (as well as Christians), the Jews’ minority status thus involved a legislated subordination to the dominant faith. The subjugated yet protected status envisioned by the dhimmī system well suited Islam’s ambivalent theological stance vis-à-vis Judaism and Christianity, a position that combined elements of recognition and rejection.
If the dhimmī system had recognizable social goals, its application nonetheless varied considerably over time and from place to place. Historians generally agree, however, that the Jewish minority fared well and experienced little in the way of systematic oppression before the middle of the thirteenth century. Geniza documents, for instance, suggest that many of the terms of the Pact of Umar were more or less neglected in Egypt and Palestine during the Fatimid (969–1171) and early Ayyubid (1171–1250) periods, and the same appears to have been the case in Spain as well before the Almohad conquests in the middle of the twelfth century. Rules requiring dhimmīs to wear distinctive clothing and prohibiting them from holding government office, which were applied with greater regularity in later periods, seem to have remained largely unenforced before the middle of the thirteenth century. At the same time, the documents make it abundantly clear that the Fatimids and Ayyubids routinely collected the poll tax from the dhimmī populations and that it constituted a major financial burden for the lower classes. And despite the generally stable conditions that prevailed during this period, violence and religious persecution were not entirely unknown. We hear, for instance, of episodes of Jewish suffering in Egypt and Palestine during the reign of the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim (996–1021), in Granada in conjunction with the assassination of the Jewish vizier Joseph Ibn Naghrīla (d. 1066), in North Africa and Spain during the Almohad invasions (1140s), and in Yemen under the Shīʿī ruler ʿAbd al-Nabī Ibn al-Mahdī (1160s).
While dhimmī legislation sought to impose a marginal legal status on the Jews, the openness that prevailed in the economic and cultural spheres offered them opportunities to integrate more fully into their surroundings. Few if any limitations were placed on Jewish commercial activity during the classical Geniza period, permitting Jews and Muslims to interact on an equal footing in their business dealings. Jewish commercial activity was also highly diversified, underscoring the absence of the kinds of restrictive measures that emerged in Europe and confined Jews there to a limited number of professions. The Geniza demonstrates that Jews were employed as professionals, as skilled artisans, as manufacturers of goods, as retail and wholesale merchants, and even as landowners and agricultural producers. And commercial partnerships involving Jewish and Muslim businessmen, by no means uncommon in the Geniza period, provided regular occasions for members of the two groups to form close personal bonds as they jointly pursued profit.71 As a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist, evidently feeling some anxiety about the trend, put it: “Becoming partners with [dhimmīs] leads to intermingling, and that, in turn, to friendship.”72
Jews also succeeded in transcending the limitations of their dhimmī status through various intellectual and cultural pursuits that were facilitated, in turn, by their willing embrace of the Arabic language, the vernacular of scholarly discourse in the Islamic world. By the tenth century Jews had thoroughly adopted the language of their Muslim neighbors, relying on it not only for everyday communication but also as their primary literary medium, even when composing works of a distinctively religious nature.73 When we find rabbinic authorities in the twelfth century discussing the permissibility of praying in Arabic we get a sense of how far the process of linguistic acculturation had actually gone.74 The Jews’ easy embrace of Arabic was surely encouraged by their assessment of its close affinities with Hebrew and Aramaic.75 Maimonides writes in Pirqei Moshe (Chapters of Moses), echoing what must have been a fairly common perception, that “all who know Arabic and Hebrew agree that they are without doubt one language.”76 Through Arabic, Jews gained access to the vibrant intellectual life of the Islamic Middle Ages, to Arabic literature and to the flourishing study of Greek philosophy and science. The study of philosophy, especially, took place in an intellectual climate and in physical settings that were religiously integrated, allowing dhimmīs and Muslims to find common cause in the quest for rationally based knowledge. Describing the interdenominational circles of philosophical study that thrived in Baghdad in the tenth century, Joel Kraemer writes: “Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, reason, and friendship made possible the convocation of these societies, devoted to a common pursuit of the truth and preservation of ancient wisdom, by surmounting particular religious ties in favor of a shared human enterprise.”77 And even when working in more religiously homogeneous settings, philosophers were nevertheless predisposed to a view of society that tended to minimize the significance of confessional differences, emphasizing, as they did, the value of man’s natural capacity for rational thought.
Medicine was another important field in which Jews could participate relatively unhindered before the middle of the thirteenth century.78 Jews and Muslims studied the medieval compendia of Galen’s works together, practiced their profession side by side, and valued one another’s scientific treatises. An illustrative example is Isaac Israeli (d. ca. 955), an Egyptian Jew who attended the founder of the Fatimid dynasty, ʿUbayd Allāh, trained Muslim students, and authored a number of well-regarded Arabic medical texts, including one on urine that was praised by an eleventh-century Muslim chronicler as “the most comprehensive work on the subject ever written, and by which [Israeli] gained superiority over all other writers.”79
There is even evidence, albeit of a more modest nature, of Jewish writers who composed belletristic works in Arabic, thereby earning reputations among contemporary Muslim poets and literary savants. Most of our information on these Jewish literati comes from the sixteenth-century Moroccan chronicler al-Maqqarī and reflects the situation in al-Andalus.80 But there is also the intriguing example of Judah al-Ḥarīzī (d. 1225), the Spanish-born writer and translator who left his homeland, traveled through the Near East, and ultimately settled in Aleppo. An eight-page biographical entry in an encyclopedia of Arabic writers by Ibn al-Shaʿār al-Mawṣilī (d. 1256) praises al-Ḥarīzī for being a “talented and erudite” poet, revealing that Jews who wrote in Arabic verse could indeed find a place in Eastern literary circles as well.81
But the adoption of Arabic was not simply a matter of exchanging one linguistic medium for another; nor, it may be argued, were forays into religiously neutral territory its most dramatic result. In espousing Arabic, Jews were also engaging in a wide-ranging process that produced “fundamental changes in the articulation of Jewish culture.”82 The scientific study of Hebrew grammar, for example, began among Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands who had internalized the linguistic pride and the systematic methods of linguistic analysis of their Muslim neighbors.83 And the first efforts to work out a consistent presentation of Jewish theology commenced only after Jews began to think according to the conceptual paradigms developed by the scholars of Arabic Kalām.84 Linguistic and cultural integration did not, therefore, automatically imply an attenuated commitment to the rigors of Jewish observance or a weakened connection to one’s community. Such a conclusion is reinforced not only by the permission extended to Arabic prayer, cited above, but also by the query of Joseph Ibn Jābir, an avid student of Maimonides’ Arabic-language Commentary on the Mishnah who had difficulty reading Hebrew and who wrote to the master asking if he intended to produce an Arabic translation of his Mishneh Torah. Maimonides had no such plans, but Ibn Jābir’s question remains a telling indicator of the extent to which deeply committed Jews could be integrated into their cultural and linguistic surroundings.85
Despite the opportunities for acculturation and the relaxed enforcement of dhimmī legislation during the early part of the Middle Ages, Jews nonetheless saw themselves as a distinct minority in the Islamic world. Even in the writings of those who most fully embody the attainments of Goitein’s “Jewish-Arab symbiosis” we find frequent references to the Jews’ distinct status. In a poem that urges God to sweep away the dominion of Islam, the Andalusian Hebrew poet and neoplatonic philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol (d. 1058) characterizes the Jewish people’s beleaguered state in terms that also recall the powerful symbolism of the Davidic line.86 “Your people sit in exile,” he writes, “surrounded by enemies who now say we have no king.”87 And a perception of the Jews’ lamentable condition is similarly evident in the alternate title of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari—The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion.
The most profound and best-known testimonial to this pervasive view, however, comes from the pen of Maimonides. In 1172 he addressed a letter to the Jews of Yemen offering them comfort as they confronted a wave of religious persecution and a crisis of faith. Surveying the history of the Jews’ experiences in Muslim lands, Maimonides wrote: “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and debase us…. No nation has ever done more harm to Israel, and none has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.”88
Maimonides, who had himself lived through a period of religious intolerance under the Almohad rulers of North Africa and Spain, wrote these words to relieve the suffering of his coreligionists in a moment of intense pain and to provide them with a theologically meaningful explanation for their travails. His comments, colored by personal experience and an understandable empathy for the plight of his addressees, should not, therefore, be taken as an impartial assessment of the position of the Jews in Muslim lands. They do, however, reflect the degree to which medieval Jews—even those integrated into the intellectual, cultural, and economic life of Islamic society—perceived themselves as members of a distinct and subordinate population.89 The Jews’ sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis the dominant society is reflected again in Maimonides’ discussion of the individual who chooses to abandon his faith. Such a person, he imagines, is able to rationalize his decision by saying to himself: “What advantage for me is there in clinging to Israel, who are humiliated and oppressed? Rather, it is better for me to join those with the upper hand.”90
The Jews’ minority status thus entailed significant complexities and ambivalences. Relegated to a distinct and inferior legal status by dhimmī policies, the Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands consistently represented themselves as the other in Islamic society, a notion conveyed through the frequently invoked rivalry between the biblical brothers Isaac (the Jews) and Ishmael (the Arabs/Muslims). But as that paradigm also suggests, the Jews saw themselves as connected in fundamental ways to their cultural and intellectual surroundings at the very same time. Literary scholars have identified this ambiguity as critical to understanding the new forms of Hebrew poetry that emerged in the tenth century, most dramatically in al-Andalus. There Jewish writers began to write poetry—the most prized form of literary expression in the Arabic-speaking world—in a new style that not only incorporated the themes, metrical patterns, and structural aspects of Arabic verse but that was designed to serve precisely the same social functions as well.
Among the most remarkable aspects of this revolution in Jewish literary activity is that it took place in Hebrew and not, as we might have expected given its textual models, in Arabic. Jewish writers, in other words, began to write Arabized poetry, but did so emphatically using Hebrew, a situation that appears all the more surprising when one recalls that Jews were at that time making use of Arabic for almost every other kind of writing. The most compelling explanation for this seemingly anomalous preference for Hebrew in the composition of verse is that it represents an internalization of the ideals of ‘arabiyya, the cultural and religious conviction that Arabic is the most perfect language and, among other things, the most ideally suited for poetic expression.91 According to such a reading, Jews who wrote and patronized Arabic-style Hebrew poetry had not only absorbed such notions, but they had also begun to think of Hebrew and Hebrew literature in comparable ways. In composing poetry that was decidedly Hebrew in language but Arabic in form and function, they were, in a sense, reflecting the complexities inherent in their very identity. In one respect, of course, the production of such literature bespeaks the Jews’ profound embeddedness within the surrounding cultural environment, their having already internalized Arabic literary tastes and categories of thought. They were, as Ross Brann puts it, simply “doing what comes naturally.”92 At the very same time, however, it also underscores their status as an “other” in the Islamic world, as a minority seeking legitimacy from, or engaged in a cultural rivalry with, the host society. Summarizing this other dimension, Raymond Scheindlin observes that “the Jews seem to have adopted the essentially competitive idea of the perfection of their own language from the Arabs, and they chose to write poetry in Hebrew as a kind of answer to the Arabic claim.”93
As described by literary historians, the Jewish embrace of Arabic literary tastes, with its attendant complexities and conflicting motives, can also suggest ways of framing other realms of cultural interaction between Jews and Muslims. The Jews’ cultivation of ennobling ancestral traditions in the Middle Ages, no less a cultural formation than their production of Arabic-style Hebrew poetry, can, in fact, be understood along much the same lines. When Jews began, in new and more pronounced ways, to celebrate the genealogy of individuals who traced themselves back to biblical figures, they were, among other things, acting in accordance with a set of Arab-Islamic values that emphasized the virtue of distinguished ancestry and deemed the Arabs as being genealogically superior to all other peoples. The Jewish embrace and performance of nasab was, therefore, an unavoidably complicated affair, and, in the tensions it involved, not unlike the process by which Jews came to write according to a Hebraized form of Arabic aesthetics. On one hand, like Arabic-style poetry, it represented a form of cultural convergence; Jews were reflecting on their own communal history by means of new categories of thought that had, by that time, already become instinctual for them. On the other hand, thinking back to our twelfth-century travelers, it is not difficult to find an element of cultural competitiveness at work as well. As Benjamin, Petaḥya, and others demonstrate, the celebration of Davidic ancestry often involved a double gaze in which Jews studiously observed the way Muslims were evaluating them and their genealogies. Like poetry, genealogy could thus serve as a cultural domain in which Jews sought to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the host society. Viewed along these lines, the Jews’ turn toward nasab-style genealogy and their veneration of Davidic and other biblical ancestries that resulted from it speak not only to developments taking place within Jewish society, to the reconceptualization of elements of the Judaic heritage, but also, more broadly, to the multi-faceted patterns of cultural interaction that existed between the Jewish minority and the Arabic-Islamic majority.94
Rabbanites and Karaites
Thus far we have considered the religious-cultural divide between Jews and Muslims, but important divisions were also to be found within the Jewish community itself. Jews in the Near East and North Africa fell into two main religious factions: the Rabbanites, who felt bound by the traditions and norms of the talmudic rabbis, and the Karaites, who did not. More than just a theoretical debate over the religious authority of the rabbis, the dispute between Karaites and Rabbanites also resulted in significant disagreements about how, on a practical level, some of the most basic religious obligations should be carried out. Karaites and Rabbanites differed in the calendars they followed, in the prayers they recited, and in the dietary restrictions they observed. In order to address their distinctive spiritual needs, Karaites also formed separate communities, and supported, in many towns, synagogues and religious courts of their own.
The history of relations between Karaites and Rabbanites has been told primarily through the lens of the sharp polemics that authors in both camps composed during the Middle Ages. Not only were Karaites portrayed as dissenters from authentic Judaism, they were depicted as the sworn enemies of the Rabbanites themselves. Recent scholarship, however, particularly research based on documentary sources from the Geniza, has added considerable nuance to this picture, demonstrating that in day-to-day life medieval Karaites and Rabbanites actually shared a great deal more than was previously imagined.95 The Geniza has revealed, for instance, that, throughout the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, Karaites and Rabbanites married one another, made use of one another’s courts, and attended one another’s synagogues. Perhaps most surprising of all, we even find Karaites providing financial support to the Jerusalem yeshiva, an institution, which, at first blush, would seem to be wholly objectionable to professed opponents of rabbinic teaching. Addressing the broader significance of these findings, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger concludes that “the Karaites did not consider themselves to be separate from mainstream Judaism, and nor were they considered as such by the Rabbanites.”96
That the two groups formed a single Jewish community in the period we are examining has important implications for the present work, since, as we have already noted, nesiʾim were to be found among Karaites as well as Rabbanites. Indeed, later Jewish tradition held that the Karaite movement was founded by ʿAnan ben David, who was not only a member of the Davidic dynasty but a candidate for the office of exilarch as well.97 And in the following centuries nesiʾim who claimed descent from ʿAnan occupied positions of stature in the Karaite community.98 Historians, however, have tended to treat Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim as two somewhat distinct phenomena, an understandable approach given the different roles they played in the two communities. But to defer to such distinctions, I would argue, is also to fall back on the problematic assumption that the Davidic dynasty is best understood within the framework of Jewish political history, and to presume yet again that its significance is most essentially revealed in the patterns of communal authority its claimants exercised. As I have repeatedly stressed, the appearance of nesiʾim in the Middle Ages is, among other things, evidence of a new emphasis on noble ancestry within Jewish society and the internalization of the importance of nasab. And when viewed in this manner, the differences between Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim dissolve, both in effect constituting instances of Davidic privilege that point to a common, underlying process that pervaded all segments of Jewish society in the Islamic East. In elucidating the significance of Davidic ancestry I therefore make use of Karaite and Rabbanite materials, recognizing that there were practical differences in the way nesiʾim functioned in the two communities. The growing evidence of close interactions between Karaites and Rabbanites, however, suggests that any attempt to historicize medieval Jewish veneration of the Davidic line must acknowledge its manifestation in both groups. The fact that Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim made use of the same list of ancestors to establish their Davidic credentials, a list that included the names of talmudic sages, further compels such an approach, and provides, in its own way, yet another illustration of the interdependence of the two communities during this period.
Nesiʾim in Western Christendom
Those familiar with the history of the Jewish communities in Western Christendom may wonder why I have decided to focus exclusively on Jewish claims to Davidic ancestry in Islamic lands. For during the very centuries dealt with in this book several families of nesiʾim emerged in parts of Latin Europe too—in northern Spain, southern France, and perhaps even Germany.99 But while inspired by the same general emotional attachment to King David that underlay claims to his legacy in the Islamic world, these European dynasties ultimately fall outside the purview of this study, focused, as it is, on the way biblical lineages reflect and respond to the ambivalences of Jewish life in Arab-Islamic society. My interest is not in the mere fact that some medieval Jews claimed to be descendants of King David, but rather in the specific ways that claim was conceptualized in a given cultural matrix.100 Taking stock of genealogy is, after all, a more or less universal human enterprise. This study seeks to understand the social function it filled for Jews in the Islamic East.
There are other considerations as well suggesting that, while superficially similar, the two phenomena were in fact quite different from one another, distinct products of processes of parallel evolution. While nesiʾim in the East were occasionally invested with religious or political authority, their ancestral claims, as we have already noted, existed quite apart from a defined base of power in the Jewish community. This was not the case in Europe, where claims to Davidic ancestry developed only as an afterthought to or as a justification for the attainment of power by particular dynastic groups in specific communal contexts.101 This distinction is critical, I believe, as it points to broader divergences between Latin Europe and the Near East regarding the social meaning of lineage. Furthermore, nesiʾim in Muslim societies related to their Davidic ancestry in very different ways from their counterparts in Europe. Eastern nesiʾim were much more deeply invested in publicizing their lineage than were nesiʾim in Spain, France, and Germany, with genealogical records playing a particularly important role in the cultivation of their Davidic identity. European nesiʾim produced no genealogies as far as we know and in general exhibited none of the anxieties about proving their lineage that were such a commonplace in the East. As we see in the next chapter, the profound cultural differences separating the Jewries of Latin Europe and the Islamic East regarding the significance of the nesiʾim are brought to the fore in a famous question posed to Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237) by a French rabbi living in Alexandria.
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This book is divided into two sections. The first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, explores the new conceptualization of the royal line that emerged in Arab-Islamic lands during the Middle Ages. Chapter 1 demonstrates that, by the tenth century, Jews and Muslims had come to think of the royal line as a family that was distinguished, above all else, by its noble ancestry. The reorientation of respect for the Davidic dynasty around lineage reveals among other things the extent to which Jews had internalized discourses within Arab-Islamic society concerning the social value of a respected pedigree. This process helps to explain the prevalence and the geographic diffusion of Davidic dynasts in the Middle Ages, as well as the unique popularity that they enjoyed within Jewish society. It also coincides with a tendency to view the Davidic family as a Jewish counterpart to the ahl al-bayt, the family of Muḥammad.
Given the importance of their ancestry in the Middle Ages, Chapter 2 examines the various ways Davidic dynasts endeavored to articulate and make public their genealogical ties to King David. It focuses on three strategies: their development of elaborate genealogies connecting them to the biblical monarch, their preference for names associated with the Davidic family, and, to a lesser extent, the use of a lion’s image as a visual representation of the family’s royal origins. By these means, members of the Davidic line were able to reinforce popular interest in their ancestry and construct for themselves a public identity based on their distinguished pedigree.
The second part of the book, comprising Chapters 3, 4, and 5, looks at three contexts that nourished the significance of Davidic lineage and provided arenas in which its meaning was played out. This section follows an outward trajectory, moving by degrees from the medieval present to the mythic future and from an analysis of political culture within the Jewish community to a comparative analysis of the role genealogy played in the legitimization of non-Arab communities more broadly.
Examining texts bearing on several leadership crises in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, Chapter 3 demonstrates the important role that ancestry had come to play in political discourse within the Jewish community. The sources, which depict, among other things, conflicts between “the House of David” and “the family of Aaron,” highlight how political controversies in the medieval Near East could be conceptualized as disputes between competing lineages. At the same time these sources also underscore the extent to which an individual’s identification with an ennobling ancestor was selective and occasional, emerging most clearly at moments of competition or conflict.
Chapter 4 shifts from the medieval present to the eschatological future, exploring the widespread messianic excitement that characterized Jewish society in the Near East during the eleventh and twelfth centuries as another important matrix for understanding the depth of emotion inspired by individuals from the Davidic line. If a backwards-looking respect for noble ancestors was critical to the social meaning of Davidic lineage, no less so was the future-directed anticipation of the House of David’s redemptive potential.
Chapter 5 expands beyond the confines of Jewish society to consider Near Eastern Jewry’s concern with biblical ancestry in relation to the roughly contemporaneous genealogical preoccupations of Persians and Berbers. For these groups, as for Jews, ancestry provided both a means of integrating into Arab-Islamic society as well as a way to resist its claims of cultural superiority. My argument is that the genealogical traditions that stand at the center of this study should thus be viewed as one aspect of a much broader process whereby non-Arab peoples sought validation through the construction of Arab-style lineages.
Rather than structuring this book as a series of discrete textual studies, I have chosen to organize it thematically out of the conviction that a synthetic approach to the material more effectively displays the pervasiveness of the attitudes I seek to describe—and it is these attitudes, after all, and not the texts in which they are expressed, that constitute my real subject. Utilizing such an arrangement, however, also means that a few key sources must inevitably be taken up in a number of contexts. To limit repetition I have tried to provide background and bibliographic information with the first major discussion.