This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
to a letter of excommunication in 1376 who counted a mere eleven generations between himself and Judah ha-Nasi, was one such figure.16 Another was Nehorai, a physician in Tiberias, who, according to Petaḥya of Regensburg, “possesses a genealogy going back to Rabbi Judah.”17 But whether they linked themselves to David through the line of the exilarchs or through the line of the patriarchs, medieval nesiʾim made use of preexisting claims that had already been sanctioned by rabbinic tradition.
Continuities with the rabbinic past are also reflected in the titles borne by medieval claimants to Davidic ancestry. The rabbinic designation rosh ha-gola was used in the medieval period for exilarchs and on occasion for other members of the Davidic line, while the title nasi, as we shall see, became in the Middle Ages a generic term for many of the descendants of King David.
Finally, medieval members of the Davidic family saw themselves, and were viewed by their contemporaries, through the prism of rabbinic lore concerning patriarchs and exilarchs. Maimonides, for example, takes it as axiomatic that twelfth-century exilarchs were entitled to appoint judges with universal jurisdiction precisely as their rabbinic-era predecessors had been.18 And a similar impression is conveyed by Nathan ha-Bavli. In his flattering portrayal of the exilarchate, he describes a ceremony for the appointment of a new exilarch, which, we are told, included a public reading from the Torah. According to Nathan, when the Torah scroll is taken out “first a kohen reads, and after him a Levite. Then the cantor lowers the Torah scroll to the exilarch while the rest of the people stand. He takes the scroll in his hand, rises, and reads from it.”19 The ritual described in Nathan’s report is clearly based on the Babylonian practice of bringing the Torah scroll to the exilarch discussed above and defended by Yosi ben Bun.20 Demonstrations of deference toward medieval exilarchs were thus informed by the prerogatives and ceremonial practices recorded in earlier rabbinic literature.
In a similar vein, the rabbinic interpretation of Genesis 49:10, which sanctioned the authority of exilarchs and patriarchs in late antiquity, was extended without hesitation to medieval exilarchs as well. As noted in the introduction, Benjamin of Tudela explains that the Abbasid caliph treated the exilarch with great respect during their weekly interview in accordance with the injunction in Genesis 49:10. And Daniel ben Ḥisday, the reigning exilarch during Benjamin of Tudela’s visit to Baghdad, alludes to this same verse in a letter preserved in the Geniza in which he argues for his jurisdictional authority over the Jewish community in Egypt.21
But medieval exilarchs were not the only members of the royal family whose status was filtered through the lens of the rabbinic textual tradition. When ʿEli ha-Kohen composed a poem in honor of the nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya, head of the Palestinian yeshiva, in the spring of 1057, he too drew on the rabbinic understanding of Genesis 49:10 as a way of glorifying his subject’s noble ancestry.22 And when the Damascus nasi Jesse ben Hezekiah issued a letter of excommunication at the end of the thirteenth century against those attempting to ban the writings of Maimonides, he also found it expedient, in justifying his actions, to invoke the rabbinic gloss to that verse.23 The tendency to define the status of medieval nesiʾim through rabbinic statements about patriarchs and exilarchs is evident as well in the controversy involving the early thirteenth-century nasi Hodaya ben Jesse in Alexandria. Hodaya claimed an unusually broad and ultimately controversial license to impose public bans, invoking as his justification the talmudic principle that “one who is banned by the patriarch [nasi] is considered banned by all of Israel.”24 Abraham Maimonides penned an important responsum, examined in detail below, challenging Hodaya’s actions as well as his reasoning. For the moment, however, it is simply worth noting how easily medieval Davidic dynasts like Hodaya could identify themselves with rabbinic-period patriarchs and exilarchs and present themselves as their direct successors.
Beyond Patriarch and Exilarch
Despite the apparent continuities there are nonetheless some rather significant ways in which the medieval situation was at variance with that reflected in rabbinic sources. One crucial difference involves the expansion of the claim of Davidic ancestry beyond its historic, institutional base. The almost complete overlap of Davidic ancestry and Davidic authority found in rabbinic literature disintegrates in sources from the Middle Ages as claims to Davidic ancestry are no longer tied exclusively to particular authority structures in the Jewish community. If previously the social value of royal lineage was restricted to those individuals who succeeded in winning appointments as either exilarchs or patriarchs, during the Middle Ages the value of a Davidic pedigree could be actualized by a much wider pool of dynasts, most of whom would never hold a Davidic post.25 To be sure, many nesiʾim in the Middle Ages did hold positions of authority, and it is the nature of our uneven source material that much of what we know about the Davidic family concerns such individuals. Only a small fraction of those, however, held offices that were restricted to members of the Davidic family—what I mean by a Davidic post. The nasi Hodaya ben Jesse, for example, whom we just encountered, served as a judge in Alexandria, occupying a position that was in effect open to any male member of the Jewish community. As head of the Palestinian yeshiva, the nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya also held an official appointment, but this too was a communal post with no intrinsic connection to the Davidic line. More significantly, though, we also find nesiʾim who did not, as far we can tell, occupy any official post whatsoever, whose nasi status seems to have been a function of ancestry rather than authority. Thus, alongside the exilarchate, which continued to operate throughout the medieval period and which historically embodied the cachet of King David’s line, there emerged alternative configurations of the royal lineage, arrangements that were more emphatically oriented around the importance of noble ancestry.
The process I am describing can be seen in, among other things, a shift in the way the title nasi was used in medieval sources. In rabbinic literature, as we have noted, the designation was applied primarily to patriarchs, though it could be used for exilarchs as well. With the termination of the office of patriarch in the fifth century, the latter usage became more pronounced. The “Epistle of Sherira gaʾon,” for instance, illustrative of the convention used in the writings of the Babylonian geʾonim, consistently refers to the exilarch by the title nasi. But during the Islamic period the title also acquired a new and broader meaning as well, one that was determined by lineage rather than administrative function. And it was surely with this expanded sense of what it meant to be a nasi that Yefet ben David ben Shekhanya, cantor of the Palestinian-rite community of Fustat in the first half of eleventh century, wrote to Daniel ben ʿAzarya sending blessings of good fortune to “my master and lord, the great nasi Daniel, head of the yeshiva of the Pride of Jacob” as well as to “his three sons, the nesiʾim” who were then only children.26 To be recognized as a nasi it was thus no longer of necessity to be a leader. In describing the layout of “the great synagogue of the exilarch” in Baghdad, Benjamin of Tudela reflects this expanded and more genealogically focused usage of the title as well. “In front of the ark,” he informs his readers, “there are about ten steps of marble, on the uppermost of which are the seats of the exilarch and the nesiʾim of the House of David.”27 And in a similar vein, a poem that appears to have been written in celebration of the appointment of Sar Shalom ben Phineas to the office of exilarch refers to “our nasi Sar Shalom” along with “his sons, the nesi ʾim.”28 Indeed, medieval sources are replete with references to nesi ʾim who are designated as such apparently on the basis of their Davidic ancestry alone. And the same phenomenon is also attested among Karaites, from whom we might have expected greater efforts at controlling the use of the title given the legal and administrative roles that nesiʾim filled in their communities in Palestine and Egypt.29 What permitted and lay beneath the expanded use of the title in these instances, was, ultimately, a new way of thinking—a growing respect for Davidic ancestry per se and a sense that noble lineages had intrinsic and not merely expedient value.
The broadening of the title nasi in the Middle Ages was not a development that was altogether unique to the Near East. In Christian Europe, too, the title began to be used in ways that extended beyond its narrow signification in rabbinic sources, yet there the process followed a noticeably different