polemical exchanges between Jews and non-Jews; and not infrequently these exchanges centered on the scope of the exilarch’s authority, drawing from it broader theological conclusions. In the first half of the eleventh century, the Andalusian Muslim polymath ʿAlī Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) claimed to have debated the status of the exilarchate with the Jewish scholar and courtier Samuel Ibn Naghrīla (d. 1055). Ibn Naghrīla maintained that “to this day the exilarchs are descendants of David and thus the offspring of Judah, and they possess authority, kingship and rule.” While Ibn Ḥazm did not dispute the purported ancestry of the exilarchs, he insisted that they enjoyed no real authority and argued on that basis that the scriptural promise that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah” was clear evidence of the Bible’s mendaciousness.22 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Jewish theologians and exegetes worked vigorously to refute Christian arguments that began with the observable “facts” of Jewish powerlessness and degradation and, buttressed with scriptural prooftexts, went on to explain them as divine punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Jesus.23 The travel accounts of Benjamin and Petaḥya counter such arguments, though not, as did Jewish biblical scholars, by challenging Christian and Muslim readings of scripture, but rather by bringing an alternative set of visible data to bear on the question of Jewish power.24 The conditions of Jewish life in the Islamic East generally, and the stature of the exilarch in particular, thus undermined the view so succinctly expressed by the fictional Christian adversary in Joseph Qimḥi’s (d. 1170) polemical treatise Sefer ha-berit (Book of the Covenant), when he insists that the Jews lack “power and kingship, indeed [they] have lost everything.”25
And yet if the general contours of Benjamin’s and Petaḥya’s perceptions of Baghdad were shaped by the kinds of arguments that confronted Jews in eleventh-century al-Andalus and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Christendom, in at least one respect they accurately attest to a fascinating but underappreciated transformation that had taken place within Near Eastern Jewish society itself. Both travelers, we have noted, took an interest in the exilarch’s purported descent from King David. More important, however, they recognized in that ancestry a counterpart to the Abbasid caliphs’ claim of descent from Muḥammad.26 The equivalence of the two dynastic lines is striking, and, as it is presented by the two travelers, helps to make the case that Jews in the East were deemed worthy of honor by the dominant religious population. But their impressions also attest to a new emphasis on the value of biblical lineage that had taken hold among Eastern Jews, an emphasis itself reflective of attitudes about noble ancestry that were prevalent in the surrounding Arab-Islamic cultural environment. Their observations are suggestive therefore precisely because they hint at a connection between the genealogical concerns of Near Eastern Jews and the Islamic society in which they lived.
Taking these observations as its point of departure, this book explores the preoccupation with biblical genealogy that characterized Jewish society in the Islamic Near East between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Focusing initially on Jewish society’s fascination with Davidic ancestry, it examines the profusion of claims to that lineage that had already begun to appear by the end of the first millennium, the attempts to chart such claims through elaborate genealogical lists, and the range of meanings that had come to be ascribed to the House of David as a whole in that period—in particular the perception, shared by Jews and Muslims alike, that the Davidic line was a counterpart to the noble family of Muḥammad, the ahl al-bayt.
The coherence of such an endeavor depends, of course, on the ability to show that Jewish society did indeed undergo a perceptible change in the way it regarded Davidic ancestry, and that an intensification of ancestral claims to the biblical monarch is detectible. In Chapter 1 I undertake to establish these points in some detail. My conclusion is that by the tenth century new layers of significance as well as a new urgency were evident in the way Jewish claims of descent from King David were articulated and understood. This change in the manifestation and meaning of Davidic ancestry can be understood as the response to a variety of pressures on Jewish society, some emanating from within the community and others from without.
Veneration of the Davidic family did not, of course, originate in the Islamic period. Indeed, concern with King David and his royal line can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible, and, in one form or another, has remained a more or less constant feature of Jewish society’s historical and spiritual self-perception ever since. Yet if Jews have remained loyal to the House of David throughout the ages, their reasons for doing so have not necessarily been so unvarying, nor have their ways of expressing that allegiance been so consistent. Moreover, the very persistence of Jewish preoccupation with the Davidic line can obscure the subtle ways in which its signification in fact shifted over time. The existence of the exilarchate is well attested in rabbinic sources, and its origins may go back to the third century CE. But Jews continued to develop new impressions of the dynastic office that were colored by later realities, its ancient roots notwithstanding. The present work deals not with origins, then, but with the culturally specific nuances that inflected the meaning of Davidic lineage for Jews living in the Islamic Near East. It explores how medieval Jews regarded and venerated the line of David, and seeks, in part, to situate those attitudes within a broader matrix of responses to minority status in the Islamic world. In proposing a cultural and historical context for understanding medieval Jews’ attitudes toward the Davidic dynasty, the present work accentuates the capacity for adaptation and reinterpretation that even timeless religious symbols possess. The tendency to view the Jewish Middle Ages as simply the playing out of earlier forms of Judaism fails to acknowledge the extent to which the meaning of cultural and religious constants like the Davidic line could vary even as the constants themselves endured.
That Jewish society indeed came to invest the Davidic family with new significance during the Middle Ages is most readily observable in the rise in the number of claimants to that lineage during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Sources from that period make frequent mention of individuals with the Hebrew title nasi (“prince,” plural nesiʾim), a biblical designation that signified, with only rare exception, membership in the House of David. And as references to nesiʾim begin to multiply, a clan of Davidic dynasts, from whose ranks the exilarchs were chosen, begins to come into focus, emerging for the first time as a recognizable kinship group within medieval Jewish society, a collective defined entirely by its presumed descent from the biblical monarch. Thus, while the title exilarch signals appointment to an office of authority, nasi implies an inherited genealogical status; and while every exilarch was a nasi, very few nesiʾim would become exilarchs. The proliferation of nesiʾim—understood in this fashion—implies both an increase in the social importance of Davidic ancestry, as well as a widening of the perimeters of the Davidic patrilineage, whose cachet had for centuries been largely limited to those specific individuals who attained the office of exilarch. The appearance of this broader descent group, I argue, reflects changing attitudes within Jewish society and is the outgrowth of a new set of attitudes toward the House of David. At its core this book is a study of the forces that led to the emergence and the consolidation of that medieval collective.
But fascination with the House of David was, I argue, just one facet of what was in reality a much broader concern with biblical ancestry, evidence of which can be found in parallel developments among a number of other segments of Jewish society. Priests, Levites, and others began to focus more emphatically on their biblical forebears, and, like Davidic dynasts, began as well to produce genealogical records to substantiate their descent from them. And as we shall see, Benjamin and Petaḥya will once again prove helpful as we explore this wider connection. Genealogical concerns also influenced the way the Jewish past was conceptualized, and they played an important role in the way historical figures were viewed.
In many respects this “genealogical turn” was a consequence of Jewish society’s dynamic encounter with the surrounding Arab-Islamic milieu, a selective adaptation to the value placed on nasab (ancestry) in the dominant cultural environment.27 While Jewish society surely had sufficient genealogical materials and preoccupations of its own upon which to draw, Arab-Islamic society
