This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin
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East. Gil’s contributions have not been limited to the accumulation of biographical data, however; he has also analyzed a number of literary texts that provide insight into the social and cultural meaning of the House of David for medieval Jews. His studies of the so-called “Scroll of Evyatar” and the Judeo-Arabic story of the exilarch Bustanay, two polemical tracts from the Geniza attacking the Davidic line, draw attention to the deep passions, both positive and negative, which enveloped claimants to that legacy and made them subjects of community-wide fixation.59 In these studies, as in his biographical sketches, Gil has performed an invaluable service for future scholars, providing the raw materials and the necessary foundation for further levels of synthetic research. Gil’s own work, however, has shied away from such analysis, tending instead to make adjustments to the framework set forth by Mann and later modified by Goitein and Cohen.
Despite the accumulation of a substantial body of new information, Mann’s reconstruction thus continued to provide the basic framework for evaluating the significance of the nesiʾim in medieval Jewish society through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.60 Subsequent research has drawn from Mann’s work two important conclusions concerning the nesiʾim: first, that they are most appropriately understood as a topic within Jewish political history; and second, that their general lack of success as political leaders indicates that they constituted a relatively unimportant phenomenon within Jewish society.61 Taken together these impressions have understandably provided little incentive for a reexamination of the nesiʾim. As historical appraisals, however, they would seem to tell only part of the story. Most significantly, they fail to acknowledge the considerable effort that medieval Jews invested in celebrating, documenting, and occasionally resisting claims to Davidic ancestry. If nesiʾim only occasionally achieved positions of real political power, as official appointees or otherwise, their ubiquitous presence in the Geniza society nonetheless bears witness to the potency of the concept of the Davidic line that they embodied for their contemporaries.
My treatment thus differs from that of previous scholars in approaching the widespread appearance of the nesiʾim as symptomatic of deeper, more fundamental processes operative within Jewish society in the medieval Near East—concerns over how Judaism could stake a unique claim to a scriptural heritage that it shared with Islam and Christianity, and anxieties about how to resolve the apparent contradiction between the Jewish people’s divine election and its second-class status in the eyes of the dominant society. From this perspective, preoccupation with biblical lineage appears as an adaptive response to the challenges of minority existence in the Islamic world, a reaction fueled by Jewish associations of King David with a golden age free of “the domination of foreign rule,” whether in the remote biblical past, the messianic future, or both.62 But the fact that these collective worries should so readily have found an answer in the celebration of a sacred lineage also reveals the operation of another process, one that pulls in the opposite direction, blurring rather than underscoring the lines between minority and majority culture. For Jewish veneration of the Davidic line was articulated through a vocabulary of respect for noble ancestors native to the Arab-Islamic environment, and the elevated importance of Davidic dynasts closely mirrored contemporary Islamic admiration for members of the family of Muḥammad. In its renewed interest in King David’s family, then, Near Eastern Jewry also demonstrated the extent to which it had become integrated into its religious and cultural environment, an instance of what Bernard Lewis has described as the Jewish community’s “Islamicization.”63
Davidic ancestry served, most immediately, the interests of its claimants, distinguishing them from their fellow Jews, conferring upon them social status, and in some cases even entitling them to positions of political power. Integral to my approach, however, is the notion that, besides its obvious relevance for the individual dynast, Davidic ancestry was also, fundamentally, a matter of collective concern. In one way or another all the sources upon which this study is based reflect a community-wide investment in the claims of descent from David, an interdependence of dynasts and their supporters. The reverence that claimants to the Davidic legacy found among their coreligionists attests to the fact that medieval Jews had a shared stake in ancient Israel’s royal line, its continuation and prestige stirring even those who were not direct heirs to its nobility. To be sure, there were also cries of opposition as individuals and factions sought, from time to time, to minimize the importance of the contemporary Davidic line or to challenge claims to authority within the Jewish community based on membership in its ranks. In the final analysis, however, these represent exceptions to the general rule, isolated voices, which, in their dissent, only call greater attention to the otherwise pervasive enthusiasm for the Davidic dynasty. Approached in this manner—as the expression of collectively held concerns—the importance attached to the House of David becomes a valuable measure of the attitudes and the anxieties, the wishes and the fears of medieval Jewish society generally, not merely the story of a select few within that community.
The Jewish Community
I have referred to the minority status of Jews living in the medieval Islamic world, and a word about that population and its status is in order. Jews constituted a numerical minority of the total population among which they lived, though precise figures are notoriously hard to come by. We can get a very general sense of their numbers, however, by considering the population estimates arrived at by historians working on various regions in or about our period. Rough estimates place the total population of Egypt in the beginning of the fourteenth century at about three million.64 Working with data from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when overall population figures were probably slightly higher, historians have suggested that the Jewish population ranged between ten and twenty thousand. It would seem, then, that the Jews probably numbered less than one percent of the total population of the country.65 In cities such as Fustat and Cairo, however, their numbers represented a much greater portion of the urban population, perhaps exceeding ten percent of the total.66 The situation appears to have been similar in Muslim Spain. Eliyahu Ashtor estimated that Jews represented little more than one half of one percent of the total population of the country, but a considerably larger percentage in the urban centers.67 Unfortunately, comparable statistics are not available for the Jewish populations in Iraq and Iran, though it seems unlikely that the situation there would have been considerably different.68
But Jewish minority status was not simply an issue of population size; it was also a matter of law. In the eyes of the Islamic legal tradition Jews were a dhimmī people, a category that applied to Christians and various other non-Muslim religious communities as well.69 Dhimmī populations were to be protected in their person and property, were guaranteed the right to practice their religion, and were extended a wide measure for self-government. In return, they were expected to pay the jizya, an annual poll tax, and to comply with various discriminatory restrictions that are enumerated, in their best-known form, in the so-called Pact of ʿUmar. Collectively, these regulations reinforced Islam’s preeminence within the social order and established a hierarchical relationship between its adherents and the dhimmī populations.70 More than a numerical inferiority to Muslims (as well as Christians), the Jews’ minority status thus involved a legislated subordination to the dominant faith. The subjugated yet protected status envisioned by the dhimmī system well suited Islam’s ambivalent theological stance vis-à-vis Judaism and Christianity, a position that combined elements of recognition and rejection.
If the dhimmī system had recognizable social goals, its application nonetheless varied considerably over time and from place to place. Historians generally agree, however, that the Jewish minority fared well and experienced little in the way of systematic oppression before the middle of the thirteenth century. Geniza documents, for instance, suggest that many of the terms of the Pact of Umar were more or less neglected in Egypt and Palestine during the Fatimid (969–1171) and early Ayyubid (1171–1250) periods, and the same appears to have been the case in Spain as well before the Almohad conquests in the middle of the twelfth century. Rules requiring dhimmīs to wear distinctive clothing and prohibiting them from holding government office, which were applied with greater regularity in later periods, seem to have remained largely unenforced before the middle of the thirteenth century. At the same time, the documents make it abundantly clear that the Fatimids and