defined other collectives within Jewish society as well. The perception of the Davidic line as primarily a descent group is similarly reflected in an observation by the eleventh-century Muslim historian al-Ḥasan ibn al-Bannāʾ. Describing a conflict among Jewish notables in Baghdad over the appointment of a new exilarch in 1069, Ibn al-Bannāʾ explains to his readers that the two rival candidates are “from the descendants of David [min awlād Dāwūd].”64
Geographic Distribution
We now find ourselves in a better position to understand yet another distinguishing feature of the medieval House of David: its geographic dispersion. By the tenth century, members of the Davidic family had begun to move westward, appearing in towns in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain.65 And the painstaking work of three generations of Geniza historians makes it clear that by the thirteenth century a dramatic redistribution of the Davidic family had occurred as members of a lineage once localized in Baghdad were settled in every corner of the Islamic world. Their research demonstrates that in virtually every case in which we find a nasi during these centuries living outside Iraq it is possible to trace him back in just a few generations to an ancestor who once lived in Iraq.66 As we see below, this is one of several ways in which the genealogical records of the Davidic line, when read with a critical eye, can provide clues to significant changes in the conception and organization of the royal family during the Islamic period.
In one respect, this diffusion of the Davidic line mirrored the political changes and economic pressures that were then reshaping Near Eastern society generally. A diminished capacity to administer effectively its outlying provinces had by the tenth century severely undermined the stability of the Abbasid caliphate. Formerly ruled by governors loyal to the Abbasid authorities, those far-flung territories now increasingly fell under the control of independent and sometimes hostile rulers. At the same time, economic disruptions impoverished the Abbasid heartland. One consequence of these developments was a migratory movement westward as merchants and intellectuals sought opportunities in the prosperous and newly autonomous lands along the Mediterranean.67 Jewish society, we know, was deeply affected by these transformations, and the migration of nesiʾim to communities outside Baghdad should perhaps be seen as yet another result of the ensuing redistribution of populations and economic power.68 Indeed, later Jewish legends would connect these developments explicitly as they described the way some local Muslim rulers, in asserting their independence from Baghdad, encouraged members of the Davidic family to visit or settle in their realms.69
From another perspective, however, the mobility of the nesiʾim can be viewed as a further consequence of the reconfiguration of the Davidic line that we have been examining. No longer defined by an authority structure, the royal family was able to move beyond its historic base of power in Iraq when conditions there became unfavorable. The Davidic family’s success in freeing itself, so to speak, from the Babylonian exilarchate, the institution that historically had defined it and geographically had anchored it, becomes clear when we consider the difficulties faced by various geʾonim as they struggled to maintain the allegiance of the communities under their jurisdiction in the same period. As desperate appeals to local Jewish communities indicate, their status remained intimately bound up with the survival of the yeshivot they headed. A telling illustration of this emerges from the correspondence of Samuel ben ʿEli, who wrote a number of letters to communities in Iraq and Syria urging them to continue to support his institution. In one of these Samuel offers the following rationale for the enduring significance of the yeshiva, and by implication his own authority:
You are aware that the place of the yeshiva is the throne of the Torah, which represents Moses our teacher in every age. The word yeshiva derives from the verse, “And Moses sat (va-yeshev) to judge the people” [Exodus 18:13]. It is the place that is designated for instruction and for study of the Torah…. Thus the yeshiva is the place of Moses our teacher, and in it the Jewish faith is perfected. All who oppose it oppose the Torah, whose place it is, and oppose Moses our teacher, whose throne it is.70
By appealing to the holiness of the yeshiva, here so emphatically construed as a sacred site, in order to legitimize his status, Samuel reveals the degree to which geonic authority was linked to the prestige of specific geographies. Indeed, a long-standing argument on behalf the superiority of the traditions of the Iraqi yeshivot drew connections between their spiritual preeminence and their geographic location.71 The Davidic family, by contrast, enjoyed a prestige that had come to be embodied in the individual claimant, and that possessed meaning even in the absence of an institutional framework. Not restricted to a specific institution or by a particular geography, it could translate itself that much more easily to new physical surroundings.
Jewish population centers across the Islamic world were thus exposed to living members of the royal line. In addition to Baghdad, important cities and towns such as Tabrīz, Mosul, Damascus, Aleppo, Ḥamā, Acre, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Fustat, Aden, and Qayrawān all played host either to individual nesiʾim or to dynasties, with the result that Jewish society as a whole during this period came into increasingly more intensive contact with members of the Davidic family. Letters from the Geniza reveal that nesiʾim also circulated through provincial towns in the Egyptian countryside: we hear of them, for instance, in Ashmūm, Damira, al-Maḥalla, and Bilbays.72 We find nesiʾim as well in Daqūqa in Iraq and in Jām in northwestern Afghanistan.73 And this list comprises only those places where the presence of Davidic dynasts is explicitly reported. When we read, for instance, of a family of nesiʾim that traveled from Tabrīz to Cairo and back, or of another that moved from Mosul to Egypt, we know that they must have come in contact with a number of communities in the course of their travels, even though those places are not mentioned in our sources. Again, it must be emphasized that this stands in contrast to the situation in earlier periods during which the value of Davidic ancestry was restricted to the respective occupants of the patriarchate and the exilarchate, and the geographic distribution of members of the House of David was correspondingly limited to the locations of those offices. The momentousness of this new development is reflected in a series of medieval legends that focus on the circumstances under which a scion of the royal line arrived in a community outside of Iraq.74 As the value of Davidic lineage increased, so too did Jewish society’s overall exposure to descendants of the royal line.
Emphasizing the Links to King David
Medieval sources also reveal a new and profound concern with documenting and publicizing the royal lineage of nesiʾim. As nobility of ancestry began to eclipse function as the source of the royal line’s significance, it is little wonder that medieval nesiʾim should have given new attention to identifying themselves explicitly with their biblical forebear. As we see in the next chapter, they accomplished this through a variety of strategies, the most dramatic of which was the creation of complete ancestor lists like the one copied down by Abraham al-Raḥbī. Another important mechanism involved naming children after figures from the biblical line of David. Such practices helped publicize the ancestral claim of the royal line and reinforced a public identity that was oriented around descent from King David. This concern is revealed in more modest ways, too, as, for example, when the nasi David ben Daniel acknowledges in a letter to a supporter “the kindness of the God of David our father.”75 Similar expressions asserting a direct familial tie to the royal line are to be found in letters by the exilarchs Hezekiah ben David and Daniel ben Ḥisday.76
Letters addressed to Davidic dynasts echo this motif as well. An illustrative example is a Judeo-Arabic missive sent to Daniel ben ʿAzarya by an unidentified supporter that is largely concerned with the consolidation of Daniel’s authority in the Fustat community.77 In discussing two separate matters, one in which the writer himself was involved and another involving the addressee, the letter draws analogies to episodes in the life of King David. Significantly, in both instances the writer is careful to identify the biblical monarch as Daniel’s ancestor (jadduhu)78
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