This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
the social and political factors that lay behind the efforts to systematically document Arab lineages in the early Abbasid period.30 Historians of medieval Jewish society have, by contrast, been relatively uncritical in their approach to these materials, often treating genealogical sources as no more than reserves of data to be selectively pillaged for the purposes of reconstructing family histories.31 In so doing, they have tended to avoid a consideration of the motives that prompted medieval Jews to record at certain moments and in particular ways the lineages of specific individual members of their society. And though recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in collecting and sorting genealogical information, relatively little effort has been given to understanding the social and cultural factors that determine both how such knowledge is acquired and how it is ultimately presented. Indeed, inquiries of this sort are sometimes viewed as entirely peripheral to what is deemed the proper practice of genealogical research. I hope the present work will succeed in demonstrating that the problematization of Jewish genealogical claims is both relevant and important—and not merely for individuals narrowly engaged in research on genealogical materials but for those broadly interested in understanding medieval Jewish culture as well.
The Sources
The most important materials on the nesiʾim come from the Cairo Geniza, an enormous and highly varied corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts that came to the attention of Western scholars in the late nineteenth century. Jewish tradition prohibits the destruction of sacred documents so as to prevent desecrating the written name of God. When such writings became worn out or were no longer of use, medieval Jews, following an ancient custom, either buried them in a cemetery or stored them in a special repository called a geniza.32 In practice, this courtesy was often extended to texts that we might regard as “secular” in nature as well, especially when written in Hebrew characters. One such repository was located on the premises of the Ben Ezra synagogue, a Jewish prayer house dating to the Middle Ages in what was formerly the town of Fustat (and today is the neighborhood of Old Cairo).33 The contents of that repository make up what is commonly known today as the Cairo Geniza. Accumulated over roughly a thousand years and now dispersed among some thirty libraries and private collections across the globe, the Geniza materials comprise roughly quarter million paper and parchment folio pages. The largest collection of these materials, amounting to roughly three-fourths of the total, was acquired in 1898 by Cambridge University Library at the instigation of Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), Reader in Rabbinics at the university.34
As one might expect, the vast majority of the Geniza manuscripts contain pages of biblical codices, rabbinic texts, legal codes, and works of Jewish philosophy, mysticism, and liturgical poetry. Subjects as disparate as the history of Jewish sectarianism, the vocalization of the biblical text, the development of halakha, Jewish thought and Hebrew literature have benefited from the discovery of these works, many of which were previously unknown. But preserved among these literary remains are also some 15,000 pages of documentary materials, sources that include business contracts, court dockets, marriage and divorce certificates, correspondence of all sorts, and records of the local Jewish community. These documents, written in Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, are most abundant for the years between 1000 and 1250, dubbed the “classical Geniza period,” and constitute, in the absence of the kinds of archives available for medieval Europe and the Ottoman Empire, an unparalleled resource for the social, religious, and economic history of the Near East in the high Middle Ages. And because Fustat was home to one of the most important Jewish communities in the period covered by the documents, a community that served among other things as the hub of a commercial network stretching from India to Spain, the Cairo Geniza records offer a panoramic view of Jewish life in the Islamic world, shedding light on people, places, and events far beyond the borders of Egypt. It is these documents that provide the majority of the source material utilized in this study.35
Overlapping with and complementing the Cairo Geniza sources are two manuscript collections that were amassed by the Karaite bibliophile Abraham Firkovich (1786–1874). Currently housed in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, these collections contain over 15,000 Arabic and Hebrew items.36 Some of Firkovich’s hoard was procured in Aleppo, Damascus, and Jerusalem; but the majority of the manuscripts, many of which date from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, were likely taken from the geniza of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo.37 As we would expect given their provenance, these manuscripts have proven to be of immeasurable importance for the study of the history and literature of the Karaites, a distinct group within medieval Jewish society about which more will be said below. While the Firkovich collections contain fewer documentary sources than the Geniza, they are nonetheless an important source of information regarding Jews’ genealogical concerns, as many prominent Karaite figures, including authors and religious leaders, were themselves nesiʾim. The first Firkovich collection was sold to the Imperial Library in 1862, the second in 1876—decades before Schechter’s acquisition of the Cairo Geniza manuscripts for Cambridge. But because scholars outside of Russia were not permitted regular access to the materials during the Soviet era, research on its contents is still in its earliest stages. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, new efforts have been made to catalog and publish some of these important manuscripts.
The recovery of these various manuscript materials has transformed our understanding of the history of Near Eastern Jewish society in dramatic ways. Yet research involving them is often painstaking and slow. As a repository for worn-out writings, the Geniza was not designed to safeguard documents for future consultation, but rather was intended to be a place where they could be respectfully discarded. Its contents, therefore, are highly uneven, the result of haphazard and unpredictable processes of disposal. Furthermore, the manuscripts themselves are frequently in poor condition. Most are torn, and many are mere fragments. And even when one is fortunate enough to be able to make out several clear lines of writing, language and style can present further obstacles. Personal correspondence, one of the most important genres used in this study, is characteristically obscure, allusive, and lax in its adherence to the rules of Arabic grammar. Posing a particular challenge to the historian are the difficulties involved in properly dating documents; many make no mention of the day, month, or year when they were written. Only by means of careful comparison with other, more firmly datable materials can such documents be placed in a chronological sequence.
Despite these limitations, however, the Geniza materials and the related manuscripts from the Firkovich collections constitute an unrivaled source for measuring and evaluating the importance of biblical genealogies for Jews in the Islamic East. The present study is based on over 400 of these texts, a corpus that includes correspondence, court records, communal records, genealogical lists, liturgical compositions, poetry, chronicles, biblical commentaries, and responsa. Offering a window onto the lives and mentalities of common men and women, this wealth of material reveals that Benjamin’s and Petaḥya’s descriptions of the exilarch in Baghdad were not merely the idiosyncratic adulations of outsiders, but echoes of a collective concern with the Davidic line that ran strong and deep within Near Eastern Jewish society itself. And so if, because of their vagueness or their poor state of preservation, many a Geniza text can do little more than attest to the existence of a nasi in some otherwise unspecified context, such materials should nonetheless be seen as meaningful, for in aggregate they strengthen our central contention that a visible and symbolically significant family of Davidic dynasts emerged during the Middle Ages to occupy a crucial place in Jewish society.
From the earliest days of research on the Geniza, scholars recognized that its materials could shed fresh light on already familiar historical events and individuals. Over the past century the biographies of Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, to name only two of the most illustrious examples, have been considerably enriched by such newly discovered materials, enabling us to follow with greater precision the course of their respective careers, to situate them within larger social networks, and to comprehend the genesis and evolution of their writings. But the intersection of Geniza sources with well-known medieval texts has also permitted entirely new issues to come the fore, in some cases even leading to some rather significant revisions in the historiography. Such was the case with the nesiʾim. Though familiar with medieval texts that mentioned nesiʾim—texts like Benjamin’s travel account or Judah al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni, both of which had