This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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by the title nasi can legitimately be described as aspiring local exilarchs. Finally, Mann’s heavy reliance on personal grievance to explain the fragmentation of the exilarchate in the eleventh century appears overly reductive, attributing, as it does, complex and enduring historical developments to ultimately trivial causes.44 The inadequacy of similar kinds of arguments to account for the emergence of the Karaite movement—arguments that saw Karaism as the consequence of ʿAnan ben David’s rejection by the Jewish aristocracy in Iraq—should caution us against putting too much faith in explanatory models that would hang structural change on the petty jealousies of disgruntled individuals.45
In fact, Mann himself acknowledged that in many cases nesiʾim seemed to be most influential within Jewish society in realms other than the political. He noted, for instance, that nesiʾim in several areas, including Egypt, seemed to enjoy “only a spiritual hold on the people,” their authority possessing “more of a moral than a political character.”46 Under careful examination, then, Mann’s position appears somewhat ambivalent. While he approached the nesiʾim principally as a manifestation of Jewish communal leadership and situated them within the history of Jewish political authority in the Near East, he also conceded that political success was not necessarily the most accurate measure of their popularity or importance.47 Is it possible that in emphasizing the (largely unrealized) political ambitions of nesiʾim in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries Mann was confusing consequence and cause? Perhaps at the root of this phenomenon lay a new and more widespread veneration for Davidic ancestry within Jewish society—a respect that in turn allowed some members of that lineage to achieve influence in a variety of guises.48
In his systematic perusal of documents from the Geniza, S. D. Goitein discovered an abundance of fresh material on nesiʾim, significantly adding to the information first examined by Poznanski and Mann. Yet despite the new sources at his disposal, Goitein did not substantially challenge the regnant explanation for the appearance of nesiʾim outside of the Abbasid heartland, nor did he deem their popular claim of Davidic ancestry to be, in and of itself, a matter worthy of further scholarly attention. Thus, while he edited numerous documents by or about nesiʾim that allowed him to adjust aspects of Mann’s treatment, Goitein did not produce an original, synthetic assessment of their importance in the Geniza society.49 Like Mann, he regarded the nesiʾim as aspiring rulers, a perspective evident in the decision to include the only sustained discussion of them in his magisterial Mediterranean Society, a mere two paragraphs in length, in a section on leadership in the Jewish community. “[I]t is not surprising,” he writes, “that some of [the exilarchal dynasty’s] more ambitious members should have tried to make capital of their dignity as ‘princes of the House of David.’ … We find them everywhere often trying to assume authority.” And like Mann, Goitein too determined that despite their aspirations, many nesiʾim seemed to possess little in the way of what he considered to be real political power. His conclusion was that nesiʾim were in fact “of no real significance, except when they were scholarly persons of renown.”50 At times Goitein could be even more emphatically judgmental in his description of the nesiʾim, as when he characterizes them as freeloaders who shamelessly took advantage of the generosity of local Jewish communities.51
Goitein’s dim view of the nesiʾim was undoubtedly informed by his low opinion of the Babylonian exilarchate, which, in his eyes, provided the inspiration for their own, more localized ambitions. In setting up an opposition between nesiʾim who, by virtue of their laudable scholarly pursuits, achieved social and historical significance, and those who were merely self-interested political opportunists and thus of little consequence, Goitein recycles a problematic dichotomy he used earlier to draw an unfavorable comparison between the gaonate and the exilarchate. “While the gaonate,” he writes, “was a force that penetrated the whole fabric of life … the secular head of the Jews, the so-called ‘head of the Diaspora,’ whose seat was in Baghdad, had only limited importance.”52
Goitein’s assessment of the nesiʾim may also be understood in terms of the broad critique of his work proposed by Miriam Frenkel.53 Frenkel observes that in Goitein’s reconstruction the classical Geniza period was characterized, above all, by a harmonious blending of Mediterranean and Hellenic elements. It was, moreover, an essentially capitalist and meritocratic society whose leaders were, appropriately, pragmatic and hardworking businessmen. As she puts it, Goitein viewed the Geniza society as “democratic, liberal, open and rationalist … the perfect embodiment of the western ideal.” As such, she notes, it was also “by necessity the complete antithesis of everything the west considered ‘oriental.’” Frenkel concludes that Goitein’s commitment to such a view led him at times to downplay or dismiss altogether what might have appeared as eastern characteristics in the Geniza sources.54
Recently, Frenkel’s insights were productively extended in a new direction to help explain Goitein’s evident minimization of magic and magical texts in the Geniza.55 Her work may also be of assistance in accounting for Goitein’s treatment of the nesiʾim, whose preponderance in the Geniza could have called into question some of the central values that Goitein associated with its Jewish community. Popular enthusiasm for their royal ancestry would appear to run counter to his vision of the Geniza society as embodying a democratic and egalitarian spirit. The principle of dynastic privilege, underscored by their celebrated genealogies, would seem to challenge his notion of the world of the Geniza as a place where men could make of themselves what they wished. And the strong affinities that existed between the popularity of the nesiʾim and the veneration of the family of Muḥammad among Muslims might suggest that Mediterranean Jewish society was very much a part of its eastern, “oriental” environment. By focusing on the nesiʾim as failed aspirants to political power Goitein would thus have been justified in downplaying their historical importance and affirming the rational, meritocratic, and democratic elements that he identified at the core of the Geniza society.
A number of Goitein’s students, chief among them Mark R. Cohen and Moshe Gil, have added considerably to the biographies of individual nesiʾim through both the identification of new materials and the reinterpretation of previously known ones. Cohen’s main contributions have come by way of his revisionist study of the origins of the post of the head of the Jews (raʾīs al-yahūd) in Egypt, in which he demonstrated that the office emerged gradually in the second half of the eleventh century, and not, as earlier historians (including Mann) had assumed, in the middle of the tenth. Among other things, Cohen highlighted the crucial role played by the politically ambitious and divisive nasi David ben Daniel (d. 1094) in the consolidation of the office of the head of the Jews.56 In a separate study Cohen also explored the political career of David’s father, the nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya (d. 1062), who served as gaʾon of the Palestinian yeshiva from 1051 to 1062.57 In writing about father and son Cohen noted the powerful symbolism of their ancestry, recognizing its broad appeal for medieval Jews and Muslims alike. Cohen’s conclusions not only transformed our understanding of the beginnings of local Jewish leadership in Egypt, they also dealt an indirect blow to one of Mann’s central claims about the nesiʾim. Mann had argued that the failure of nesiʾim to establish themselves as leaders in cities like Fustat and Qayrawān could be explained by the presence of alternate and pre-existing forms of local Jewish leadership in Egypt and Tunisia, respectively. In the case of Fustat, Mann pointed to the office of the head of the Jews, which he and others presumed was founded by the Fatimid authorities shortly after their conquest of Egypt in 969. Cohen’s findings, which delayed the emergence of that institution by over a century, thus inadvertently reopened the puzzling question of why nesiʾim were so often unsuccessful in Egypt as political figures, and suggested that the received analytic paradigm was in need of reconsideration. Despite wide recognition for Cohen’s work, its implications for the significance of the nesiʾim were left unrealized.
Gil’s voluminous writings, culminating in his monumental histories of the Jewish communities in Palestine and Iraq, have dealt with virtually every available source on the Davidic family in the Middle Ages.58 Through painstaking efforts he has extracted from them a wealth of detail, greatly expanding and complicating