This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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appealing to the holiness of the yeshiva, here so emphatically construed as a sacred site, in order to legitimize his status, Samuel reveals the degree to which geonic authority was linked to the prestige of specific geographies. Indeed, a long-standing argument on behalf the superiority of the traditions of the Iraqi yeshivot drew connections between their spiritual preeminence and their geographic location.71 The Davidic family, by contrast, enjoyed a prestige that had come to be embodied in the individual claimant, and that possessed meaning even in the absence of an institutional framework. Not restricted to a specific institution or by a particular geography, it could translate itself that much more easily to new physical surroundings.
Jewish population centers across the Islamic world were thus exposed to living members of the royal line. In addition to Baghdad, important cities and towns such as Tabrīz, Mosul, Damascus, Aleppo, Ḥamā, Acre, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Fustat, Aden, and Qayrawān all played host either to individual nesiʾim or to dynasties, with the result that Jewish society as a whole during this period came into increasingly more intensive contact with members of the Davidic family. Letters from the Geniza reveal that nesiʾim also circulated through provincial towns in the Egyptian countryside: we hear of them, for instance, in Ashmūm, Damira, al-Maḥalla, and Bilbays.72 We find nesiʾim as well in Daqūqa in Iraq and in Jām in northwestern Afghanistan.73 And this list comprises only those places where the presence of Davidic dynasts is explicitly reported. When we read, for instance, of a family of nesiʾim that traveled from Tabrīz to Cairo and back, or of another that moved from Mosul to Egypt, we know that they must have come in contact with a number of communities in the course of their travels, even though those places are not mentioned in our sources. Again, it must be emphasized that this stands in contrast to the situation in earlier periods during which the value of Davidic ancestry was restricted to the respective occupants of the patriarchate and the exilarchate, and the geographic distribution of members of the House of David was correspondingly limited to the locations of those offices. The momentousness of this new development is reflected in a series of medieval legends that focus on the circumstances under which a scion of the royal line arrived in a community outside of Iraq.74 As the value of Davidic lineage increased, so too did Jewish society’s overall exposure to descendants of the royal line.
Emphasizing the Links to King David
Medieval sources also reveal a new and profound concern with documenting and publicizing the royal lineage of nesiʾim. As nobility of ancestry began to eclipse function as the source of the royal line’s significance, it is little wonder that medieval nesiʾim should have given new attention to identifying themselves explicitly with their biblical forebear. As we see in the next chapter, they accomplished this through a variety of strategies, the most dramatic of which was the creation of complete ancestor lists like the one copied down by Abraham al-Raḥbī. Another important mechanism involved naming children after figures from the biblical line of David. Such practices helped publicize the ancestral claim of the royal line and reinforced a public identity that was oriented around descent from King David. This concern is revealed in more modest ways, too, as, for example, when the nasi David ben Daniel acknowledges in a letter to a supporter “the kindness of the God of David our father.”75 Similar expressions asserting a direct familial tie to the royal line are to be found in letters by the exilarchs Hezekiah ben David and Daniel ben Ḥisday.76
Letters addressed to Davidic dynasts echo this motif as well. An illustrative example is a Judeo-Arabic missive sent to Daniel ben ʿAzarya by an unidentified supporter that is largely concerned with the consolidation of Daniel’s authority in the Fustat community.77 In discussing two separate matters, one in which the writer himself was involved and another involving the addressee, the letter draws analogies to episodes in the life of King David. Significantly, in both instances the writer is careful to identify the biblical monarch as Daniel’s ancestor (jadduhu)78
A draft of a flowery letter to the nasi Hodaya ben Jesse reveals how another writer modified a conventional expression of religious piety in order to emphasize the genealogical connection between his addressee and King David.79 The missive, written by Joseph ben Obadiah in Syria, contains numerous corrections and revisions, some of a purely stylistic nature.80 Thus, in one instance the writer originally described the nasi with the phrase “perfect in wisdom and full of beauty [kelil ḥokhma u-male yofi],” but then evidently decided to switch the wording so that it should read instead “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty [male ḥokhma u-khelil yofi].” Another correction demonstrates how Joseph carefully revised his text to better flatter its recipient. Initially he included in his florid introduction the standard messianic wish that God should raise “the fallen tabernacle of David” during Hodaya’s lifetime. When revising his letter, however, Joseph apparently felt that it was important to acknowledge the nasi’s connection to King David in a more direct manner and accordingly changed the expression to read “the fallen tabernacle of David his father” (emphasis added).
Karaite marriage contracts from Egypt, which typically include a special clause mentioning the nasi who served as the head of the Karaite community, exhibit a similar tendency. Once such document, written in Fustat in 1036 under the jurisdiction of Semaḥ ben Asa, characterizes that nasi as “the descendant of the man of rest,” an allusion, on the basis of 2 Chronicles 22:9, to King Solomon.81 In similar fashion, a marriage contract drawn up in 1117 recalls the royal lineage of the the nasi Ḥisday ben Hezekiah ben Solomon when it speaks of “his virtuous fathers, the kings.”82
While clearly building on preexisting traditions about the Davidic ancestry of the family of exilarchs, such medieval strategies reflect a new investment in promoting and proving that lineage. Of particular significance for our purposes is recognizing the subtle shift this represents in the way claims to Davidic ancestry were now expressed, a transformation that has its roots in new attitudes about the importance of genealogy. As noted above, there is every reason to believe that exilarchs in late antiquity considered themselves to be the descendants of King David; indeed, the existence of such a family tradition is amply reflected in rabbinic writings. But there is no indication that they ever felt obliged to substantiate that claim by enumerating a sequence of ancestors that directly linked them to the royal line. The earliest recorded effort in that direction appeared around the beginning of the ninth century in Seder ʿolam zuṭa (The Lesser Order of the World).83 That text’s delineation of a sequence of Davidic descendants stretching from the biblical period to the end of the rabbinic era reflects not only the concern to link medieval nesiʾim with the Israelite king but a new preoccupation with complete and accurate genealogical record-keeping as well.
That a continuous chain of Davidic descendants was not actually worked out until the Islamic period is further suggested by a surprising feature of the Davidic genealogies that were recorded between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, genealogies that build upon the sequence of ancestors first laid out in Seder ‘olam zuṭa. Unlike family trees that follow multiple descent lines and chart the relations between contemporary descendants of the same ancestor, Davidic genealogies generally trace ascent from son to father through only one individual in a given generation. The ancestor list copied by Abraham al-Raḥbī, which traces a continuous chain of ninety-nine ascendants, is in this respect typical. Discounting one rather late and problematic exception, all such ancestor lists for the Davidic line converge at a single medieval progenitor—the fabled exilarch Bustanay, who is alleged to have lived during the Islamic conquests of the seventh century.84 In other words, an identical sequence of ancestors stretching all the way from King David to the early Islamic period is shared by virtually all of the extant Davidic pedigrees, Rabbanite and Karaite, with significant differentiation occurring only in the generations that come after Bustanay. Leaving aside the many still unresolved questions concerning Bustanay’s identity and precise floruit, this fact would seem to indicate that the meticulous recording of Davidic lineage did not precede Bustanay’s day. If it had, we would surely expect to find genealogies of other, non-Bustanay branches of the family (besides the fourteenth-century exception mentioned above).85 The almost complete absence of Davidic lineages traceable to an ancestor