This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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