but as ʿAllūn ibn Yaʿīsh al-Hārūnī in the Arabic-script address written in the margins.37 It is understandable that the Arabic forms were preferred in communications with the Muslim authorities.38 Such substitutions reveal deep processes of cultural reconfiguration; they are evidence not only of the Jews’ embrace of Arabic, but of Islamic culture’s ability to structure Jewish notions of social status as well. The significance of titles like nasi and kohen had evidently come to be identified with their genealogical connotations, and it is precisely these elements that prevail in their Arabic renderings. While an ancestral affiliation had been implicit in the titles nasi and kohen, it was ultimately their translation that provided the occasion for that meaning to become explicit.
Stress on the genealogical connotations of the titles nasi and kohen is further illustrated by their extension in certain instances to women as well. A marriage contract drawn up in Cairo in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century effects the marriage of a certain Hillel the elder to a woman who is referred to as almana ha-kohenet, “the priestly widow,” employing a rabbinic designation to emphasize that she was the daughter of a kohen.39 In an undated Arabic letter from the Geniza, a Karaite woman informs her mother of various pieces of news including the fact that “the old woman from the line of David has died [mātat al-dāwūdiyya al-kabīra].”40 And a dirge written on the death of a nasi reflects a similar tendency. Noting the deceased’s noble lineage, the poem mourns: “Gathered up is the son of the nasi of my people, yea the son of nesiʾot.”41 That women could enjoy the cachet of a distinguished biblical lineage also emerges from a list of members of several families of Levites in which it is specifically noted whether a man’s wife or mother was herself of levitical lineage.42
Scholars have observed that medieval conceptions of ancestry were largely concerned with the male members of society: it was the ancestry of men that mattered most, and it was their descent from men that was normally taken into consideration. Only in such rare cases in which the maternal line was deemed to be more important than that of the father might it be cited instead.43 The genealogical records produced for members of the Davidic line (which are considered in greater detail in the next chapter) bear out this observation—Davidic ancestry is in every instance recorded through a succession of forebears that is exclusively male, even in those cases in which one would expect to find female ancestors.44 But if medieval women were not customarily regarded as the active transmitters of noble ancestry, the sources cited suggest that they might nonetheless occasionally be seen as its passive recipients. And the inclusion of women in the reckoning of at least some noble lineages provides yet another gauge of the importance of biblical lineage in the Geniza society.
The uncoupling of Davidic ancestry from structures of Davidic authority also lies at the heart of the famous exchange between Abraham Maimonides and Joseph ben Gershom, to which I have already alluded.45 The former, in his capacity as the administrative head of Egyptian Jewry, had appointed the French-born Joseph as a judge in Alexandria. Along with other European Jews in that town, Joseph became embroiled in a conflict with the nasi Hodaya ben Jesse. Though apparently not the occupant of an official post at the time of the conflict, Hodaya, a member of a family of nesiʾim hailing from Mosul that had established a presence in Syria and Egypt in the thirteenth century, was nonetheless an influential figure in the Jewish community of Alexandria, and, as we have seen, claimed the right to issue public bans on the basis of his ancestry.46 When Joseph sought to curb what he regarded as the nasi’s illegitimate exercise of authority, Hodaya retaliated by placing him under the ban, accusing the community of French Jews in the town of being “heretics, unbelievers, and corporealists,” and threatening with excommunication anyone who offered them financial support. As we have already noted, Hodaya justified his actions by invoking the talmudic principle that “one who is banned by the patriarch [nasi] is considered banned by all of Israel.” It was at this point that a frustrated Joseph turned to Abraham Maimonides in Fustat, putting to him five queries intended to clarify Hodaya’s status.
The nasi’s actions may have been motivated in part by feelings of jealousy toward Joseph for having been elevated to a judgeship from which he himself had been ousted. In a letter to his father, the physician Abū Zikrī ben Elijah describes how a certain unnamed nasi was recently relieved of his duties as a judge in Alexandria when the governor who appointed him had fallen into disfavor.47 Abū Zikrī mentions the handsome government stipend that went along with the post and suggests that his father, the judge Elijah ben Zechariah, consider replacing the nasi. A combination of factors makes it likely that Abū Zikrī’s letter refers to the nasi Hodaya ben Jesse. The date, location, and unusual coincidence of a nasi serving as a judge in Alexandria all point to Hodaya ben Jesse’s turbulent period in that town. Moreover, Abū Zikrī’s insinuations about the immoral behavior of the nasi in question would seem to echo accusations leveled against Hodaya by Joseph. Abū Zikrī writes that the dismissed nasi had accepted bribes from both litigants to a case and had appropriated religious objects belonging to the synagogue. Such allegations resonate with the French rabbi’s description of Hodaya as driven by greed and in one instance demanding a fee of ten dinars to cancel a public ordinance.
Simmering beneath this personal conflict were also deeper tensions between the religious traditions of the indigenous Jewish populations of the East on the one hand and those of the recent Jewish arrivals from France on the other. As Elchanan Reiner has observed, a crucial element in the controversy appears to have been a difference in the way the two groups understood the coercive power of the ban. While Eastern Jews viewed it as the prerogative of charismatic leaders like the nasi, Europeans saw it as a sanction entrusted only to the officially constituted leaders of the community.48 The conclusion of the episode bears out such an analysis, for in February 1234 eleven rabbis from Acre, more than half of European extraction, signed an edict prohibiting individuals from enacting bans on their own; from that point on they were only to be issued by courts made up of at least three religious authorities. The affair thus resulted in a campaign strongly endorsed by the European leadership to curtail use of the ban by representatives of charismatic authority and to safeguard it as an instrument of the community’s official leaders.
But if personal grievances and regional variations in the application of the ban played a role in the dispute, so too did a cultural divide over what it meant to be a nasi. Joseph introduces his five queries to Abraham Maimonides with a review of Hodaya’s recent actions as well as the justification that Hodaya offered for them. He insists that in arrogating for himself powers restricted to the patriarch—in regarding himself, in other words, as equivalent to the nasi mentioned in rabbinic sources—Hodaya “seeks to invent things that are contrary to the laws of our faith and that cannot be.”49 Contemporary nesiʾim, he contends, are clearly not the same as the nasi that is discussed by the rabbis and therefore ought not to be given the same privileges.
Are all of those known as nesiʾim today of the same status as the nasi mentioned in scripture and the Talmud, or not? According to my humble opinion, they have no special status except for the one who is appointed exilarch, from whom, according to the Talmud, we derive our authority. And there cannot be two exilarchs at one time, since they have said, “There is only one leader in a generation, and not two” [BT Sanhedrin 8a].50
Coming from Latin Europe, Joseph evidently had difficulty accepting the influence enjoyed in eastern lands by figures like Hodaya ben Jesse, figures whose status seemed to be based on popular respect for their lineage rather than official appointment or substantive qualifications. Joseph’s frustration on this point is particularly evident when he complains, “If one should argue … that [Hodaya] is the son and grandson of a nasi, [I would reply that] I am the son and grandson of scholars going back several generations.”51
Joseph not only challenged the identification of medieval nesiʾim with the nasi discussed in rabbinic texts, he also questioned the link between
