also resulted in significant disagreements about how, on a practical level, some of the most basic religious obligations should be carried out. Karaites and Rabbanites differed in the calendars they followed, in the prayers they recited, and in the dietary restrictions they observed. In order to address their distinctive spiritual needs, Karaites also formed separate communities, and supported, in many towns, synagogues and religious courts of their own.
The history of relations between Karaites and Rabbanites has been told primarily through the lens of the sharp polemics that authors in both camps composed during the Middle Ages. Not only were Karaites portrayed as dissenters from authentic Judaism, they were depicted as the sworn enemies of the Rabbanites themselves. Recent scholarship, however, particularly research based on documentary sources from the Geniza, has added considerable nuance to this picture, demonstrating that in day-to-day life medieval Karaites and Rabbanites actually shared a great deal more than was previously imagined.95 The Geniza has revealed, for instance, that, throughout the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, Karaites and Rabbanites married one another, made use of one another’s courts, and attended one another’s synagogues. Perhaps most surprising of all, we even find Karaites providing financial support to the Jerusalem yeshiva, an institution, which, at first blush, would seem to be wholly objectionable to professed opponents of rabbinic teaching. Addressing the broader significance of these findings, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger concludes that “the Karaites did not consider themselves to be separate from mainstream Judaism, and nor were they considered as such by the Rabbanites.”96
That the two groups formed a single Jewish community in the period we are examining has important implications for the present work, since, as we have already noted, nesiʾim were to be found among Karaites as well as Rabbanites. Indeed, later Jewish tradition held that the Karaite movement was founded by ʿAnan ben David, who was not only a member of the Davidic dynasty but a candidate for the office of exilarch as well.97 And in the following centuries nesiʾim who claimed descent from ʿAnan occupied positions of stature in the Karaite community.98 Historians, however, have tended to treat Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim as two somewhat distinct phenomena, an understandable approach given the different roles they played in the two communities. But to defer to such distinctions, I would argue, is also to fall back on the problematic assumption that the Davidic dynasty is best understood within the framework of Jewish political history, and to presume yet again that its significance is most essentially revealed in the patterns of communal authority its claimants exercised. As I have repeatedly stressed, the appearance of nesiʾim in the Middle Ages is, among other things, evidence of a new emphasis on noble ancestry within Jewish society and the internalization of the importance of nasab. And when viewed in this manner, the differences between Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim dissolve, both in effect constituting instances of Davidic privilege that point to a common, underlying process that pervaded all segments of Jewish society in the Islamic East. In elucidating the significance of Davidic ancestry I therefore make use of Karaite and Rabbanite materials, recognizing that there were practical differences in the way nesiʾim functioned in the two communities. The growing evidence of close interactions between Karaites and Rabbanites, however, suggests that any attempt to historicize medieval Jewish veneration of the Davidic line must acknowledge its manifestation in both groups. The fact that Karaite and Rabbanite nesiʾim made use of the same list of ancestors to establish their Davidic credentials, a list that included the names of talmudic sages, further compels such an approach, and provides, in its own way, yet another illustration of the interdependence of the two communities during this period.
Nesiʾim in Western Christendom
Those familiar with the history of the Jewish communities in Western Christendom may wonder why I have decided to focus exclusively on Jewish claims to Davidic ancestry in Islamic lands. For during the very centuries dealt with in this book several families of nesiʾim emerged in parts of Latin Europe too—in northern Spain, southern France, and perhaps even Germany.99 But while inspired by the same general emotional attachment to King David that underlay claims to his legacy in the Islamic world, these European dynasties ultimately fall outside the purview of this study, focused, as it is, on the way biblical lineages reflect and respond to the ambivalences of Jewish life in Arab-Islamic society. My interest is not in the mere fact that some medieval Jews claimed to be descendants of King David, but rather in the specific ways that claim was conceptualized in a given cultural matrix.100 Taking stock of genealogy is, after all, a more or less universal human enterprise. This study seeks to understand the social function it filled for Jews in the Islamic East.
There are other considerations as well suggesting that, while superficially similar, the two phenomena were in fact quite different from one another, distinct products of processes of parallel evolution. While nesiʾim in the East were occasionally invested with religious or political authority, their ancestral claims, as we have already noted, existed quite apart from a defined base of power in the Jewish community. This was not the case in Europe, where claims to Davidic ancestry developed only as an afterthought to or as a justification for the attainment of power by particular dynastic groups in specific communal contexts.101 This distinction is critical, I believe, as it points to broader divergences between Latin Europe and the Near East regarding the social meaning of lineage. Furthermore, nesiʾim in Muslim societies related to their Davidic ancestry in very different ways from their counterparts in Europe. Eastern nesiʾim were much more deeply invested in publicizing their lineage than were nesiʾim in Spain, France, and Germany, with genealogical records playing a particularly important role in the cultivation of their Davidic identity. European nesiʾim produced no genealogies as far as we know and in general exhibited none of the anxieties about proving their lineage that were such a commonplace in the East. As we see in the next chapter, the profound cultural differences separating the Jewries of Latin Europe and the Islamic East regarding the significance of the nesiʾim are brought to the fore in a famous question posed to Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237) by a French rabbi living in Alexandria.
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This book is divided into two sections. The first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, explores the new conceptualization of the royal line that emerged in Arab-Islamic lands during the Middle Ages. Chapter 1 demonstrates that, by the tenth century, Jews and Muslims had come to think of the royal line as a family that was distinguished, above all else, by its noble ancestry. The reorientation of respect for the Davidic dynasty around lineage reveals among other things the extent to which Jews had internalized discourses within Arab-Islamic society concerning the social value of a respected pedigree. This process helps to explain the prevalence and the geographic diffusion of Davidic dynasts in the Middle Ages, as well as the unique popularity that they enjoyed within Jewish society. It also coincides with a tendency to view the Davidic family as a Jewish counterpart to the ahl al-bayt, the family of Muḥammad.
Given the importance of their ancestry in the Middle Ages, Chapter 2 examines the various ways Davidic dynasts endeavored to articulate and make public their genealogical ties to King David. It focuses on three strategies: their development of elaborate genealogies connecting them to the biblical monarch, their preference for names associated with the Davidic family, and, to a lesser extent, the use of a lion’s image as a visual representation of the family’s royal origins. By these means, members of the Davidic line were able to reinforce popular interest in their ancestry and construct for themselves a public identity based on their distinguished pedigree.
The second part of the book, comprising Chapters 3, 4, and 5, looks at three contexts that nourished the
