This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin

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СКАЧАТЬ opposed to merely asserted—ancestry ultimately provided the impetus for accessing those traditions anew and deploying them in ways that were unprecedented.

      The Jewish embrace of nasab was, however, a complex and multi-vocal phenomenon. On one hand it reflects Jewish acculturation; it is an instance of medieval Jews reflexively and unselfconsciously making use of the cultural forms of their Muslim neighbors. At the same time, it also entails an element of cultural competitiveness or perhaps even resistance, an implicit response to claims of Arab genealogical superiority using the very methods of the Arab “science of genealogy” (ʿilm al-nasab) itself. In fact, as we shall see, Jews were one of several non-Arab minority groups to take up genealogy in this particular way. At the broadest level, then, this work, in investigating Jewish genealogical claims, illuminates a strategy that various populations utilized as they sought cultural legitimacy within the medieval Arab-Islamic world. Individual and societal interests converged, as an ennobling lineage could benefit at one and the same time both the specific dynast and the larger community of which he was a member.

      It is my hope that the cultural insights gained through the kind of critical evaluation of genealogies undertaken in this work will encourage further research along such lines in the field of medieval Jewish history. Few will quibble with the premise that ancestral claims can tell us as much, if not more, about the period in which they were asserted as they can about the succession of past generations they putatively record. Historians of medieval Europe have been particularly attentive to connections between social developments and genealogical claims. Georges Duby correlated the extensive genealogical literature produced in France during the twelfth century with a number of critical changes that were then affecting the French nobility, among them a profound shift in its very conception of the family.²⁸ Others have made similar efforts at contextualizing genealogical activity.²⁹ Historians of Islamic civilization have demonstrated a comparable sophistication in dealing with genealogical sources, paying close attention to the social and political factors that lay behind the efforts to systematically document Arab lineages in the early Abbasid period.³⁰ Historians of medieval Jewish society have, by contrast, been relatively uncritical in their approach to these materials, often treating genealogical sources as no more than reserves of data to be selectively pillaged for the purposes of reconstructing family histories.³¹ In so doing, they have tended to avoid a consideration of the motives that prompted medieval Jews to record at certain moments and in particular ways the lineages of specific individual members of their society. And though recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in collecting and sorting genealogical information, relatively little effort has been given to understanding the social and cultural factors that determine both how such knowledge is acquired and how it is ultimately presented. Indeed, inquiries of this sort are sometimes viewed as entirely peripheral to what is deemed the proper practice of genealogical research. I hope the present work will succeed in demonstrating that the problematization of Jewish genealogical claims is both relevant and important—and not merely for individuals narrowly engaged in research on genealogical materials but for those broadly interested in understanding medieval Jewish culture as well.

      The Sources

      The most important materials on the nesiʾim come from the Cairo Geniza, an enormous and highly varied corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts that came to the attention of Western scholars in the late nineteenth century. Jewish tradition prohibits the destruction of sacred documents so as to prevent desecrating the written name of God. When such writings became worn out or were no longer of use, medieval Jews, following an ancient custom, either buried them in a cemetery or stored them in a special repository called a geniza.³² In practice, this courtesy was often extended to texts that we might regard as “secular” in nature as well, especially when written in Hebrew characters. One such repository was located on the premises of the Ben Ezra synagogue, a Jewish prayer house dating to the Middle Ages in what was formerly the town of Fustat (and today is the neighborhood of Old Cairo).³³ The contents of that repository make up what is commonly known today as the Cairo Geniza. Accumulated over roughly a thousand years and now dispersed among some thirty libraries and private collections across the globe, the Geniza materials comprise roughly quarter million paper and parchment folio pages. The largest collection of these materials, amounting to roughly three-fourths of the total, was acquired in 1898 by Cambridge University Library at the instigation of Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), Reader in Rabbinics at the university.³⁴

      As one might expect, the vast majority of the Geniza manuscripts contain pages of biblical codices, rabbinic texts, legal codes, and works of Jewish philosophy, mysticism, and liturgical poetry. Subjects as disparate as the history of Jewish sectarianism, the vocalization of the biblical text, the development of halakha, Jewish thought and Hebrew literature have benefited from the discovery of these works, many of which were previously unknown. But preserved among these literary remains are also some 15,000 pages of documentary materials, sources that include business contracts, court dockets, marriage and divorce certificates, correspondence of all sorts, and records of the local Jewish community. These documents, written in Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, are most abundant for the years between 1000 and 1250, dubbed the “classical Geniza period,” and constitute, in the absence of the kinds of archives available for medieval Europe and the Ottoman Empire, an unparalleled resource for the social, religious, and economic history of the Near East in the high Middle Ages. And because Fustat was home to one of the most important Jewish communities in the period covered by the documents, a community that served among other things as the hub of a commercial network stretching from India to Spain, the Cairo Geniza records offer a panoramic view of Jewish life in the Islamic world, shedding light on people, places, and events far beyond the borders of Egypt. It is these documents that provide the majority of the source material utilized in this study.³⁵

      Overlapping with and complementing the Cairo Geniza sources are two manuscript collections that were amassed by the Karaite bibliophile Abraham Firkovich (1786–1874). Currently housed in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, these collections contain over 15,000 Arabic and Hebrew items.³⁶ Some of Firkovich’s hoard was procured in Aleppo, Damascus, and Jerusalem; but the majority of the manuscripts, many of which date from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, were likely taken from the geniza of the Karaite synagogue in Cairo.³⁷ As we would expect given their provenance, these manuscripts have proven to be of immeasurable importance for the study of the history and literature of the Karaites, a distinct group within medieval Jewish society about which more will be said below. While the Firkovich collections contain fewer documentary sources than the Geniza, they are nonetheless an important source of information regarding Jews’ genealogical concerns, as many prominent Karaite figures, including authors and religious leaders, were themselves nesiʾim. The first Firkovich collection was sold to the Imperial Library in 1862, the second in 1876—decades before Schechter’s acquisition of the Cairo Geniza manuscripts for Cambridge. But because scholars outside of Russia were not permitted regular access to the materials during the Soviet era, research on its contents is still in its earliest stages. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, new efforts have been made to catalog and publish some of these important manuscripts.

      The recovery of these various manuscript materials has transformed our understanding of the history of Near Eastern Jewish society in dramatic ways. Yet research involving them is often painstaking and slow. As a repository for worn-out writings, the Geniza was not designed to safeguard documents for future consultation, but rather was intended to be a place where they could be respectfully discarded. Its contents, therefore, are highly uneven, the result of haphazard and unpredictable processes of disposal. Furthermore, the manuscripts themselves are frequently in poor condition. Most are torn, and many are mere fragments. And even when one is fortunate enough to be able to make out several clear lines of writing, language and style can present further obstacles. Personal correspondence, one of the most important genres used in this study, is characteristically obscure, allusive, and lax in its adherence to the rules of Arabic grammar. Posing a particular challenge to the historian are the difficulties involved in properly dating documents; many make no mention of the day, month, or year when they were СКАЧАТЬ