Jews in the Central Islamic Lands in the Eleventh Century

Chapter 10 Jews in the Central Islamic Lands in the Eleventh Century

D.G. Tor*

מעשה אבות סימן לבנים ∵

The Jewish community in the caliphal heartlands of Western Iran and Iraq during the eleventh century was an extremely large and important one.1 Moreover, this century was transformative for both Jewish life and in the larger political life of the central Islamic lands. For the Jews, this was the period when the Gaonate ended.2 In the broader society, the middle part of the century was when political rule passed from the autochthonous Arab and Persian elite to the first of the Turco-Mongol dynasties, the Seljuqs, thus providing a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the Jewish experience under two very different kinds of Muslim rule: First the ethnically Iranian, weak late-Buyid

* The author is grateful to Michael Cook and Jane Gerber for their comments, and to the In- stitute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the National Endowment for the Humanities for having funded this research. 1 Although numbers are notoriously difficult to come by or rely upon, even for the Muslim population; vide David Ayalon, “Regarding Population Estimates in the Countries of Medi- eval Islam,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 28 (1985): 1–19 and, on Jewish population estimates in particular, e.g. Arnold E. Franklin, This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 2013), 3, 33. In any event, despite population loss and Jewish emigration from the central lands, especially to Egypt, in the latter part of the tenth century, it is clear that there was still an extremely significant Jewish community in the Islamic heartlands, especially in Iraq, which remained the seat of the Exilarchate; see e.g. Moshe Gil’s discussion of important Jewish figures in eleventh-century Iraq in Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages, trans. David Strassler (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 414–415. 2 On the late period of the Gaonate, especially its end, see Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylo- nia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 11–18; Uriel Simonsohn, A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews under Early Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 124–130, and Avraham Grossman, Rashut ha-golah be-Bavel be-tekufat ha-geʾonim (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 1984).

188 Tor rule, and then subsequently the strong and vigorous early rule of the Turkish Seljuqs, closing in the tumultuous years of civil war (1092–1105).3 Despite the importance and unique features of this era, the history of the Jewish community in the caliphal heartlands during the eleventh century has long been something of an undiscovered country, into whose bourn few re- searchers have ventured. Those who have done so have approached the topic primarily from the Jewish side, through the writings of outstanding Jewish figures of the time, or through the retrojection of the famous descriptions of Ben- jamin of Tudela, who traveled in the Islamic heartlands during the late twelfth century, after the end of effective Seljuq rule.4 Yet Jews, both as individuals and as a collective group, do appear, albeit sparsely, in major Muslim-authored sources documenting the eleventh century, thus providing an invaluable per- spective on how the majority society viewed and perceived the treatment of the Jewish minority in its midst. Moreover, in Muslim eyes and Muslim law, Jews were linked together with Christians, the other major confessional minority, and much can be gleaned from comparing and contrasting the relative experiences of the two communities as recorded in the Muslim sources. This chapter will examine the Arabic and Persian primary sources— chronicles, hagiographies, dynastic histories and belletristic texts—in order to glean information on the status, primarily of Jews, but where possible also of Christians, in the larger society and how that status varied under different regimes. Such an examination reveals, first, how strikingly sparse references to the Jews as a community are in the Muslim Arabic and Persian primary sources pertaining to this period and place, despite the substantial size of that

3 The end of the civil war in 1105 was followed by weaker Seljuq rule in the heartlands after the removal of the Great Sultanate to Marv in 1118, and consequent ʿAbbāsid revanchism in Iraq; and, finally, from the 1150s, revived caliphal rule. See D.G. Tor, “The Importance of Khurāsān and Transoxiana in the Persianate Dynastic Period (850–1220),” in Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World: Iranian Tradition and Islamic Civilisation, eds., A.C.S. Peacock and D.G. Tor (London: British Institute of Persian Studies Series; I.B. Tauris, 2015) and D.G. Tor, “A Tale of Two Murders: Power Relations Between Caliph and Sultan in the Twelfth Cen- tury,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 159 (2009): 279–297. The Jewish experience in Khurāsān and the eastern Persianate lands was distinct from that of the central lands, and even more poorly documented; here, too, though, there was clearly a significant Jewish presence; see Walter J. Fischel, “The Jews of Central Asia (Khorasan) in Medieval He- brew and Islamic Literature,” Historia Judaica 7 (1945): 29–50; Walter J. Fischel, “The Redis- covery of the Medieval Jewish Community at Fīrūzkūh in Central Afghanistan,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 85, 2 (1965): 148–153. 4 Benjamin of Tudela, Sefer masaʾot shel Rabbi Binyamin mi-Tudela, ed. Mordechai Adler (Jeru- salem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1965). The relative sparseness even of the Jewish sources is particularly striking when compared with the Cairo Genizah, a veritable treasure trove of information on the Jewish community of Egypt and, to a lesser extent, greater Syria.