This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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The inclusion of such a stipulation in an investiture letter for the most powerful Jewish official in the Ayyubid realm attests to the influence that the Davidic family enjoyed in Egyptian Jewish society. But what is of particular significance for our purposes is that the letter understands the importance of the Davidic line as essentially deriving from its ennobling genealogy. The classical overlap of claims of Davidic descent with the occupancy of specific offices of Davidic leadership seems to have all but vanished in this thirteenth-century formulary. nesiʾim are quite simply those who can trace themselves back to King David. Written in the same period as Abraham Maimonides’ responsum to Joseph ben Gershom, the letter of appointment provides us with yet another glimpse of the way Davidic dynasts had come to enjoy a status that was principally oriented around a venerable genealogical claim.
A Noble Family
The move toward a more genealogically based perception of the royal line in the East resulted in other shifts as well. Jews in the Middle Ages began, for instance, to think of the Davidic family as precisely that—a kinship group united by its descent from a common ancestor. Such a notion is implied, of course, in the various rabbinic traditions asserting that the exilarchs were descended from David. But in the Middle Ages this idea was expressed more directly, and its implications—in terms of how contemporary nesiʾim were related to one another, for example—taken far more seriously. The effects of such thinking are evident in the genealogical text with which we began this chapter: Abraham al-Raḥbī repeatedly emphasizes that his subject is worthy of honor because he is a member of “the noble House of David,” by which he refers not only to the anonymous nasi’s ancestors, but to his living relatives as well. And above we noted Abraham Maimonides’ insistence on the obligation to honor the family of the nasi Hodaya. While the vertical lines linking individual nesiʾim to their biblical progenitors always counted most, horizontal connections between nesiʾim, underscoring their membership in a collective defined by blood ties, were now acknowledged too. Indeed, as the ancestry of the nesiʾim assumed ever greater importance, it is only natural that they should have been increasingly seen as members of a wider Davidic clan or tribe. While the substitution of Dāʾūdī for nasi emphasized most explicitly an individual’s vertical relationship to David, indirectly it also served to connect him to the many living claimants to the same ancestry.
One can recognize this notion in a letter sent to the nasi Solomon ben Jesse in the winter of 1236 in which the recipient is styled the lord of the “the Davidic faction [al-ṭāʾifa al-dāwūdiyya],” a formula that implies his membership in a larger network of noble relatives.58 The notion of a family of Davidic descendants also emerges from memorial lists for Karaite nesiʾim preserved in the Geniza. A typical list of this type begins with the formula: “A fitting memorial … for the memory of the noble family, the family of the House of David, the nesiʾim.”59 And the Judeo-Arabic version of the story of Bustanay, which describes the illegitimate union of a seventh-century exilarch with a non-Jewish captive, takes aim at “the pedigree of the Davidic family [nasab al-dāwūdiyya]” as a whole.60 And when the Andalusian-born exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1167) observes that the House of David is “a great and powerful family [mishpaḥa rabba ve-gedola]” that continues to flourish in his own day, he, too, expresses the new perception of the Davidic line as a descent group encompassing much more than just its office holding members.61 Finally, we may note an undated Judeo-Arabic letter from the Geniza addressed to Yefet ben Sasson that evinces the same idea when it refers to al-Nafīs the elder as “a branch of the prophetic, Davidic clan [farʿ al-ʿashira al-nabawiyya al-dāwūdiyya].”62
Nor were Jews the only ones to think along such lines. When the Arabic essayist al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868 or 869), discussing the love of homeland among various peoples, refers to the practice of “the children of Aaron and the family of David [al Dāwūd]” to transfer the bodies of their deceased to Palestine for burial, he too seems to reflect a tendency to think of Jewish society in terms of groups that are delimited by ancestry.63 Strengthening an observation made above, al-Jāḥiẓ’s comment also suggests that this phenomenon was not restricted to the Davidic line alone and that descent from a biblical ancestor defined other collectives within Jewish society as well. The perception of the Davidic line as primarily a descent group is similarly reflected in an observation by the eleventh-century Muslim historian al-Ḥasan ibn al-Bannāʾ. Describing a conflict among Jewish notables in Baghdad over the appointment of a new exilarch in 1069, Ibn al-Bannāʾ explains to his readers that the two rival candidates are “from the descendants of David [min awlād Dāwūd].”64
Geographic Distribution
We now find ourselves in a better position to understand yet another distinguishing feature of the medieval House of David: its geographic dispersion. By the tenth century, members of the Davidic family had begun to move westward, appearing in towns in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain.65 And the painstaking work of three generations of Geniza historians makes it clear that by the thirteenth century a dramatic redistribution of the Davidic family had occurred as members of a lineage once localized in Baghdad were settled in every corner of the Islamic world. Their research demonstrates that in virtually every case in which we find a nasi during these centuries living outside Iraq it is possible to trace him back in just a few generations to an ancestor who once lived in Iraq.66 As we see below, this is one of several ways in which the genealogical records of the Davidic line, when read with a critical eye, can provide clues to significant changes in the conception and organization of the royal family during the Islamic period.
In one respect, this diffusion of the Davidic line mirrored the political changes and economic pressures that were then reshaping Near Eastern society generally. A diminished capacity to administer effectively its outlying provinces had by the tenth century severely undermined the stability of the Abbasid caliphate. Formerly ruled by governors loyal to the Abbasid authorities, those far-flung territories now increasingly fell under the control of independent and sometimes hostile rulers. At the same time, economic disruptions impoverished the Abbasid heartland. One consequence of these developments was a migratory movement westward as merchants and intellectuals sought opportunities in the prosperous and newly autonomous lands along the Mediterranean.67 Jewish society, we know, was deeply affected by these transformations, and the migration of nesiʾim to communities outside Baghdad should perhaps be seen as yet another result of the ensuing redistribution of populations and economic power.68 Indeed, later Jewish legends would connect these developments explicitly as they described the way some local Muslim rulers, in asserting their independence from Baghdad, encouraged members of the Davidic family to visit or settle in their realms.69
From another perspective, however, the mobility of the nesiʾim can be viewed as a further consequence of the reconfiguration of the Davidic line that we have been examining. No longer defined by an authority structure, the royal family was able to move beyond its historic base of power in Iraq when conditions there became unfavorable. The Davidic family’s success in freeing itself, so to speak, from the Babylonian exilarchate, the institution that historically had defined it and geographically had anchored it, becomes clear when we consider the difficulties faced by various geʾonim as they struggled to maintain the allegiance of the communities under their jurisdiction in the same period. As desperate appeals to local Jewish communities indicate, their status remained intimately bound up with the survival of the yeshivot they headed. A telling illustration of this emerges from the correspondence of Samuel ben ʿEli, who wrote a number of letters to communities in Iraq and Syria urging them to continue to support his institution. In one of these Samuel offers the following rationale for the enduring significance of the yeshiva, and by implication his own authority:
You are aware that the place of the yeshiva is the throne of the Torah, which represents Moses our teacher in every age. The word yeshiva derives from the verse, “And Moses sat (va-yeshev) to judge the people” [Exodus 18:13]. It is the place that is designated for instruction and for study of the Torah…. Thus the yeshiva is the place of Moses our teacher, and in it the Jewish faith is perfected. All who oppose it oppose the Torah, whose place it is,