This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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than the gaʾon was to be found in the exilarch (rosh ha-gola). Benjamin was evidently taken with the exilarch as well, devoting a long and admiring passage to him while passing over Samuel ben ʿEli with no more than a few perfunctory observations.
Like the gaonate, the office of exilarch emerged from barely perceptible origins at the beginning of the Islamic period to become an important institution of centralized Jewish communal leadership in the Middle Ages.14 While it is evident that exilarchs played an important role in administering the affairs of the Jewish minority population under the Abbasid caliphs and their successors, it is frustratingly difficult to delineate the precise functions that were entrusted to them. Not only do we lack the kinds of reliable sources that might afford such a reconstruction, the authority of the exilarchate appears to have fluctuated over the course of the medieval period, in particular in relation to that exercised by the geʾonim. An idealized picture of the office, its prerogatives, and its relationship to the gaonate two centuries prior to Benjamin and Petaḥya’s arrival in Baghdad is presented in the so-called “Account of Rabbi Nathan ha-Bavli,” a tenth-century work possibly composed to pacify a Jewish audience in North Africa that was concerned about recent reports of conflict among Jewish leaders and elites in Iraq.15 According to Nathan, the exilarch, like each of the geʾonim, functioned as the exclusive head of an administrative district (reshut). Nathan locates the regions under the authority of the exilarch in the lands to the east of the Tigris, and claims that within this territory he was entitled to appoint judges and collect internal taxes. Critical to Nathan’s account is the portrayal of relations between the Iraqi geʾonim and the exilarchate as mutually respectful and collaborative, a theme that is masterfully underscored in his description of the installation ceremony for the exilarch.16 The reality, of course, was a great deal messier: boundaries between the exilarchate’s and the gaonate’s spheres of influence, geographical and otherwise, remained in flux throughout the Middle Ages, frequently generating competition and conflict.
Nonetheless, a few points are fairly well established. At least in certain periods exilarchs do appear to have appointed Jewish officials in some local communities and to have collected revenues from them, although there are conflicting indications as to the extent of the area that fell under their jurisdiction. They also presided over a judicial apparatus referred to from time to time as a yeshiva. Additionally, they may also have represented the Jewish community before the Muslim authorities, though the generally held view that they were formally appointed in that capacity still remains a matter of conjecture.17 But the exilarchs’ prestige in the eyes of Benjamin, Petaḥya, and other medieval Jews did not derive merely—or even primarily—from their administrative powers or their access to the highest echelons of the Islamic state. Rather, it was based on their alleged ancestry—for the exilarchate, unlike the gaonate, was a hereditary office that was transferred among members of a dynasty that claimed descent from King David. Thus did the office enjoy a symbolic meaning for medieval Jews that transcended the particular functions exercised by it. The exilarchate was understood to be in a very real sense a living remnant of the ancient biblical monarchy, a notion that is captured in the bold assertion of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) that “the exilarchs of Babylonia stand in place of the king.”18 It should come as little surprise, then, that medieval Jews regarded the exilarchate as a potent symbol of national survival as well as an implicit rejoinder to those who saw in the dissolution of the ancient Judean monarchy clear evidence of God’s displeasure with the Jewish people.
In their narratives Benjamin and Petaḥya have left us revealing impressions of both the office of exilarch and of Daniel ben Ḥisday (d. ca. 1175), its long-reigning incumbent who died shortly after Benjamin’s visit and evidently had not yet been replaced at the time of Petaḥya’s.19 Benjamin’s portrayal of the exilarch follows closely on his earlier description of the caliph and suggests a deliberate pairing of the two figures. The exilarch is described as wise, rich, and generous, and like the caliph has in his possession “hospices, gardens, and plantations.” The great synagogue of the exilarch, with its “columns of marble of various colors overlaid with silver and gold,” recalls Benjamin’s depiction of the caliphal palace. Lineage constitutes another critical point of comparison: the caliph is introduced as a member “of the family of Muḥammad,” while the exilarch has a “pedigree going back as far as David, King of Israel.” At the center of this portion of Benjamin’s narrative is a description of the visit he claims the exilarch made to the caliph’s residence every Thursday—a rather improbable occurrence, but a device that nonetheless allowed Benjamin to bring his two subjects face-to-face. Here again the exilarch’s genealogy assumes importance. The exilarch was escorted to the caliph’s palace by an entourage on horseback comprising Jews and Muslims, and as he made his way through the streets of the city, heralds would proclaim in Arabic: “Make way for our lord, the son of David [sayyidunā ibn Dāʾūd]!”20 Benjamin emphasizes that this was the Muslims’ own appellation for the exilarch; the Jews, he says, referred to him in Hebrew as “our lord, the head of the exile.” Once inside the palace the exilarch would be seated on a special throne that stood opposite the caliph’s and that was reserved for the exilarch’s use on such visits. Benjamin concludes by explaining that the unusual display of deference toward the exilarch was in keeping with the wishes of Muḥammad himself, who recognized the exilarchs as legitimate successors to the Davidic monarchy and accordingly commanded his caliphal heirs to uphold the injunction in Genesis 49:10 that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet.”21
Petaḥya’s account of the exilarchate is much shorter than Benjamin’s. Yet in his brief notes Petaḥya relates a telling bit of information that brings into sharper focus the juxtaposition of the caliphal and Davidic dynasties suggested in Benjamin’s longer and more carefully crafted presentation. The caliph, he writes, had great affection for the exilarch because he “is of the seed of Muḥammad and the exilarch is of the seed of King David.”
A New Fascination with Biblical Ancestry
The city of Baghdad described by Benjamin and Petaḥya is, in many respects, an imaginary landscape—a mythical place where Jews are powerful, wealthy, and pious, but more important, where they are treated with respect by their non-Jewish neighbors. In conjuring up such an idealized scene these writers offer a comforting counterpoint to the perceived conditions of Jewish life in Latin Europe. The subject of the Jews’ loss of sovereignty had become an increasingly important element in medieval polemical exchanges between Jews and non-Jews; and not infrequently these exchanges centered on the scope of the exilarch’s authority, drawing from it broader theological conclusions. In the first half of the eleventh century, the Andalusian Muslim polymath ʿAlī Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) claimed to have debated the status of the exilarchate with the Jewish scholar and courtier Samuel Ibn Naghrīla (d. 1055). Ibn Naghrīla maintained that “to this day the exilarchs are descendants of David and thus the offspring of Judah, and they possess authority, kingship and rule.” While Ibn Ḥazm did not dispute the purported ancestry of the exilarchs, he insisted that they enjoyed no real authority and argued on that basis that the scriptural promise that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah” was clear evidence of the Bible’s mendaciousness.22 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Jewish theologians and exegetes worked vigorously to refute Christian arguments that began with the observable “facts” of Jewish powerlessness and degradation and, buttressed with scriptural prooftexts, went on to explain them as divine punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Jesus.23 The travel accounts of Benjamin and Petaḥya counter such arguments, though not, as did Jewish biblical scholars, by challenging Christian and Muslim readings of scripture, but rather by bringing an alternative set of visible data to bear on the question of Jewish power.24 The conditions of Jewish life in the Islamic East generally, and the stature of the exilarch in particular, thus undermined the view so succinctly expressed by the fictional Christian adversary in Joseph Qimḥi’s (d. 1170) polemical treatise Sefer ha-berit (Book of the Covenant), when he insists that the Jews lack “power and kingship, indeed [they] have lost everything.”25
And yet if the general contours of Benjamin’s and Petaḥya’s perceptions of Baghdad were shaped by the kinds of arguments that confronted Jews in eleventh-century