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A p p e n d i x B A Tentative List of Davidic Dynasts Datable between ca. 950 and ca. 1450 The following is a list of Davidic dynasts who can be definitively documented in the Near East, North Africa, and Muslim-dominated Spain between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. It is provided as a preliminary effort at gauging the prevalence of claims of Davidic lineage in medieval Jewish society in the Islamic world. During the roughly five centuries covered, I have identified 107 individuals living in the specified regions. Extracting this kind information from the various types of sources at our disposal poses a number of challenges. While all would probably agree that genealogies contain valuable information, methodological issues arise when it comes to determining how much of it can in fact be used responsibly. Should all the names appearing in an ancestor list be added to our tally, or only a portion of them? And if the latter, how ought one to determine where the critical line between reliable and unreliable information is to be drawn? A related question relates to individuals identified in documentary sources by a personal name only: Should we add some of their unnamed ancestors to our tally, inasmuch as their lineage claim was almost certainly inherited from preceding generations, or should we not? A third type of challenge involves the ambiguous nature of our sources. In certain cases it is difficult to know whether a group of texts refers to a single individual or to several different individuals who all bore the same name. This is a particular problem when individuals are identified without patronymics. For instance, a number of sources mention a nasi or exilarch named David in northern Iraq between the years 1175 and 1215. Do they refer to the same David, or, as several scholars have suggested, to two different Davids? How these and related questions are answered obviously affects one’s total. 190 Appendix B In light of these considerations, I have opted to err on the side of caution and have adopted the following guidelines so as to arrive at an estimate that, while artificially low, carries the greatest possible degree of confidence. When dealing with genealogical lists, I have restricted myself to counting only the subject of the list (the first name in the sequence) and the generation preceding it. On the basis of the list copied by Abraham al-Raḥbī, I therefore added just two names to my tally: that of the text’s anonymous subject (#4), indicated as [ ? ], and that of his father, Zakkay (#106). Where the sources provide a personal name but no patronymic I have counted only the named subject in my tally, though in reality there is every reason to assume that that individual had a father who would himself have been regarded as a Davidic dynast as well. And if there was reason to suspect overlap in my sources I adopted a similarly cautious course. Thus, in the case of the various texts that refer to a nasi named David in northern Iraq, I added to my list one entry only (#23). I have also omitted from my tally a number of doubtful cases such as the messianic figure Abū Saʿīd alD āʾūdī, whose existence is known exclusively on the basis of the spurious letter discussed in Chapter 4 and is therefore open to some question. An obvious disadvantage resulting from these procedures is that a number of individuals discussed in earlier scholarly literature make no appearance in the following tally. But what this list lacks in inclusiveness is made up for, I believe, in providing a rigorously grounded and reliable baseline for assessing the social presence of the House of David in Jewish communities in the Near East. The skewing effect of my guidelines is, moreover, partially compensated for by the relatively broad period of time that has been taken into consideration. My concern is to convey a sound sense of the overall exposure that Jews in the East would have had to claimants of Davidic lineage. Given that Geniza sources illuminate only certain families of nesiʾim and even then tend to focus on lineal as opposed to collateral kinship connections, there is good reason to imagine that the actual number of Davidic dynasts in the period and regions involved would have been several times greater than the total arrived at here. Even as is, our tally of 107 dynasts significantly revises a previous estimate that...

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