this we learn that nasi status is not dependent on [membership in] the House of David, but rather on legal expertise.”52 Emanating as it does from a European unfamiliar with local practice in the East, Joseph’s question brings into clearer relief the distinctive contours of respect for Davidic ancestry among Jews in Muslim lands. His dismay at the situation in the Islamic world becomes all the more understandable when we bear in mind our earlier observations about the very different ways in which the title nasi was understood and employed in France and northern Spain.
In his long reply to Joseph’s queries, Abraham Maimonides attempts to navigate delicately between the opposing sides. Despite his sympathy for Joseph’s difficult predicament and his seeming disapproval of the nasi’s arrogant and unjust behavior, Abraham is reluctant to criticize Hodaya. He acknowledges that the nasi became enraged and in his anger cursed Joseph and the rabbis of France, saying things “that cannot be written down.” But Abraham also reminds Joseph that “the honorable nasi” is “an old man with a reputation in his own land”—perhaps referring to Mosul—and urges forbearance since the nasi “grew up among scholars and possesses both wisdom and understanding.”53 “And there is no justification for disparaging him,” Abraham continues, “insofar as we are obligated to honor his family.”54
In referring to the obligation to honor the nasi’s family, Abraham assumes the role of a cultural mediator, attempting to offer an explanation for the status of contemporary nesiʾim that so puzzled the French rabbi. He goes on to explain the significance of Hodaya’s title in the context of local custom, underscoring once more the profound regard for the genealogy it signified in the East.
These descendants of our master David are called nesiʾim because they are from the royal line and because the king himself is called nasi. But someone from David’s seed who is neither an exilarch nor the head of a yeshiva is designated a nasi only figuratively [kinuy be-ʿalma], insofar as he is from the royal line. Know that it is in this sense that we call their children nesiʾim too, in the sense that they are nesiʾim with respect to lineage [nesiʾim be-yiḥusam].55
Abraham introduces the notion of a “nasi with respect to lineage,” a category that he contrasts with that of the “nasi with respect to rank” (nasi be-maʿalato). This distinction is Abraham’s own, and reveals the prominence of the purely genealogical sense of the title nasi in his place and time. By positing such a distinction Abraham is able to concede Joseph’s point that contemporary Davidic dynasts (other than the exilarch) were not equivalent to the talmudic nasi, while at the same time providing an explanation for the popularity that they nevertheless enjoyed in the Near East. Abraham acknowledges that Hodaya’s status cannot be defended according to the rabbinic legal tradition, but he also points out that it has a basis in the local community’s respect for lineage. When read together, Joseph’s queries and Abraham’s responsum underscore the distinctive patterns of respect for Davidic ancestry that had come to prevail among Jews living in the Arabic-speaking East.
Another textual witness to the situation reflected in Abraham Maimonides’ responsum is the draft of an early thirteenth-century letter of appointment for a raʾīs al-yahūd that is preserved in the monumental secretarial manual of the Islamic legal scholar and Egyptian chancery clerk, al-Qalqashandī.56 The document, which entrusts to the appointee administrative jurisdiction over “the Rabbanites, Karaites and Samaritans in Egyptian lands,” includes the following clause regarding his obligations to members of the Davidic line: “And as for the one who possesses a relationship of genealogy [luḥmat nasab] to David, peace be upon him, and who enjoys through him [David] the sanctity of genealogy [wa-lahu bihi ḥurmat nasab], he [the appointee] shall look after his privilege and take him as a companion with the most generous kindliness.”57 The inclusion of such a stipulation in an investiture letter for the most powerful Jewish official in the Ayyubid realm attests to the influence that the Davidic family enjoyed in Egyptian Jewish society. But what is of particular significance for our purposes is that the letter understands the importance of the Davidic line as essentially deriving from its ennobling genealogy. The classical overlap of claims of Davidic descent with the occupancy of specific offices of Davidic leadership seems to have all but vanished in this thirteenth-century formulary. nesiʾim are quite simply those who can trace themselves back to King David. Written in the same period as Abraham Maimonides’ responsum to Joseph ben Gershom, the letter of appointment provides us with yet another glimpse of the way Davidic dynasts had come to enjoy a status that was principally oriented around a venerable genealogical claim.
A Noble Family
The move toward a more genealogically based perception of the royal line in the East resulted in other shifts as well. Jews in the Middle Ages began, for instance, to think of the Davidic family as precisely that—a kinship group united by its descent from a common ancestor. Such a notion is implied, of course, in the various rabbinic traditions asserting that the exilarchs were descended from David. But in the Middle Ages this idea was expressed more directly, and its implications—in terms of how contemporary nesiʾim were related to one another, for example—taken far more seriously. The effects of such thinking are evident in the genealogical text with which we began this chapter: Abraham al-Raḥbī repeatedly emphasizes that his subject is worthy of honor because he is a member of “the noble House of David,” by which he refers not only to the anonymous nasi’s ancestors, but to his living relatives as well. And above we noted Abraham Maimonides’ insistence on the obligation to honor the family of the nasi Hodaya. While the vertical lines linking individual nesiʾim to their biblical progenitors always counted most, horizontal connections between nesiʾim, underscoring their membership in a collective defined by blood ties, were now acknowledged too. Indeed, as the ancestry of the nesiʾim assumed ever greater importance, it is only natural that they should have been increasingly seen as members of a wider Davidic clan or tribe. While the substitution of Dāʾūdī for nasi emphasized most explicitly an individual’s vertical relationship to David, indirectly it also served to connect him to the many living claimants to the same ancestry.
One can recognize this notion in a letter sent to the nasi Solomon ben Jesse in the winter of 1236 in which the recipient is styled the lord of the “the Davidic faction [al-ṭāʾifa al-dāwūdiyya],” a formula that implies his membership in a larger network of noble relatives.58 The notion of a family of Davidic descendants also emerges from memorial lists for Karaite nesiʾim preserved in the Geniza. A typical list of this type begins with the formula: “A fitting memorial … for the memory of the noble family, the family of the House of David, the nesiʾim.”59 And the Judeo-Arabic version of the story of Bustanay, which describes the illegitimate union of a seventh-century exilarch with a non-Jewish captive, takes aim at “the pedigree of the Davidic family [nasab al-dāwūdiyya]” as a whole.60 And when the Andalusian-born exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1167) observes that the House of David is “a great and powerful family [mishpaḥa rabba ve-gedola]” that continues to flourish in his own day, he, too, expresses the new perception of the Davidic line as a descent group encompassing much more than just its office holding members.61 Finally, we may note an undated Judeo-Arabic letter from the Geniza addressed to Yefet ben Sasson that evinces the same idea when it refers to al-Nafīs the elder as “a branch of the prophetic, Davidic clan [farʿ al-ʿashira al-nabawiyya al-dāwūdiyya].”62
Nor were Jews the only ones to think along such lines. When the Arabic essayist al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868 or 869), discussing the love of homeland among various peoples, refers to the practice of “the children of Aaron and the family of David [al Dāwūd]” to transfer the bodies of their deceased to Palestine for burial, he too seems to reflect a tendency to think of Jewish society in terms of groups that are delimited by ancestry.63 Strengthening an observation made above, al-Jāḥiẓ’s comment also suggests that this phenomenon was not restricted to the
