This Noble House - Arnold E. Franklin Jewish Culture and Contexts

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al-Raḥbī copied down, in a careful and clear hand, the lineage of a contemporary member of the Davidic line, tracing his ancestry back, son to father, through King David all the way to Adam (Figure 1).1 In medieval Hebrew, as in Arabic, individuals are typically identified according to the pattern “x son of y,” a model that can easily be expanded to include a third, fourth, or fifth generation when deemed important. Al-Raḥbī took this miniature genealogical form and extended it as far back as possible, traversing ninety-nine generations of ancestors as he recorded his honoree’s uninterrupted descent from the mythical progenitor of mankind. Beneath the genealogy, which sprawls across seventeen lines of text, he explains that he “wrote these words to acknowledge and give honor” to the Davidic dynast and his “royal family.” He declares himself “a friend of this noble, pure and unsullied family,” and writes that it was “a joyous hour when God gave [him] the merit to see the seed of our lord David, God’s anointed one.” Al-Raḥbī concludes this most intriguing document with a prayer that God should hasten “the coming of the messiah, the son of David,” a common enough wish in the Middle Ages, but one that was probably intended as more than a mere rhetorical flourish when appended to a Davidic genealogy such as this. Truly, it is difficult to imagine how a medieval reader of this text (and as we will see, such genealogical documents were indeed read) could have failed to connect its messianic conclusion with the celebration of the Davidic line that precedes it.

      Ironically, though, while we can clearly make out all his ancestors’ names, the identity of the “exalted presence” himself remains a mystery since al-Raḥbī’s document is torn at the top and missing the line of text that once contained his honoree’s given name. One might expect that it should nevertheless be rather easy to figure out who he was. How many nesiʾim, after all, could there have been with fathers named Zakkay, grandfathers named Joseph, great-grandfathers named Zakkay, and so on, who were also important enough to be eulogized in so dramatic a fashion? As it turns out, the list of ancestors does help us to identify him to an extent. Four generations back we encounter the name Zakkay ben ʿAzarya, a familiar figure from the middle of the eleventh century. Mentioned in a handful of Geniza documents, Zakkay was a brother of the famous nasi Daniel ben ʿAzarya, who served as head of the Palestinian yeshiva from 1052 until his death in 1062.2 But about this Zakkay’s descendants and about his great-grandson in particular, for whom the genealogy was actually compiled, we know absolutely nothing—to date no other sources, whether from the Geniza or otherwise, make any mention of them. Al-Raḥbī’s adulation and enthusiasm notwithstanding, the unnamed subject of this genealogical text seems to have been a rather obscure individual.

      Unusual only in that it brings together in a single text so many of the recurring themes in medieval discussions of the Davidic line, al-Raḥbī’s genealogy gives us a sense of the new ways in which medieval Jews had begun to think about the royal family and its significance for them. To be sure, a passionate devotion to King David’s line was not an altogether new development in the Middle Ages. Medieval Jews were, after all, heirs to a rich and variegated set of long-held traditions and beliefs, some going back to the Hebrew Bible itself, which took a lively interest in the descendants of the ancient Israelite monarch. But if the general contours of this commitment to the House of David were relatively unchanging, its articulation had nonetheless taken on new forms and acquired new shades of meaning by the time Abraham al-Raḥbī sat down to record the complete genealogy of his “Davidic master.” In referring to David’s line as a “noble family,” using a term that Muslims applied to the descendants of Muḥammad, in admiring the purity of the family’s lineage, and in speaking of the privilege of beholding even one of its lesser known members—in these and in numerous other ways al-Raḥbī’s remarkable text reveals the extent to which new attitudes were coloring Jews’ perceptions of the royal family and its role in their society.

      This chapter evaluates the status of King David’s family in the Middle Ages from a historicist perspective, drawing attention to the new ways in which Jewish society began to conceptualize and express its importance in the centuries following the Islamic expansion. Discerning what in fact constitutes a new layer of meaning in this period is not an easy task since we are ultimately searching for what amounts to subtle variations on a familiar theme, faint shifts in thinking that almost certainly eluded the attention of the medieval writers upon whose testimonies we are dependant. Further complicating our effort is the fact that the overwhelming majority of sources at our disposal uphold, in one way or another, a view of the Davidic dynasty as something stable and continuous over time. Identifying evolving attitudes toward the Davidic family thus requires not only looking for things that can be difficult to see, but also relying on medieval sources that were often written with a view to obscuring the very process of change that we are trying to illuminate. Abraham al-Raḥbī’s genealogical list is a case in point. On the surface the text projects a view of the family of David as an eternal and unchanging entity; it is a veritable celebration of continuity across the longue durée that links, by means of the Davidic line, the biblical past and the medieval present. And yet, as I am arguing, genealogies such as this are themselves the products of a novel way of perceiving the Davidic family, the result of a new pride in the completeness and the demonstrability of its pedigree, which developed only in the centuries after the Islamic conquests. The determination to chart with precision the biblical roots of the Davidic line thus turns out to be a tell-tale sign of the uniquely medieval conceptualization of the royal family lurking beneath the surface of this seemingly straightforward text. Accordingly, our analysis involves reading a good many of the available sources “against the grain,” probing beyond the narrative of linear continuity which they seek to project.

      But if highlighting change in medieval perceptions of the royal family is therefore an endeavor beset with challenges, it is also one that can open up new ways of thinking about a conspicuous yet poorly understood aspect of medieval Jewish society. As I argue, the flood of such claims not only represents a significant departure from earlier forms of attachment to the line of David, it also speaks to broader changes affecting Jewish society in the Islamic period. Before we can contemplate the significance of change, however, we must first establish that it indeed occurred; and so the present chapter lays out the evidence for drawing such a conclusion. In so doing, it will also provide the historical framework that underlies my analysis of the meaning of the Davidic family for medieval Jews in the remainder of the book.

      The Rabbinic Legacy

      As noted, the vast compilations of rabbinic literature—the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds and the collections of exegetical commentary (midrash)—contain a great store of interpretive traditions and beliefs concerning King David and his family. My intention in what follows is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the various themes contained in that corpus, but rather to draw attention to the way rabbinic sources relate to the post-biblical House of David and how they regard claims to membership in it.3 Shaped as they were within a highly specific cultural milieu, rabbinic materials cannot provide a complete account of Jewish perceptions of the Davidic line in the pre-Islamic period.4 They can, however, help us recognize when medieval sources communicate ideas that are not rooted in the rabbinic literary canon, and, in so doing, can bring us closer to determining whether such divergences are historically meaningful. Once we have delineated the general shape of this earlier stratum of reflection on the Davidic line, we will be in a better position to see where medieval Jews elaborated upon, and departed from earlier traditions as they, in turn, encountered claimants to Davidic ancestry in their own day.

      While it may seem self-evident, it is nonetheless worth noting at the outset that rabbinic sources accept in principle that authentic heirs to the Davidic line could be identified in post-biblical Jewish society. They are not, however, always in agreement about the details of their lineage. A telling example

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