This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin

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СКАЧАТЬ flowery letter to the nasi Hodaya ben Jesse reveals how another writer modified a conventional expression of religious piety in order to emphasize the genealogical connection between his addressee and King David.⁷⁹ The missive, written by Joseph ben Obadiah in Syria, contains numerous corrections and revisions, some of a purely stylistic nature.⁸⁰ Thus, in one instance the writer originally described the nasi with the phrase “perfect in wisdom and full of beauty [kelil ḥokhma u-male yofi],” but then evidently decided to switch the wording so that it should read instead “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty [male ḥokhma u-khelil yofi].” Another correction demonstrates how Joseph carefully revised his text to better flatter its recipient. Initially he included in his florid introduction the standard messianic wish that God should raise “the fallen tabernacle of David” during Hodaya’s lifetime. When revising his letter, however, Joseph apparently felt that it was important to acknowledge the nasi’s connection to King David in a more direct manner and accordingly changed the expression to read “the fallen tabernacle of David his father” (emphasis added).

      Karaite marriage contracts from Egypt, which typically include a special clause mentioning the nasi who served as the head of the Karaite community, exhibit a similar tendency. Once such document, written in Fustat in 1036 under the jurisdiction of Semaḥ ben Asa, characterizes that nasi as “the descendant of the man of rest,” an allusion, on the basis of 2 Chronicles 22:9, to King Solomon.⁸¹ In similar fashion, a marriage contract drawn up in 1117 recalls the royal lineage of the the nasi Ḥisday ben Hezekiah ben Solomon when it speaks of “his virtuous fathers, the kings.”⁸²

      While clearly building on preexisting traditions about the Davidic ancestry of the family of exilarchs, such medieval strategies reflect a new investment in promoting and proving that lineage. Of particular significance for our purposes is recognizing the subtle shift this represents in the way claims to Davidic ancestry were now expressed, a transformation that has its roots in new attitudes about the importance of genealogy. As noted above, there is every reason to believe that exilarchs in late antiquity considered themselves to be the descendants of King David; indeed, the existence of such a family tradition is amply reflected in rabbinic writings. But there is no indication that they ever felt obliged to substantiate that claim by enumerating a sequence of ancestors that directly linked them to the royal line. The earliest recorded effort in that direction appeared around the beginning of the ninth century in Seder ʿolam zuṭa (The Lesser Order of the World).⁸³ That text’s delineation of a sequence of Davidic descendants stretching from the biblical period to the end of the rabbinic era reflects not only the concern to link medieval nesiʾim with the Israelite king but a new preoccupation with complete and accurate genealogical record-keeping as well.

      That a continuous chain of Davidic descendants was not actually worked out until the Islamic period is further suggested by a surprising feature of the Davidic genealogies that were recorded between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, genealogies that build upon the sequence of ancestors first laid out in Seder ‘olam zuṭa. Unlike family trees that follow multiple descent lines and chart the relations between contemporary descendants of the same ancestor, Davidic genealogies generally trace ascent from son to father through only one individual in a given generation. The ancestor list copied by Abraham al-Raḥbī, which traces a continuous chain of ninety-nine ascendants, is in this respect typical. Discounting one rather late and problematic exception, all such ancestor lists for the Davidic line converge at a single medieval progenitor—the fabled exilarch Bustanay, who is alleged to have lived during the Islamic conquests of the seventh century.⁸⁴ In other words, an identical sequence of ancestors stretching all the way from King David to the early Islamic period is shared by virtually all of the extant Davidic pedigrees, Rabbanite and Karaite, with significant differentiation occurring only in the generations that come after Bustanay. Leaving aside the many still unresolved questions concerning Bustanay’s identity and precise floruit, this fact would seem to indicate that the meticulous recording of Davidic lineage did not precede Bustanay’s day. If it had, we would surely expect to find genealogies of other, non-Bustanay branches of the family (besides the fourteenth-century exception mentioned above).⁸⁵ The almost complete absence of Davidic lineages traceable to an ancestor other than Bustanay is all the more surprising given the well-known medieval allegation that Bustanay 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 СКАЧАТЬ