This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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and transferred to new types of communal leadership, while the implied genealogical ties to David, which became so important in the East, tended to recede into the background. In towns like Narbonne, Barcelona, and Toledo the title was adopted by members of a powerful Jewish aristocracy who benefited from close ties to the ruling nobility. This sense of the title was also projected into the past. The depiction of Jacob Ibn Jau’s rise to power in late tenth-century al-Andalus in Sefer ha-qabbala (Book of Tradition) makes it clear that, as Abraham Ibn Daud and others in twelfth-century Christian Spain understood it, the title nasi signified above all else someone who was entrusted with communal authority. According to Ibn Daud, al-Manṣūr, the Umayyad regent, took a liking to Ibn Jau and
issued him a document placing him in charge of all the Jewish communities from Sijilmasa to the river Duero, which was the border of his realm. [The decree stated] that he was to adjudicate all their litigants, and that he was empowered to appoint over them whomsoever he wished and to exact from them any tax or payment to which they might be subject…. Then all the members of the community of Cordova assembled and signed an agreement [certifying] his position as nasi, which stated: “Rule over us, you, your son, and your son’s son also.”30
If appointment by the temporal authorities and authorization by the Jewish community had been crucial for nasi status as it was understood by Ibn Daud, royal ancestry apparently was not since earlier in his chronicle Ibn Daud informs his readers that members of the Davidic line were of negligible significance in Jewish society in al-Andalus.31 Moses Naḥmanides’ objection to the excesses of the nesiʾim in Barcelona reveals a similar perception of the title as marking communal authority rather than royal ancestry. Complaining about the impiety and heavy-handed rule of the Barcelona nesiʾim, he suggests that their status derived from their appointment to “the office of bailiff and their moving in the courts of kings and their palaces.”32
While some of these aristocratic European families did, eventually, develop foundation stories—but not, it must be noted, genealogical lists—linking their ancestors with the line of the exilarchs, such traditions emerged in response to and as an explanation for preexisting power and influence. Writing about this process in Spain, Yitzhak Baer observes that “because of their success at court, Davidic lineage was ascribed to them, the title Nasi bestowed upon them, and they were allowed whatever special privileges they arrogated to themselves.”33 And even then Davidic lineage rarely amounted to more than an expendable accessory of the Jewish aristocracy in Europe. A comment by Judah al-Ḥarīzī illustrates the divergence in the way Jews in the Islamic East and Jews in Western Christendom understood the title. “Among their nesiʾim,” al-Ḥarīzī writes of the Jewish community of Toledo, “is the Levite Rabbi Meir ben Todros.”34 In Christian Spain, where the title nasi was regularly applied to local elites, such a description would have been entirely comprehensible. But in the Islamic East, where lineal descent from King David was the primary qualification for nasi status, it would have made little sense. A comparison with the situation in Christian Europe thus clarifies the unique and contextually specific semantic shift that occurred in the East.
The growing importance of Davidic ancestry as such is also evident in the substitution of the word dāʾūdī for the title nasi in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic. Dāʾūdī means “descendant of David” and is a typical Arabic noun of relation, or nisba—a grammatical form used to identify an individual on the basis of a distinguishing characteristic such as physical appearance, place of origin, profession, or, as in this case, ancestry. Dāʾūdī is not, therefore, a literal rendering of nasi, but rather an interpretation that exposes the particular significance the title held for Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands. Used by both Muslims and Jews, the term points unequivocally to the way the ancestral claim eclipsed layers of meaning connected with particular functions and positions.35 The ease with which the Hebrew and Arabic terms could be substituted for one another is demonstrated by a pair of Judeo-Arabic letters sent three weeks apart from Israel ben Nathan to Nahray ben Nissim. The first, dated December 20, 1051, refers twice to Daniel ben ʿAzarya, recently appointed head of the Palestine yeshiva, as “al-dāʾūdī,” while the second, written on January 11, 1052, just as naturally styles him “our master, the nasi.”36
The same process also led to the interchanging of the Hebrew term kohen with the Arabic hārūni, “descendant of Aaron.” Thus, for example, a letter sent by Abraham ben Ḥalfon to ʿEli ben Ḥayyim in November 1090 refers to the addressee as ʿEli ha-Kohen in the second line of the text, but as ʿAllūn ibn Yaʿīsh al-Hārūnī in the Arabic-script address written in the margins.37 It is understandable that the Arabic forms were preferred in communications with the Muslim authorities.38 Such substitutions reveal deep processes of cultural reconfiguration; they are evidence not only of the Jews’ embrace of Arabic, but of Islamic culture’s ability to structure Jewish notions of social status as well. The significance of titles like nasi and kohen had evidently come to be identified with their genealogical connotations, and it is precisely these elements that prevail in their Arabic renderings. While an ancestral affiliation had been implicit in the titles nasi and kohen, it was ultimately their translation that provided the occasion for that meaning to become explicit.
Stress on the genealogical connotations of the titles nasi and kohen is further illustrated by their extension in certain instances to women as well. A marriage contract drawn up in Cairo in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century effects the marriage of a certain Hillel the elder to a woman who is referred to as almana ha-kohenet, “the priestly widow,” employing a rabbinic designation to emphasize that she was the daughter of a kohen.39 In an undated Arabic letter from the Geniza, a Karaite woman informs her mother of various pieces of news including the fact that “the old woman from the line of David has died [mātat al-dāwūdiyya al-kabīra].”40 And a dirge written on the death of a nasi reflects a similar tendency. Noting the deceased’s noble lineage, the poem mourns: “Gathered up is the son of the nasi of my people, yea the son of nesiʾot.”41 That women could enjoy the cachet of a distinguished biblical lineage also emerges from a list of members of several families of Levites in which it is specifically noted whether a man’s wife or mother was herself of levitical lineage.42
Scholars have observed that medieval conceptions of ancestry were largely concerned with the male members of society: it was the ancestry of men that mattered most, and it was their descent from men that was normally taken into consideration. Only in such rare cases in which the maternal line was deemed to be more important than that of the father might it be cited instead.43 The genealogical records produced for members of the Davidic line (which are considered in greater detail in the next chapter) bear out this observation—Davidic ancestry is in every instance recorded through a succession of forebears that is exclusively male, even in those cases in which one would expect to find female ancestors.44 But if medieval women were not customarily regarded as the active transmitters of noble ancestry, the sources cited suggest that they might nonetheless occasionally be seen as its passive recipients. And the inclusion of women in the reckoning of at least some noble lineages provides yet another gauge of the importance of biblical lineage in the Geniza society.
The uncoupling of Davidic ancestry from structures of Davidic authority also lies at the heart of the famous exchange between Abraham Maimonides and Joseph ben Gershom, to which I have already alluded.45 The former, in his capacity as the administrative head of Egyptian Jewry, had appointed the French-born Joseph as a judge in Alexandria. Along with other European Jews in that town, Joseph became embroiled in a conflict with the nasi Hodaya ben Jesse. Though apparently not the occupant of an official post at the time of the conflict, Hodaya, a member of a family of nesiʾim hailing from Mosul that had established a presence in Syria and Egypt in the thirteenth century, was nonetheless an influential figure in the Jewish community of Alexandria, and, as we have seen, claimed the right to issue public bans on the basis of his ancestry.46 When Joseph sought to curb what he regarded as the nasi’s illegitimate exercise of authority, Hodaya retaliated by placing him under the ban, accusing