more firmly datable materials can such documents be placed in a chronological sequence.
Despite these limitations, however, the Geniza materials and the related manuscripts from the Firkovich collections constitute an unrivaled source for measuring and evaluating the importance of biblical genealogies for Jews in the Islamic East. The present study is based on over 400 of these texts, a corpus that includes correspondence, court records, communal records, genealogical lists, liturgical compositions, poetry, chronicles, biblical commentaries, and responsa. Offering a window onto the lives and mentalities of common men and women, this wealth of material reveals that Benjamin’s and Petaḥya’s descriptions of the exilarch in Baghdad were not merely the idiosyncratic adulations of outsiders, but echoes of a collective concern with the Davidic line that ran strong and deep within Near Eastern Jewish society itself. And so if, because of their vagueness or their poor state of preservation, many a Geniza text can do little more than attest to the existence of a nasi in some otherwise unspecified context, such materials should nonetheless be seen as meaningful, for in aggregate they strengthen our central contention that a visible and symbolically significant family of Davidic dynasts emerged during the Middle Ages to occupy a crucial place in Jewish society.
From the earliest days of research on the Geniza, scholars recognized that its materials could shed fresh light on already familiar historical events and individuals. Over the past century the biographies of Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, to name only two of the most illustrious examples, have been considerably enriched by such newly discovered materials, enabling us to follow with greater precision the course of their respective careers, to situate them within larger social networks, and to comprehend the genesis and evolution of their writings. But the intersection of Geniza sources with well-known medieval texts has also permitted entirely new issues to come the fore, in some cases even leading to some rather significant revisions in the historiography. Such was the case with the nesiʾim. Though familiar with medieval texts that mentioned nesiʾim—texts like Benjamin’s travel account or Judah al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni, both of which had been printed as early as the sixteenth century—Jewish historians working before the systematic study of the Geniza paid scant attention to them. As documents from the Geniza began to be edited, however, and a wealth of new information on Davidic dynasts surfaced, interest began to grow. The newly available manuscripts not only directed attention to the nesi’im as a subject worthy of investigation, they also encouraged the rereading of printed texts containing hitherto unappreciated references to them. In such a manner the Geniza supplied the contextual background for more nuanced interpretations of some well-known medieval sources.
Therefore, while Geniza and Geniza-related manuscript materials loom large in the present study, providing not only the catalyst for my research but also the lion’s share of my sources, they do not define the parameters of this work. Rather, like many working on the Jewish community reflected in those documents, I have also made use of contemporary “non-Geniza” materials wherever relevant, following the lead of my subject matter and not the provenance of my sources. And in fact a surprisingly wide range of non-Geniza texts relate in one way or another to the subject of the nesiʾim, providing a broad array of perspectives from which to evaluate the meaning of Davidic ancestry for medieval Jews and Muslims. These sources include printed chronicles, poetic compositions, halakhic literature, and, as we have already seen, travel accounts. Yet another important body of material comes from a variety of medieval Islamic sources, including reports in biographical dictionaries, chronicles, belletristic writings, collections of ḥadīth, and documents preserved in formularies prepared for use by government secretaries. In its stunning diversity this rich corpus of material demonstrates the importance as well as the pervasiveness of Jewish fascination with biblical lineage.
The nature of these materials has determined to a great extent both the approach and the scope of this book. Given the inherent vagueness and the still tenuous dating of many of the relevant sources, not to mention the unresolved debates concerning the biographical details of quite a few nesiʾim, I have adopted what I believe is the prudent course of synchronic analysis, concentrating my efforts on providing an outline of a broad cultural pattern rather than trying to identify its development over the course of the period covered. The termini of this study are similarly a function of the Geniza sources, which are most abundant for the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. While in a few instances I have introduced texts that lie outside of those temporal parameters, I have done so with a view to demonstrating the depth and persistence of the conceptual shift that lies at the heart of this study and that is most readily glimpsed in the classical Geniza period. The physical setting of this book has in like manner been determined by the geographical dimensions of the Geniza world, with Egypt, Palestine, and Syria standing at its center, Iraq and Yemen in flanking positions, and Spain and North Africa receding to the margins.
Previous Scholarship
Reminiscent of their twelfth-century forerunners, the first modern scholars to direct their attention to the House of David in the Middle Ages were captivated by the idea of Jewish power and tended to approach the nesiʾim in terms of the authority they exercised within the medieval Jewish community. The first sustained treatment appeared in 1914 as an appendix to Samuel Poznanski’s important study of the gaonate in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and was titled “The Exilarchs in the Post-Gaonic Period.”38 Poznanski, a rabbi and scholar whose primary research interests lay in the field of Karaite history, brought together in these twenty-some pages scattered bits of information culled from literary sources as well as a few recently published Geniza materials to reconstruct the history of the Davidic line over the course of a period that was barely discussed in any of the extant medieval chronicles. As the title of the appendix suggests, Poznanski’s efforts were focused on Davidic rulers and dealt primarily with individuals who held the office of exilarch. Poznanski’s work is significant not only for its pioneering effort to organize isolated references into a chronological framework, but also for developing the broad picture of a centralized exilarchate based in Baghdad, which, in the middle of the eleventh century, splintered into what would become several successor institutions located in cities throughout the Near East. Poznanski took the year 1038, the year Hayya gaʾon died and the traditional terminus of the Babylonian gaonate, as the pivotal moment in this process. Among other things, Poznanski must also be credited for the decision to include in his study Karaites who held the title exilarch, a reflection of his deep interest in that community and an acknowledgment of the important connections underlying claims to royal ancestry in various segments of Jewish society.
Poznanski’s presentation was carried forward and significantly nuanced in a series of studies undertaken by Jacob Mann, one of the first historians to rely primarily on the newly available manuscript materials.39 Though generally averse to drawing broad conclusions, Mann nevertheless offered a comprehensive account of the emergence of local exilarchal offices in an important article written in 1927 that went significantly beyond the biographical data gathered by Poznanski. Its title, “The Exilarchal Office in Babylonia and Its Ramifications at the End of the Gaonic Age,” reveals that Mann, like Poznanski, understood his subject to be the effects of decentralization on an institution of Jewish communal authority.40 In it Mann discussed several families of nesiʾim and the dynastic offices of leadership they established, beginning in the eleventh century, in places like Mosul, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Mann portrayed these nesiʾim as political pretenders who sought to replicate the exilarchal office beyond the borders of Iraq, and offered as causal explanations for their dispersion both external and internal factors. On the one hand, he attributed their appearance to the disintegration of Abbasid authority in the tenth and eleventh centuries, arguing that as local Muslim governors asserted their independence from Baghdad it became both necessary and expedient for Jews living in their lands to establish autonomous political institutions of their own. Local exilarchal offices were thus understood to be small-scale replacements for the Babylonian exilarchate, which was sustained up until that point by a strong and centralized Abbasid state.41 At the same time, Mann also saw the establishment of these offices as the result of a rivalry within the exilarchal dynasty itself—between the descendants of the brothers David
