In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion In the concluding chapter of the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides depicts the messianic age as a time when, among other things, the Jews will once again be made aware of their biblical ancestries. He writes: In the days of the king messiah, when his kingdom will be established and all Israel will gather round him, the pedigrees of all will be determined by him through the Holy Spirit. . . . First, he will purify the descendants of Levi, declaring “This one, of good birth, is a priest; this one, of good birth, is a Levite.” . . . The descent of the Israelites will be recorded according to their tribes. Thus he will announce: “This one is of such-and-such a tribe, and this one is of such-and-such a tribe.”1 Maimonides’ formulation is based upon a passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Qiddushin 70b–71a) that describes a miraculous future discrimination between individuals of legitimate and illegitimate birth. In envisioning a scenario in which all Jews will one day be explicitly traced to biblical tribes, Maimonides thus seems to take some liberty with his rabbinic source. According to one possible reading, Maimonides’ version implicitly acknowledges the importance of the kinds of genealogical concerns we have been examining. He seems to suggest, in fact, that the recovery of such information constitutes a significant stage in the national restoration as he understood it. According to another reading of the passage in the Mishneh Torah, however, Maimonides may be deflecting the excessive genealogical preoccupations of Jews in his day. In suggesting that accurate genealogical knowledge of any sort will be attained only at some undisclosed future moment—and by means of “the Holy Spirit”—this passage can just as easily be read as a caution against placing undue confidence in contemporary ancestral claims and genealogical records. For the time being, he may be saying, such matters are best set aside. In either reading, though, biblical lineages seem to have evident significance . Whether we take the final chapter of the Mishneh Torah as an affirmation  Conclusion of the intrinsic importance of biblical pedigrees for the national redemption or as a critique of the genealogical obsessions of Jewish society in the twelfth century, the concern with biblical ancestry is unavoidable and seems of a piece with the material examined in this book. * * * In the preceding chapters we explored the importance that claimants of Davidic ancestry enjoyed in medieval Jewish society in the Islamic East. One of the main conclusions to emerge from our investigation is that Jewish attitudes regarding genealogy developed considerably in the Middle Ages, and they did so under the influence of and in direct relation to Islamic society’s concern with nasab. The materials concerned with the ancestral claims of members of the Davidic family, we have argued, thus reveal not only a shift in the way the royal line itself was perceived, but also a new emphasis on the importance of genealogy more broadly within Jewish society. Throughout we have also noted parallel developments among other genealogically defined groups in the Jewish community—most notably among kohanim, but to a lesser extent among Levites and others as well. While Jewish tradition surely provided the genealogical resources that were ultimately pressed into service, the impetus for this broader transformation, I have argued, appears to have come from the nasab-oriented culture of the dominant Muslim society. Indeed , as we noted in the previous chapter, just as non-Arab Muslims turned to the Arab science of genealogy as a way of establishing cultural legitimacy, so, too, it seems, could non-Muslim minorities like the Jews. Given all this, it is worth considering the extent to which the Jewish embrace of nasab might in fact also be viewed as part of a more comprehensive concern with medieval Jewish society’s continuities with its biblical past. For at the broadest level, the cultural emphasis placed on genealogy speaks to anxieties about the links connecting the present and previous generations. This concern is best known from and most clearly addressed in the so-called “chain of tradition” literature, whose origins can be traced to the very period we have been focusing on—a genre of historiographical writing that includes works such as the anonymous ninth-century Seder tanaʾim ve-amoraʾim (Order of Mishnaic and Talmudic Sages) and the “Epistle of Sherira Gaʾon” and Kitāb al-taʾrīkh that have come up at various points in this work as testimonies to genealogical interest. Such...

Share