This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East

This Noble House

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the

Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

of the University of Pennsylvania

David B. Ruderman, Series Editor

Advisory Board

Richard I. Cohen

Moshe Idel

Alan Mintz

Deborah Dash Moore

Ada Rapoport-Albert

Michael D. Swartz

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THIS NOBLE HOUSE

Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East

ARNOLD E. FRANKLIN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Franklin, Arnold E., 1971–

This noble house : Jewish descendants of King David in the medieval Islamic East / Arnold E. Franklin. — 1st ed.

    p. cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4409-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. David, King of Israel—Family. 2. Jews—Nobility. 3. Jews—Genealogy—History. 4. Judaism—Relations—Islam. 5. Islam—Relations—Judaism. 6. Islamic Empire—Ethnic relations. I. Title. II. Series: Jewish culture and contexts.

CS28.F73 2012

296.3'97—dc23

2012002586

People are more akin to their contemporaries than to their ancestors.

—Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), ʿUyūn al-akhbār, 2:1

But one should never dismiss as nonsense things that other people took seriously.

—S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 5:260

Contents

A Note on Transliteration, Names, and Dates

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. "Sharīf of the Jewish Nation": Reconceptualizing the House of David in the Islamic East

Chapter 2. The Truth of the Pedigree: Documenting Origins and the Public Performance of Lineage

Chapter 3. Ancestry as Authority: Lineage and Power in Near Eastern Jewish Society

Chapter 4. Designated in the Past and for the Future: Davidic Dynasts and Medieval Messianic Anticipation

Chapter 5. "The Sharīf of Every People Is Well-Born": Genealogy and the Legitimization of Minority Culture

Conclusion

Appendix A. Halper 462: Transcription and Translation

Appendix B. A Tentative List of Davidic Dynasts Datable between ca. 950 and ca. 1450

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Manuscript Sources

Index

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration, Names, and Dates

The transliteration of Hebrew and Aramaic terms follows the system used in the Association for Jewish Studies Review with the following exceptions: ṭ is used for ṭet, ṣ for ṣade, and q for qof. Segol, sheva, and ṣere are all represented by e, while ṣere followed by yod marking the construct state is represented by ei. Other long vowels are not indicated, nor are final silent alef and he (thus: nasi and yeshiva). Arabic words have been transliterated in accordance with the system used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For common biblical names, such as Judah, David, and Daniel, the familiar English rendering has been retained, while less familiar Hebrew and Aramaic names, as well as those in Arabic, have been transliterated phonetically according to the systems above. In cases where a distinctive form of a name is commonly used in the scholarly literature (such as Maimonides and Ibn Daud), I have generally used that form. Familiar Arabic place names and dynasties (such as Baghdad and Abbasids) are given in the usual English form as well. Dates follow the conventional Western system.

Preface

In reviewing the period of the ancient Israelite monarchy, the tenth-century Judeo-Arabic chronicle Kitāb al-taʾrīkh (Book of Chronology) briefly narrates the story of Elijah’s triumph at Mount Carmel over the prophets of Baal:

At the end of the third year [of King Ahab’s reign] all the people of Israel gathered at Mount Carmel, and provoked the idolaters: Can your god make fire from the heavens descend to consume this sacrifice? So they cried out to the idol the whole day and made themselves weary, yet nothing happened. Then Elijah, peace upon him, prayed to his God, and the Lord, may He be blessed and exalted, sent fire from the heavens to the sacrifice, which had been soaked with twelve jugs of water. And [the fire] consumed it, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water. The people then fell to the ground prostrate before the Lord and cried out: "There is no god but the Lord [lā ilāha illā Allāh]!"¹

Kitāb al-taʾrīkh’s compressed style, its tendency to reduce historical periods to lists of leaders and important figures, and its often derivative nature might seem to justify its relative neglect by modern historians of Jewish society in the Islamic world. Yet for all of its aesthetic shortcomings, it nonetheless presents an important witness to the way the Jewish past was understood and the way familiar narratives were accordingly reformulated during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the passage quoted above offers a striking illustration of the processes by means of which Jews in Arabic-speaking lands reinterpreted their historical and religious traditions using categories of analysis and modes of expression embedded in the Arabic linguistic medium they shared with their Muslim neighbors.

Thus, while in many respects Kitāb al-taʾrīkh hews closely to the account of the confrontation on Mount Carmel as it is narrated in 1 Kings 18, in rendering the Israelites’ reaction to the appearance of the divine fire it deviates from the biblical text to dramatic effect. In the biblical story, the assembled masses proclaim their devotion to the Lord with the words "The Lord is God, the Lord is God [Adonay hu ha-Elohim Adonay hu ha-Elohim]!" Kitāb al-taʾrīkh does not translate this phrase literally, but instead offers an approximation of its meaning using the tahlīl, a Qurʾānic phrase that is also the unmistakable first line of the Islamic confession of faith and part of the traditional call to prayer, frequently given in English as There is no god but Allah.

While the phrase lā ilāha illā Allāh certainly conveys the general sense of the Israelites’ cry, other, more literal options were available to the author of Kitāb al-taʾrīkh. A medieval Judeo-Arabic translation of the Book of Kings, for example, scrupulously adheres to the Hebrew original when it renders the Israelites’ words as Allāh hūwa al-ilāh, Allāh hūwa al-ilāh (the Lord is God, the Lord is God).² And this more precise wording is also used in the popular and influential Judeo-Arabic tafsīr of Saʿadya ben Joseph al-Fayyūmī (d. 942) to translate Deuteronomy 4:35 and 4:39, verses that contain the very same Hebrew phrase uttered by the Israelites at Mount Carmel.³

There is, in fact, good reason to believe that medieval Jews consciously associated the Arabic words lā ilāha illā Allāh with the Islamic religious tradition. Consider, for example, Bustān al-ʿuqūl (The Garden of Intellects), a theological work by the twelfth-century Yemenite scholar Nethanel Ibn Fayyūmī. The second chapter of Nethanel’s work discusses at some length the significance of the numbers seven and twelve, citing in support of their esoteric meaning evidence from both the natural world and a variety of Jewish religious sources. But Nethanel also adduces proof for their importance from the formula lā ilāha illā Allāh, noting that the phrase is made up of a total of twelve letters that in Arabic orthography divide into seven discrete sets. Nethanel is explicit, moreover, about the fact that he is drawing support from an Islamic source, explaining that he has introduced this particular prooftext in order to demonstrate the similarity between us and them with regard to the numbers seven and twelve.⁴

How, then, are we to understand Kitāb al-taʾrīkh’s preference for the formula lā ilāha illā Allāh given both its apparent identification with the religious tradition of Islam and the availability of a more literal and neutral alternative? In having the Israelites on Mount Carmel effectively recite the first portion of the shahāda, the author of Kitāb al-taʾrīkh exposes the complex cultural situation of the Jews living in the medieval Islamic world. On one level, the scene reflects the extent to which Jews could accommodate themselves to, and even identify with, overtly religious elements in the discourse of the dominant culture. And in doing so Jews were apparently not alone. According to the anonymous author of a ninth-century work summarizing the principles of Melkite theology, "When we, the assembly of Christians, say lā ilāha illā Allāh, we mean by it a living God, endowed with a living Spirit which enlivens and lets die, an intellect which gives determination to whatever it wills, and a Word by means of which all being comes to be."⁵ Certain Arabic-speaking Christians were, in other words, evidently prepared to make use of the tahlīl formulation for their own particular religious needs as well.

On another level, however, the scene can be read as an expression of competitiveness toward the dominant society and its perceived triumphalism, an attempt to reassert the primacy of Judaism as the ultimate source of a monotheistic belief that was later adopted by Islam. In this regard we would do well to remember that Kitāb al-taʾrīkh is, by design, a chronographic work, and the clarification of sequence its very raison d’être. And such a concern with Jewish precedence is in fact made explicit in Nethanel Ibn Fayyūmī’s discussion of the shahāda mentioned earlier. After expounding the hidden meaning of the letters of the Islamic confession of faith, Nethanel tellingly adds that "the principles of this come from us, for we confessed [nashhadu] God’s unity in this manner before them, as we can see from the words of David, ‘For, who is a god but the Lord, and who is a rock but our God?’ [Psalm 18:32]."⁶ Such claims of Jewish precedence were ubiquitous in the Middle Ages, serving as one of the standard arguments by means of which Jews were able to make sense of the evident cultural affinities that existed between them and their Muslim neighbors. Philosophers, mystics, and poets alike embraced such a perspective, and in so doing justified potentially problematic cultural pursuits as legitimately, authentically, and originally Jewish.⁷ A biblical story about the triumph of the Israelites’ faith over idolatrous unbelief thus arguably becomes in Kitāb al-taʾrīkh a narrative subtly vindicating Judaism in its rivalry with Islam, a vindication made that much more complex by its conspicuous reliance on a formulation drawn from the text of the Qurʾān.

The process reflected in the passage from Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, whereby medieval Jewish tradition was shaped by formulations rooted in the religious discourse of Islam, lies at the very heart of the present study. The projection of the shahāda onto the canvas of the biblical past, with all the ambivalence inherent in such a maneuver, presents a concise and concrete instance of the kind of cultural reconfiguration with which the present work is concerned. In its interpretive translation of the words of the Israelites, Kitāb al-taʾrīkh provides a suggestive model for thinking about the way other, more amorphous elements of the Jewish tradition were similarly translated in order to conform to the normative values and cultural dictates of medieval Arab-Islamic society.

This study focuses on the reimagining of one such element of the Jewish tradition. A close analysis of a little examined social phenomenon, it explores how the meaningfulness of King David’s family was understood and articulated in the cultural orbit of Islam between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. David’s line has occupied a central place in Jewish reflections on both the past and the future from time immemorial. In Arabic-speaking lands during the Middle Ages, however, the House of David enjoyed a particular and unique status in Jewish society—a prominence reflected not only in the importance attached to the notion of the royal family, but in the concern shown to those considered to be its living members as well. This work explores that status, looking both at the cultural roots that nurtured it as well as at the various social contexts in which it flourished. It argues that, like the story of the Israelites’ declaration on Mount Carmel, Jewish thinking about the Davidic line was profoundly transformed by the medieval encounter with Arab-Islamic civilization, in particular the value that it placed on noble ancestry. Jewish veneration of the family of King David, I argue, like the image of the ancient Israelites reciting the beginning of the shahāda, was the result of a dynamic process of cultural translation. And as it happens, in the course of our investigation we will again return to Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, for in addition to summarizing and recasting biblical history it turns out that that text also preserves an important witness to medieval Jewish society’s deep interest in the Davidic line.

The genesis for this book came from a brief but characteristically prescient observation by S. D. Goitein, the towering figure of Geniza research in the second half of the twentieth century. Discussing the numerous Jewish claimants to Davidic ancestry who are mentioned in documents from the Geniza, Goitein succinctly proposed that their role may be compared with that of the Alids, or descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, in the contemporary Muslim society.⁸ He offered no evidence to back up his intuitive suggestion, nor did he or any of his students elaborate upon it in subsequent publications. Yet he was surely on to something deserving of further investigation. The present work is in many ways an extended development of Goitein’s insightful but largely overlooked observation. As we shall see, both Jews and Muslims did indeed come to view the family of King David as an analogue to the family of Muḥammad. In what follows we will explore the processes that were involved in this reconceptualization of the Jewish royal line as well as its ramifications for the Jewish community. But our inquiry will also lead us beyond the narrow confines of the House of David, for, as we shall see, changes in the way the Davidic family was perceived ultimately reflect transformations in Jewish society’s valorization of lineage more broadly. Jews, like other non-Arab populations in the Near East and North Africa, embraced the value that Arab-Islamic society placed on noble lineage, and as a result turned with renewed interest to the genealogical traditions that connected them and their forebears to the biblical past. The valorization of Davidic ancestry in the medieval Jewish community thus emerges as the most salient instance of what was in fact a more comprehensive concern with genealogy. Pursuing Goitein’s suggestion, then, we arrive at a largely unexplored realm of the dynamic interplay between Judaism and Islam, what Goitein himself referred to in another connection as the Jewish-Arab symbiosis of the Middle Ages.⁹

This Noble House

Introduction

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