This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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