know about the Davidic family concerns such individuals. Only a small fraction of those, however, held offices that were restricted to members of the Davidic family—what I mean by a Davidic post. The nasi Hodaya ben Jesse, for example, whom we just encountered, served as a judge in Alexandria, occupying a position that was in effect open to any male member of the Jewish community. As head of the Palestinian yeshiva, the nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya also held an official appointment, but this too was a communal post with no intrinsic connection to the Davidic line. More significantly, though, we also find nesiʾim who did not, as far we can tell, occupy any official post whatsoever, whose nasi status seems to have been a function of ancestry rather than authority. Thus, alongside the exilarchate, which continued to operate throughout the medieval period and which historically embodied the cachet of King David’s line, there emerged alternative configurations of the royal lineage, arrangements that were more emphatically oriented around the importance of noble ancestry.
The process I am describing can be seen in, among other things, a shift in the way the title nasi was used in medieval sources. In rabbinic literature, as we have noted, the designation was applied primarily to patriarchs, though it could be used for exilarchs as well. With the termination of the office of patriarch in the fifth century, the latter usage became more pronounced. The “Epistle of Sherira gaʾon,” for instance, illustrative of the convention used in the writings of the Babylonian geʾonim, consistently refers to the exilarch by the title nasi. But during the Islamic period the title also acquired a new and broader meaning as well, one that was determined by lineage rather than administrative function. And it was surely with this expanded sense of what it meant to be a nasi that Yefet ben David ben Shekhanya, cantor of the Palestinian-rite community of Fustat in the first half of eleventh century, wrote to Daniel ben ʿAzarya sending blessings of good fortune to “my master and lord, the great nasi Daniel, head of the yeshiva of the Pride of Jacob” as well as to “his three sons, the nesiʾim” who were then only children.26 To be recognized as a nasi it was thus no longer of necessity to be a leader. In describing the layout of “the great synagogue of the exilarch” in Baghdad, Benjamin of Tudela reflects this expanded and more genealogically focused usage of the title as well. “In front of the ark,” he informs his readers, “there are about ten steps of marble, on the uppermost of which are the seats of the exilarch and the nesiʾim of the House of David.”27 And in a similar vein, a poem that appears to have been written in celebration of the appointment of Sar Shalom ben Phineas to the office of exilarch refers to “our nasi Sar Shalom” along with “his sons, the nesi ʾim.”28 Indeed, medieval sources are replete with references to nesi ʾim who are designated as such apparently on the basis of their Davidic ancestry alone. And the same phenomenon is also attested among Karaites, from whom we might have expected greater efforts at controlling the use of the title given the legal and administrative roles that nesiʾim filled in their communities in Palestine and Egypt.29 What permitted and lay beneath the expanded use of the title in these instances, was, ultimately, a new way of thinking—a growing respect for Davidic ancestry per se and a sense that noble lineages had intrinsic and not merely expedient value.
The broadening of the title nasi in the Middle Ages was not a development that was altogether unique to the Near East. In Christian Europe, too, the title began to be used in ways that extended beyond its narrow signification in rabbinic sources, yet there the process followed a noticeably different course: the functional aspect of the title, signifying succession to a recognized office of authority, was brought to the foreground and transferred to new types of communal leadership, while the implied genealogical ties to David, which became so important in the East, tended to recede into the background. In towns like Narbonne, Barcelona, and Toledo the title was adopted by members of a powerful Jewish aristocracy who benefited from close ties to the ruling nobility. This sense of the title was also projected into the past. The depiction of Jacob Ibn Jau’s rise to power in late tenth-century al-Andalus in Sefer ha-qabbala (Book of Tradition) makes it clear that, as Abraham Ibn Daud and others in twelfth-century Christian Spain understood it, the title nasi signified above all else someone who was entrusted with communal authority. According to Ibn Daud, al-Manṣūr, the Umayyad regent, took a liking to Ibn Jau and
issued him a document placing him in charge of all the Jewish communities from Sijilmasa to the river Duero, which was the border of his realm. [The decree stated] that he was to adjudicate all their litigants, and that he was empowered to appoint over them whomsoever he wished and to exact from them any tax or payment to which they might be subject…. Then all the members of the community of Cordova assembled and signed an agreement [certifying] his position as nasi, which stated: “Rule over us, you, your son, and your son’s son also.”30
If appointment by the temporal authorities and authorization by the Jewish community had been crucial for nasi status as it was understood by Ibn Daud, royal ancestry apparently was not since earlier in his chronicle Ibn Daud informs his readers that members of the Davidic line were of negligible significance in Jewish society in al-Andalus.31 Moses Naḥmanides’ objection to the excesses of the nesiʾim in Barcelona reveals a similar perception of the title as marking communal authority rather than royal ancestry. Complaining about the impiety and heavy-handed rule of the Barcelona nesiʾim, he suggests that their status derived from their appointment to “the office of bailiff and their moving in the courts of kings and their palaces.”32
While some of these aristocratic European families did, eventually, develop foundation stories—but not, it must be noted, genealogical lists—linking their ancestors with the line of the exilarchs, such traditions emerged in response to and as an explanation for preexisting power and influence. Writing about this process in Spain, Yitzhak Baer observes that “because of their success at court, Davidic lineage was ascribed to them, the title Nasi bestowed upon them, and they were allowed whatever special privileges they arrogated to themselves.”33 And even then Davidic lineage rarely amounted to more than an expendable accessory of the Jewish aristocracy in Europe. A comment by Judah al-Ḥarīzī illustrates the divergence in the way Jews in the Islamic East and Jews in Western Christendom understood the title. “Among their nesiʾim,” al-Ḥarīzī writes of the Jewish community of Toledo, “is the Levite Rabbi Meir ben Todros.”34 In Christian Spain, where the title nasi was regularly applied to local elites, such a description would have been entirely comprehensible. But in the Islamic East, where lineal descent from King David was the primary qualification for nasi status, it would have made little sense. A comparison with the situation in Christian Europe thus clarifies the unique and contextually specific semantic shift that occurred in the East.
The growing importance of Davidic ancestry as such is also evident in the substitution of the word dāʾūdī for the title nasi in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic. Dāʾūdī means “descendant of David” and is a typical Arabic noun of relation, or nisba—a grammatical form used to identify an individual on the basis of a distinguishing characteristic such as physical appearance, place of origin, profession, or, as in this case, ancestry. Dāʾūdī is not, therefore, a literal rendering of nasi, but rather an interpretation that exposes the particular significance the title held for Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands. Used by both Muslims and Jews, the term points unequivocally to the way the ancestral claim eclipsed layers of meaning connected with particular functions and positions.35 The ease with which the Hebrew and Arabic terms could be substituted for one another is demonstrated by a pair of Judeo-Arabic letters sent three weeks apart from Israel ben Nathan to Nahray ben Nissim. The first, dated December 20, 1051, refers twice to Daniel ben ʿAzarya, recently appointed head of the Palestine yeshiva, as “al-dāʾūdī,” while the second, written on January 11, 1052, just as naturally styles him “our master, the nasi.”36
The same process also led to the interchanging of the Hebrew term kohen with the Arabic hārūni, “descendant of Aaron.” Thus, for example, a letter sent by Abraham ben Ḥalfon to ʿEli ben Ḥayyim
