alluded to (as in the gloss on Genesis 49:10), asserted (as in the statement that “Hillel is from David”), or even challenged (as when Judah ha-Nasi concedes his genealogical inferiority to the exilarch), but they are never substantiated with genealogical evidence. Given their apparent investment in such traditions, rabbinic materials exhibit surprisingly little interest in detailing the exact line of ancestors through which patriarchs and exilarchs would have traced themselves to King David. Indeed, beyond the vague assertion that the patriarchs were descendants of David “on the maternal side,” the only specific information rabbinic sources seem to know about their pedigree is which of King David’s sons they could claim as an ancestor.13 We are on a similarly bad footing when it comes to reconstructing the precise lineage of the exilarchs. Given that rabbinic sources implicitly affirm the ongoing importance of the Davidic line in Jewish society, their disregard for the details of the Davidic pedigree is striking.14 And the absence of precise genealogical information for the Davidic family appears that much more surprising when compared with its documentation in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Commenting on this situation and noting an important distinction between vague ancestral claims and hard genealogical evidence, Marshall Johnson observes that while rabbis attempted “to exalt the memory of admired predecessors by providing them with honorable ancestry … such attempts were not always based on genealogical records.”15
Rabbinic sources thus appear to display only a limited interest in the postbiblical line of David. While they acknowledge and discuss contemporary claims to Davidic ancestry, rarely if ever is that pedigree, in and of itself, the true focus of their attention. Instead, they tend to be preoccupied with the narrower question of how ancestry and power intersect—with the way Davidic pedigrees might or might not support succession to positions of formal authority in the Jewish community. Considered by themselves, however, claims to membership in the Davidic line seem to have held little meaning for the editors of the rabbinic corpus. Furthermore, rabbinic literature devotes surprisingly little attention to genealogical documentation. Both in supporting and in rejecting claims of Davidic ancestry, rabbinic sources noticeably avoid discussing the actual lists of ancestors upon which such claims would have had to rely. Indeed, rabbinic sources seem profoundly uninterested in the genealogical intermediaries by means of which an individual could link himself to an ennobling ancestor in the mythic past. Ancestral claims may have mattered to the rabbis, but rabbinic literature reveals only the vaguest awareness of, or interest in, how such claims would have actually been substantiated.
Medieval Continuities
When we consider the situation that emerges from medieval sources, we encounter a number of important continuities with the rabbinic past. First, the Middle Ages witnessed the perpetuation of structures of Davidic authority that had their origins in the rabbinic period. While the patriarchate was abolished by the Romans in the year 425, the exilarchate continued to operate throughout the Middle Ages, even expanding its jurisdiction under Islamic rule. With respect to the institutional configuration of the Davidic family, then, the medieval period seems to manifest an affinity with the rabbinic past.
Second, those who claimed royal ancestry in the Middle Ages always traced their lineage through Davidic dynasts mentioned in the rabbinic corpus. While the overwhelming majority of nesiʾim regarded themselves as descendants of the line of the exilarchs, a few connected themselves to David through the patriarchs in Palestine. David ben Hodaya, a signatory to a letter of excommunication in 1376 who counted a mere eleven generations between himself and Judah ha-Nasi, was one such figure.16 Another was Nehorai, a physician in Tiberias, who, according to Petaḥya of Regensburg, “possesses a genealogy going back to Rabbi Judah.”17 But whether they linked themselves to David through the line of the exilarchs or through the line of the patriarchs, medieval nesiʾim made use of preexisting claims that had already been sanctioned by rabbinic tradition.
Continuities with the rabbinic past are also reflected in the titles borne by medieval claimants to Davidic ancestry. The rabbinic designation rosh ha-gola was used in the medieval period for exilarchs and on occasion for other members of the Davidic line, while the title nasi, as we shall see, became in the Middle Ages a generic term for many of the descendants of King David.
Finally, medieval members of the Davidic family saw themselves, and were viewed by their contemporaries, through the prism of rabbinic lore concerning patriarchs and exilarchs. Maimonides, for example, takes it as axiomatic that twelfth-century exilarchs were entitled to appoint judges with universal jurisdiction precisely as their rabbinic-era predecessors had been.18 And a similar impression is conveyed by Nathan ha-Bavli. In his flattering portrayal of the exilarchate, he describes a ceremony for the appointment of a new exilarch, which, we are told, included a public reading from the Torah. According to Nathan, when the Torah scroll is taken out “first a kohen reads, and after him a Levite. Then the cantor lowers the Torah scroll to the exilarch while the rest of the people stand. He takes the scroll in his hand, rises, and reads from it.”19 The ritual described in Nathan’s report is clearly based on the Babylonian practice of bringing the Torah scroll to the exilarch discussed above and defended by Yosi ben Bun.20 Demonstrations of deference toward medieval exilarchs were thus informed by the prerogatives and ceremonial practices recorded in earlier rabbinic literature.
In a similar vein, the rabbinic interpretation of Genesis 49:10, which sanctioned the authority of exilarchs and patriarchs in late antiquity, was extended without hesitation to medieval exilarchs as well. As noted in the introduction, Benjamin of Tudela explains that the Abbasid caliph treated the exilarch with great respect during their weekly interview in accordance with the injunction in Genesis 49:10. And Daniel ben Ḥisday, the reigning exilarch during Benjamin of Tudela’s visit to Baghdad, alludes to this same verse in a letter preserved in the Geniza in which he argues for his jurisdictional authority over the Jewish community in Egypt.21
But medieval exilarchs were not the only members of the royal family whose status was filtered through the lens of the rabbinic textual tradition. When ʿEli ha-Kohen composed a poem in honor of the nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya, head of the Palestinian yeshiva, in the spring of 1057, he too drew on the rabbinic understanding of Genesis 49:10 as a way of glorifying his subject’s noble ancestry.22 And when the Damascus nasi Jesse ben Hezekiah issued a letter of excommunication at the end of the thirteenth century against those attempting to ban the writings of Maimonides, he also found it expedient, in justifying his actions, to invoke the rabbinic gloss to that verse.23 The tendency to define the status of medieval nesiʾim through rabbinic statements about patriarchs and exilarchs is evident as well in the controversy involving the early thirteenth-century nasi Hodaya ben Jesse in Alexandria. Hodaya claimed an unusually broad and ultimately controversial license to impose public bans, invoking as his justification the talmudic principle that “one who is banned by the patriarch [nasi] is considered banned by all of Israel.”24 Abraham Maimonides penned an important responsum, examined in detail below, challenging Hodaya’s actions as well as his reasoning. For the moment, however, it is simply worth noting how easily medieval Davidic dynasts like Hodaya could identify themselves with rabbinic-period patriarchs and exilarchs and present themselves as their direct successors.
Beyond Patriarch and Exilarch
Despite the apparent continuities there are nonetheless some rather significant ways in which the medieval situation was at variance with that reflected in rabbinic sources. One crucial difference involves the expansion of the claim of Davidic ancestry beyond its historic, institutional base. The almost complete overlap of Davidic ancestry and Davidic authority found in rabbinic literature disintegrates in sources from the Middle Ages as claims to Davidic ancestry are no longer tied exclusively to particular authority structures in the Jewish community. If previously the social value of royal lineage was restricted to those individuals who succeeded in winning appointments as either exilarchs or patriarchs, during the Middle Ages the value of a Davidic pedigree could be actualized by a much wider pool of dynasts, most of whom would never hold a Davidic post.25 To be sure, many nesiʾim
