trajectory, moving by degrees from the medieval present to the mythic future and from an analysis of political culture within the Jewish community to a comparative analysis of the role genealogy played in the legitimization of non-Arab communities more broadly.
Examining texts bearing on several leadership crises in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, Chapter 3 demonstrates the important role that ancestry had come to play in political discourse within the Jewish community. The sources, which depict, among other things, conflicts between “the House of David” and “the family of Aaron,” highlight how political controversies in the medieval Near East could be conceptualized as disputes between competing lineages. At the same time these sources also underscore the extent to which an individual’s identification with an ennobling ancestor was selective and occasional, emerging most clearly at moments of competition or conflict.
Chapter 4 shifts from the medieval present to the eschatological future, exploring the widespread messianic excitement that characterized Jewish society in the Near East during the eleventh and twelfth centuries as another important matrix for understanding the depth of emotion inspired by individuals from the Davidic line. If a backwards-looking respect for noble ancestors was critical to the social meaning of Davidic lineage, no less so was the future-directed anticipation of the House of David’s redemptive potential.
Chapter 5 expands beyond the confines of Jewish society to consider Near Eastern Jewry’s concern with biblical ancestry in relation to the roughly contemporaneous genealogical preoccupations of Persians and Berbers. For these groups, as for Jews, ancestry provided both a means of integrating into Arab-Islamic society as well as a way to resist its claims of cultural superiority. My argument is that the genealogical traditions that stand at the center of this study should thus be viewed as one aspect of a much broader process whereby non-Arab peoples sought validation through the construction of Arab-style lineages.
Rather than structuring this book as a series of discrete textual studies, I have chosen to organize it thematically out of the conviction that a synthetic approach to the material more effectively displays the pervasiveness of the attitudes I seek to describe—and it is these attitudes, after all, and not the texts in which they are expressed, that constitute my real subject. Utilizing such an arrangement, however, also means that a few key sources must inevitably be taken up in a number of contexts. To limit repetition I have tried to provide background and bibliographic information with the first major discussion.
Chapter 1
“Sharīf of the Jewish Nation”: Reconceptualizing the House of David in the Islamic East
Sometime in the late twelfth century, an otherwise unknown individual by the name of Abraham ha-Levi bar Tamim al-Raḥbī copied down, in a careful and clear hand, the lineage of a contemporary member of the Davidic line, tracing his ancestry back, son to father, through King David all the way to Adam (Figure 1).1 In medieval Hebrew, as in Arabic, individuals are typically identified according to the pattern “x son of y,” a model that can easily be expanded to include a third, fourth, or fifth generation when deemed important. Al-Raḥbī took this miniature genealogical form and extended it as far back as possible, traversing ninety-nine generations of ancestors as he recorded his honoree’s uninterrupted descent from the mythical progenitor of mankind. Beneath the genealogy, which sprawls across seventeen lines of text, he explains that he “wrote these words to acknowledge and give honor” to the Davidic dynast and his “royal family.” He declares himself “a friend of this noble, pure and unsullied family,” and writes that it was “a joyous hour when God gave [him] the merit to see the seed of our lord David, God’s anointed one.” Al-Raḥbī concludes this most intriguing document with a prayer that God should hasten “the coming of the messiah, the son of David,” a common enough wish in the Middle Ages, but one that was probably intended as more than a mere rhetorical flourish when appended to a Davidic genealogy such as this. Truly, it is difficult to imagine how a medieval reader of this text (and as we will see, such genealogical documents were indeed read) could have failed to connect its messianic conclusion with the celebration of the Davidic line that precedes it.
Ironically, though, while we can clearly make out all his ancestors’ names, the identity of the “exalted presence” himself remains a mystery since al-Raḥbī’s document is torn at the top and missing the line of text that once contained his honoree’s given name. One might expect that it should nevertheless be rather easy to figure out who he was. How many nesiʾim, after all, could there have been with fathers named Zakkay, grandfathers named Joseph, great-grandfathers named Zakkay, and so on, who were also important enough to be eulogized in so dramatic a fashion? As it turns out, the list of ancestors does help us to identify him to an extent. Four generations back we encounter the name Zakkay ben ʿAzarya, a familiar figure from the middle of the eleventh century. Mentioned in a handful of Geniza documents, Zakkay was a brother of the famous nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya, who served as head of the Palestinian yeshiva from 1052 until his death in 1062.2 But about this Zakkay’s descendants and about his great-grandson in particular, for whom the genealogy was actually compiled, we know absolutely nothing—to date no other sources, whether from the Geniza or otherwise, make any mention of them. Al-Raḥbī’s adulation and enthusiasm notwithstanding, the unnamed subject of this genealogical text seems to have been a rather obscure individual.
Figure 1. The genealogy of the nasi [?] ben Zakkay that enumerates one hundred generations of ancestors and extends back to Adam. In Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, probably mid-twelfth century. Halper 462. Reproduced courtesy of the Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
Unusual only in that it brings together in a single text so many of the recurring themes in medieval discussions of the Davidic line, al-Raḥbī’s genealogy gives us a sense of the new ways in which medieval Jews had begun to think about the royal family and its significance for them. To be sure, a passionate devotion to King David’s line was not an altogether new development in the Middle Ages. Medieval Jews were, after all, heirs to a rich and variegated set of long-held traditions and beliefs, some going back to the Hebrew Bible itself, which took a lively interest in the descendants of the ancient Israelite monarch. But if the general contours of this commitment to the House of David were relatively unchanging, its articulation had nonetheless taken on new forms and acquired new shades of meaning by the time Abraham al-Raḥbī sat down to record the complete genealogy of his “Davidic master.” In referring to David’s line as a “noble family,” using a term that Muslims applied to the descendants of Muḥammad, in admiring the purity of the family’s lineage, and in speaking of the privilege of beholding even one of its lesser known members—in these and in numerous other ways al-Raḥbī’s remarkable text reveals the extent to which new attitudes were coloring Jews’ perceptions of the royal family and its role in their society.
This chapter evaluates the status of King David’s family in the Middle Ages from a historicist perspective, drawing attention to the new ways in which Jewish society began to conceptualize and express its importance in the centuries following the Islamic expansion. Discerning what in fact constitutes a new layer of meaning in this period is not an easy task since we are ultimately searching for what amounts to subtle variations on a familiar theme, faint shifts in thinking that almost certainly eluded the attention of the medieval writers upon whose testimonies we are dependant. Further complicating our effort is the fact that the overwhelming majority of sources at our disposal uphold, in one way or another, a view of the Davidic dynasty as something stable and continuous over time. Identifying evolving attitudes toward the Davidic family thus requires not only looking
