This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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