This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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privilege that point to a common, underlying process that pervaded all segments of Jewish society in the Islamic East. In elucidating the significance of Davidic ancestry I therefore make use of Karaite and Rabbanite materials, recognizing that there were practical differences in the way nesiʾim functioned in the two communities. The growing evidence of close interactions between Karaites and Rabbanites, however, suggests that any attempt to historicize medieval Jewish veneration of the Davidic line must acknowledge its manifestation in both groups. The fact that Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim made use of the same list of ancestors to establish their Davidic credentials, a list that included the names of talmudic sages, further compels such an approach, and provides, in its own way, yet another illustration of the interdependence of the two communities during this period.
Nesiʾim in Western Christendom
Those familiar with the history of the Jewish communities in Western Christendom may wonder why I have decided to focus exclusively on Jewish claims to Davidic ancestry in Islamic lands. For during the very centuries dealt with in this book several families of nesiʾim emerged in parts of Latin Europe too—in northern Spain, southern France, and perhaps even Germany.99 But while inspired by the same general emotional attachment to King David that underlay claims to his legacy in the Islamic world, these European dynasties ultimately fall outside the purview of this study, focused, as it is, on the way biblical lineages reflect and respond to the ambivalences of Jewish life in Arab-Islamic society. My interest is not in the mere fact that some medieval Jews claimed to be descendants of King David, but rather in the specific ways that claim was conceptualized in a given cultural matrix.100 Taking stock of genealogy is, after all, a more or less universal human enterprise. This study seeks to understand the social function it filled for Jews in the Islamic East.
There are other considerations as well suggesting that, while superficially similar, the two phenomena were in fact quite different from one another, distinct products of processes of parallel evolution. While nesiʾim in the East were occasionally invested with religious or political authority, their ancestral claims, as we have already noted, existed quite apart from a defined base of power in the Jewish community. This was not the case in Europe, where claims to Davidic ancestry developed only as an afterthought to or as a justification for the attainment of power by particular dynastic groups in specific communal contexts.101 This distinction is critical, I believe, as it points to broader divergences between Latin Europe and the Near East regarding the social meaning of lineage. Furthermore, nesiʾim in Muslim societies related to their Davidic ancestry in very different ways from their counterparts in Europe. Eastern nesiʾim were much more deeply invested in publicizing their lineage than were nesiʾim in Spain, France, and Germany, with genealogical records playing a particularly important role in the cultivation of their Davidic identity. European nesiʾim produced no genealogies as far as we know and in general exhibited none of the anxieties about proving their lineage that were such a commonplace in the East. As we see in the next chapter, the profound cultural differences separating the Jewries of Latin Europe and the Islamic East regarding the significance of the nesiʾim are brought to the fore in a famous question posed to Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237) by a French rabbi living in Alexandria.
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This book is divided into two sections. The first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, explores the new conceptualization of the royal line that emerged in Arab-Islamic lands during the Middle Ages. Chapter 1 demonstrates that, by the tenth century, Jews and Muslims had come to think of the royal line as a family that was distinguished, above all else, by its noble ancestry. The reorientation of respect for the Davidic dynasty around lineage reveals among other things the extent to which Jews had internalized discourses within Arab-Islamic society concerning the social value of a respected pedigree. This process helps to explain the prevalence and the geographic diffusion of Davidic dynasts in the Middle Ages, as well as the unique popularity that they enjoyed within Jewish society. It also coincides with a tendency to view the Davidic family as a Jewish counterpart to the ahl al-bayt, the family of Muḥammad.
Given the importance of their ancestry in the Middle Ages, Chapter 2 examines the various ways Davidic dynasts endeavored to articulate and make public their genealogical ties to King David. It focuses on three strategies: their development of elaborate genealogies connecting them to the biblical monarch, their preference for names associated with the Davidic family, and, to a lesser extent, the use of a lion’s image as a visual representation of the family’s royal origins. By these means, members of the Davidic line were able to reinforce popular interest in their ancestry and construct for themselves a public identity based on their distinguished pedigree.
The second part of the book, comprising Chapters 3, 4, and 5, looks at three contexts that nourished the significance of Davidic lineage and provided arenas in which its meaning was played out. This section follows an outward trajectory, moving by degrees from the medieval present to the mythic future and from an analysis of political culture within the Jewish community to a comparative analysis of the role genealogy played in the legitimization of non-Arab communities more broadly.
Examining texts bearing on several leadership crises in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, Chapter 3 demonstrates the important role that ancestry had come to play in political discourse within the Jewish community. The sources, which depict, among other things, conflicts between “the House of David” and “the family of Aaron,” highlight how political controversies in the medieval Near East could be conceptualized as disputes between competing lineages. At the same time these sources also underscore the extent to which an individual’s identification with an ennobling ancestor was selective and occasional, emerging most clearly at moments of competition or conflict.
Chapter 4 shifts from the medieval present to the eschatological future, exploring the widespread messianic excitement that characterized Jewish society in the Near East during the eleventh and twelfth centuries as another important matrix for understanding the depth of emotion inspired by individuals from the Davidic line. If a backwards-looking respect for noble ancestors was critical to the social meaning of Davidic lineage, no less so was the future-directed anticipation of the House of David’s redemptive potential.
Chapter 5 expands beyond the confines of Jewish society to consider Near Eastern Jewry’s concern with biblical ancestry in relation to the roughly contemporaneous genealogical preoccupations of Persians and Berbers. For these groups, as for Jews, ancestry provided both a means of integrating into Arab-Islamic society as well as a way to resist its claims of cultural superiority. My argument is that the genealogical traditions that stand at the center of this study should thus be viewed as one aspect of a much broader process whereby non-Arab peoples sought validation through the construction of Arab-style lineages.
Rather than structuring this book as a series of discrete textual studies, I have chosen to organize it thematically out of the conviction that a synthetic approach to the material more effectively displays the pervasiveness of the attitudes I seek to describe—and it is these attitudes, after all, and not the texts in which they are expressed, that constitute my real subject. Utilizing such an arrangement, however, also means that a few key sources must inevitably be taken up in a number of contexts. To limit repetition I have tried to provide background and bibliographic information with the first major discussion.
Chapter 1
“Sharīf of the Jewish Nation”: Reconceptualizing the House of David in the Islamic East
Sometime