This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin

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      Chapter 1

      “Sharīf of the Jewish Nation”: Reconceptualizing the House of David in the Islamic East

      Sometime in the late twelfth century, an otherwise unknown individual by the name of Abraham ha-Levi bar Tamim 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.