automatically imply an attenuated commitment to the rigors of Jewish observance or a weakened connection to one’s community. Such a conclusion is reinforced not only by the permission extended to Arabic prayer, cited above, but also by the query of Joseph Ibn Jābir, an avid student of Maimonides’ Arabic-language Commentary on the Mishnah who had difficulty reading Hebrew and who wrote to the master asking if he intended to produce an Arabic translation of his Mishneh Torah. Maimonides had no such plans, but Ibn Jābir’s question remains a telling indicator of the extent to which deeply committed Jews could be integrated into their cultural and linguistic surroundings.85
Despite the opportunities for acculturation and the relaxed enforcement of dhimmī legislation during the early part of the Middle Ages, Jews nonetheless saw themselves as a distinct minority in the Islamic world. Even in the writings of those who most fully embody the attainments of Goitein’s “Jewish-Arab symbiosis” we find frequent references to the Jews’ distinct status. In a poem that urges God to sweep away the dominion of Islam, the Andalusian Hebrew poet and neoplatonic philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol (d. 1058) characterizes the Jewish people’s beleaguered state in terms that also recall the powerful symbolism of the Davidic line.86 “Your people sit in exile,” he writes, “surrounded by enemies who now say we have no king.”87 And a perception of the Jews’ lamentable condition is similarly evident in the alternate title of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari—The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion.
The most profound and best-known testimonial to this pervasive view, however, comes from the pen of Maimonides. In 1172 he addressed a letter to the Jews of Yemen offering them comfort as they confronted a wave of religious persecution and a crisis of faith. Surveying the history of the Jews’ experiences in Muslim lands, Maimonides wrote: “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and debase us…. No nation has ever done more harm to Israel, and none has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.”88
Maimonides, who had himself lived through a period of religious intolerance under the Almohad rulers of North Africa and Spain, wrote these words to relieve the suffering of his coreligionists in a moment of intense pain and to provide them with a theologically meaningful explanation for their travails. His comments, colored by personal experience and an understandable empathy for the plight of his addressees, should not, therefore, be taken as an impartial assessment of the position of the Jews in Muslim lands. They do, however, reflect the degree to which medieval Jews—even those integrated into the intellectual, cultural, and economic life of Islamic society—perceived themselves as members of a distinct and subordinate population.89 The Jews’ sense of vulnerability vis-à-vis the dominant society is reflected again in Maimonides’ discussion of the individual who chooses to abandon his faith. Such a person, he imagines, is able to rationalize his decision by saying to himself: “What advantage for me is there in clinging to Israel, who are humiliated and oppressed? Rather, it is better for me to join those with the upper hand.”90
The Jews’ minority status thus entailed significant complexities and ambivalences. Relegated to a distinct and inferior legal status by dhimmī policies, the Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands consistently represented themselves as the other in Islamic society, a notion conveyed through the frequently invoked rivalry between the biblical brothers Isaac (the Jews) and Ishmael (the Arabs/Muslims). But as that paradigm also suggests, the Jews saw themselves as connected in fundamental ways to their cultural and intellectual surroundings at the very same time. Literary scholars have identified this ambiguity as critical to understanding the new forms of Hebrew poetry that emerged in the tenth century, most dramatically in al-Andalus. There Jewish writers began to write poetry—the most prized form of literary expression in the Arabic-speaking world—in a new style that not only incorporated the themes, metrical patterns, and structural aspects of Arabic verse but that was designed to serve precisely the same social functions as well.
Among the most remarkable aspects of this revolution in Jewish literary activity is that it took place in Hebrew and not, as we might have expected given its textual models, in Arabic. Jewish writers, in other words, began to write Arabized poetry, but did so emphatically using Hebrew, a situation that appears all the more surprising when one recalls that Jews were at that time making use of Arabic for almost every other kind of writing. The most compelling explanation for this seemingly anomalous preference for Hebrew in the composition of verse is that it represents an internalization of the ideals of ‘arabiyya, the cultural and religious conviction that Arabic is the most perfect language and, among other things, the most ideally suited for poetic expression.91 According to such a reading, Jews who wrote and patronized Arabic-style Hebrew poetry had not only absorbed such notions, but they had also begun to think of Hebrew and Hebrew literature in comparable ways. In composing poetry that was decidedly Hebrew in language but Arabic in form and function, they were, in a sense, reflecting the complexities inherent in their very identity. In one respect, of course, the production of such literature bespeaks the Jews’ profound embeddedness within the surrounding cultural environment, their having already internalized Arabic literary tastes and categories of thought. They were, as Ross Brann puts it, simply “doing what comes naturally.”92 At the very same time, however, it also underscores their status as an “other” in the Islamic world, as a minority seeking legitimacy from, or engaged in a cultural rivalry with, the host society. Summarizing this other dimension, Raymond Scheindlin observes that “the Jews seem to have adopted the essentially competitive idea of the perfection of their own language from the Arabs, and they chose to write poetry in Hebrew as a kind of answer to the Arabic claim.”93
As described by literary historians, the Jewish embrace of Arabic literary tastes, with its attendant complexities and conflicting motives, can also suggest ways of framing other realms of cultural interaction between Jews and Muslims. The Jews’ cultivation of ennobling ancestral traditions in the Middle Ages, no less a cultural formation than their production of Arabic-style Hebrew poetry, can, in fact, be understood along much the same lines. When Jews began, in new and more pronounced ways, to celebrate the genealogy of individuals who traced themselves back to biblical figures, they were, among other things, acting in accordance with a set of Arab-Islamic values that emphasized the virtue of distinguished ancestry and deemed the Arabs as being genealogically superior to all other peoples. The Jewish embrace and performance of nasab was, therefore, an unavoidably complicated affair, and, in the tensions it involved, not unlike the process by which Jews came to write according to a Hebraized form of Arabic aesthetics. On one hand, like Arabic-style poetry, it represented a form of cultural convergence; Jews were reflecting on their own communal history by means of new categories of thought that had, by that time, already become instinctual for them. On the other hand, thinking back to our twelfth-century travelers, it is not difficult to find an element of cultural competitiveness at work as well. As Benjamin, Petaḥya, and others demonstrate, the celebration of Davidic ancestry often involved a double gaze in which Jews studiously observed the way Muslims were evaluating them and their genealogies. Like poetry, genealogy could thus serve as a cultural domain in which Jews sought to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the host society. Viewed along these lines, the Jews’ turn toward nasab-style genealogy and their veneration of Davidic and other biblical ancestries that resulted from it speak not only to developments taking place within Jewish society, to the reconceptualization of elements of the Judaic heritage, but also, more broadly, to the multi-faceted patterns of cultural interaction that existed between the Jewish minority and the Arabic-Islamic majority.94
Rabbanites and Karaites
Thus far we have considered the religious-cultural divide between Jews and Muslims, but important divisions were also to be found within the Jewish community itself. Jews in the Near East and North Africa fell into two main religious factions: the Rabbanites, who felt bound by the traditions and norms of the talmudic rabbis, and the Karaites, who did not. More than just a theoretical debate over the religious authority of the rabbis, the dispute
