LITMIR.BIZ

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had improper sexual relations with a Persian slave-girl resulting in the irrevocable defilement of his entire progeny. The fact that the existing ancestor lists reflect a genealogical diversity for the Davidic family that goes back only as far as Bustanay would thus appear to support the conclusion that a significant reconceptualization of the Davidic line had indeed occurred sometime after the middle of the seventh century and was accompanied by a new emphasis on genealogical record keeping.

      The suspicious appearance of Bustanay in virtually all Davidic pedigrees may have troubled some medievals as well. And it was perhaps in partial explanation of this curiosity that a legend emerged according to which Bustanay, while still in his mother’s womb, was miraculously saved from a plague that left all other members of the Davidic family dead.⁸⁶ As the story makes quite clear, all subsequent Davidic dynasts must therefore be directly descended from Bustanay. At one level, then, the story can perhaps be read as an acknowledgment of the genealogical anomaly noted above and an attempt to account for it.

      Another important way Davidic dynasts publicized their ancestry was by naming their sons after biblical figures from the line of King David. In the next chapter we explore this phenomenon in greater detail, but for the purposes of our present discussion it is sufficient to note that here too we can point to a general shift that seems to have occurred during the early Islamic centuries, subsequent to the period of Bustanay. Indeed, comparing the various extant Davidic genealogies one cannot help but notice a marked difference between the names of Bustanay’s ascendants and those borne by his descendants. Names appearing in the generations before Bustanay are generally in Aramaic with no evident connection to the biblical line of David. Those that appear in the generations after Bustanay, by contrast, are not only more frequently biblical Hebrew names, they are also much more likely to be names of persons easily identified with the House of David. What this ultimately suggests is that the shift toward more complete genealogical recordkeeping seems to have accompanied other developments that were similarly intended to enhance the perceived connection between individual members of the royal line and their mythical forebear.

      Numeric Growth

      Another related consequence of the changes that we have been exploring is a perceptible rise in the number of individuals who claimed descent from King David in the Middle Ages. This is a natural corollary to our earlier observations. Inasmuch as the significance of a Davidic pedigree was tied less and less to particular offices of authority in the Jewish community and increasingly became a marker of prestige in and of itself, it stands to reason that there would have been greater incentive for individuals who could lay claim to a Davidic pedigree to actually do so. When the importance of Davidic ancestry was connected to specific authority structures, the benefits of being a son, grandson, or brother of an exilarch or patriarch were limited to the kinds of perks that relatives of powerful people generally can expect to enjoy through nepotism. But when Davidic ancestry acquired a meaningfulness in its own right, when cultural attitudes determined that being a “nasi with respect to lineage” was itself something of value, the son, grandson or brother of an exilarch became himself a legitimate member of the royal household in his own right. The new medieval conception of the Davidic family as a noble lineage can thus be seen to have encouraged and permitted its numeric growth.

      A perception of the expanded size of the Davidic family in the Middle Ages emerges from the work of previous generations of historians, who, however, did not fully appreciate its significance or consider it indicative of broader processes of change affecting the House of David.⁸⁷ To give a sense of the numbers involved, I have compiled a list of dynasts who lived roughly between the years 950 and 1450 (see Appendix B). This is an admittedly broad swath of time, but the conservative approach I have used in tallying the nesiʾim more than makes up for any distortion resulting from such expansive temporal parameters. For the entire period in question I have counted a total of 107 male Davidic dynasts. By no means, however, does this figure approximate the actual number of nesiʾim who lived during those five centuries; rather, it merely represents a lower boundary, the actual number being certainly several times greater. Factoring in hints that daughters of nesiʾim were occasionally viewed as members of the biblical lineage as well, the Jewish community’s overall exposure to members of the royal line becomes all the more considerable.

      While there is no reliable data from earlier periods to compare with our tally, indirect evidence that the Davidic line had indeed undergone an expansion can be deduced again from critically considering the extant genealogical records of medieval nesiʾim. As noted above, those genealogies converge at Bustanay. The ancestor lists themselves, then, convey the image of a Davidic lineage that begins to divide into collateral descent lines only in the early Islamic period; only at that point does the genealogical record as a whole appear to acknowledge the existence of multiple dynasts in a single generation. And the further we move from Bustanay, the more ramified and numerous the lineage becomes. We need not ascribe an undue measure of accuracy to these genealogical sources in order to discern in this spread the echo of a progressive increase over time in the number of individuals laying claim to what was regarded as a legitimate Davidic pedigree. The variability that enters into the lineage after the time of Bustanay would thus point not only to more vigorous efforts to record Davidic ancestry, but to a growth in the overall number of recognized dynasts as well.

      Comparisons with the Family of Muḥammad

      The changes noted above in the organization, localization, and self-presentation of the Davidic line resemble in certain respects transformations that occurred among the ʿAlids about a century earlier. By the late tenth century members of the ʿAlid dynasty had spread to towns across the Islamic East, where they succeeded in converting popular respect for their noble lineage into a variety of forms of status at the local level.⁸⁸

      The affinities between the two lines were also evident to medievals. Jews and Muslims alike began to conceive of the exilarchal dynasty as a Jewish equivalent to the family of the Prophet. In the introduction we observed the way both Benjamin of Tudela and Petaḥya of Regensburg suggestively paired the families of King David and Muḥammad in their enthusiastic descriptions of Jewish power in Baghdad. An equation of the two families is also evident in the specific honorifics that Jews began to use when referring to members of the Davidic line. The letter mentioned above that was addressed to the thirteenth-century nasi Solomon ben Jesse is illustrative. In the opening lines of the missive, the writer, following epistolary custom, lavishes praise on his addressee in the midst of which he describes Solomon in rhyming prose as “the sharīf of the Jewish nation, and the sayyid of the Davidic faction [sharīf al-milla al-yahūdiyya wa-sayyid al-tāʾifa al-dāwūdiyya].”⁸⁹ The combination of the terms sharīf and sayyid—each a common designation for members of the family of Muḥammad—unmistakably casts the House of David as the Jewish counterpart to the ahl albayt.⁹⁰ A similar characterization of the Davidic family occurs in yet another letter addressed to the same Solomon ben Jesse, this one by a man named Peraḥya. The writer apologizes for not paying a visit to Solomon on the occasion of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, explaining that he was prevented from doing so because of the unexpected arrival in town of the nasi Josiah—quite possibly referring to a brother of Solomon with the same name. Peraḥya’s letter includes the wish that God might bring joy to the Jewish people “through the merit of his [Solomon’s] noble family [baytatihi al-sharīfa],” once again drawing on language most frequently used in connection with the family of Muḥammad.⁹¹ The tendency to think of the Davidic line as a family of Jewish ashrāf is also suggested by Abraham al-Raḥbī, who refers to the subject of his genealogical list as “his noble … presence [al-ḥaḍra al-sharīfa]” and to the nasi’s family as “this noble house [hadha al-bayt al-sharīf].”⁹² The complementary notion of the Davidic dynasty as a family of sāda appears in medieval sources as well. Several letters addressed to Solomon ben Jesse refer to his “exalted … sayyidi court,” and the members of his family are described as “the sāda [who are] the nesiʾim.”⁹³ While the terms sharīf and sayyid could also be used as generic titles of respect—sayyidunā (“my master”) is in fact a common form of address in

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