Aquitaine's princess abducted, her Berber rebel, a "Jewish kingdom of Septimania"
As the Moors took Spain, a legendary twining nested in my family tree ca. 730
Voltaire on social climbing: “the slippered feet going down the stairs as the hobnailed boots ascend them.” Scramble higher into ancestral leaves: twigs sprout from shaky stems. My claims via a scheming Butler clan remain the only branch snaking up. Given that mercenary Irish lot’s grasping at courtly legitimacy by innumerable matches, then as now a persistence of boasts, hearsay, bragging rights, “we’re from royalty” assertions—before rabbits died or “who’s your daddy?” DNA tests proliferated—abounds.
But let’s enjoy the ascent. In the last two entries, I’ve trimmed two bonsai, if you will, from the bulk of lumber for a glance at both Butler and the Saher de Cuincy/Quincy lines, which suggested in the latter a surmised Levantine origin for that outlier first name of the latter family. However, there’s nothing prior to that 1100-1250 stretch to reveal any more hints. Poke around the shrubbery around adjacent estates, and another demesne lurks in shadowy supposition, evidence of Charlemagne—from whom every Western European seems to have been descended eventually as the proliferation of his spawn populate whatever few charts kept by the gentry survive. In other words, if you can trace your forebears on this side of the world, you’ll hit not only the first (un)Holy (non)Roman Emperor, but Muhammad, according to this essay. (I caught a glitch, as the Prophet left no grandchildren; both his daughters bore none; thus the Shiite fracas over the rights from an “inherited” founder via the sons-in-law.)
Ten years, ago, Gregory Clark wrote an ingeniously titled study, “The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility.” His thesis tracked in Sweden, the U.S,, Britain, and China how families with wealth tended to stretch back hundreds of years.
Large-scale, rapid social mobility is impossible to legislate. What governments can do is ameliorate the effects of life’s inherent unfairness. Where we will fall within the social spectrum is largely fated at birth. Given that fact, we have to decide how much reward, or punishment, should be attached to what is ultimately fickle and arbitrary, the lottery of your lineage.
So, as in my case, the happenstance of one set of records coming down the stairs, so to speak, on GENI, and another going up at WikiTree, never intersected online, but I, never gifted with much but a memory for names, dates, and trivia, bridged the gap by grafting. And thus found a ladder into the rarified upper stories (not as often those garrets where the servants slept) and turreted towers allegedly housing progenitors.
As most Irish Catholics lack an ability to go back past around 1850 in their trails, the Butlers I found hailed from anti-Papist cousins, and therefore I did an end-run, enabling me to keep shinnying up, to mix legged metaphors, and detour that barrier. Eventually, I found myself among the Normans, who in turn hail from the Vikings who likely forced themselves in more ways than one and in the one that matters most if one wishes to finagle one’s self into a “relationship with benefits,” as Clark concurs.
For brevity, wriggle up to Lampede, princess of Aquitaine, daughter of a Toulouse king, born let’s guesstimate 700. Their fate’s imperiled. Moors defeat Visigoths. Born around 675 in Egypt to the son of a Berber captive forced to convert to Islam, their leader, Uthman ibn Abu-Musa Emir of Cordoba, lived in the castle of Llívia (once the Roman base at Iulia Lybica), Cerdanya, near Girona in Catalunya. He’s married off to our girl, around twenty. She bears him Magdalena, but very soon, “Munusa” revolts against the Muslim overlord; overwhelmed, leaps into a ravine lest he fall into the hands of his enemy as a traitor, whatever fate worse than….which now-single mom sadly suffers; she’s ferried off to that victorious vengeful Caliph’s harem in Damascus.
Well, that’s one story. Another’s nearby, up the coast. The Makhir of Narbonne was called by Charlemagne to settle a dispute over that city’s control, and to settle down.
Makhir ben Yehudah Zakkai of Narbonne or Makhir ben Habibai of Narbonne or Natronai ben Habibi (725 - 765 CE or 793 CE) was a Babylonian-Jewish scholar and later, the supposed leader of the Jewish community of Narbonne in a region which at that time was called Septimania at the end of the eighth century. (Wikipedia)
The (here speculation mirrors itself) tale’s told by Abraham ibn Daud in his Sefer ha-Qabbalah, ~1161, Makhir was a descendant of the house of David. Ibn Daud wrote:
Then King Charles sent to the King of Baghdad [Caliph] requesting that he dispatch one of his Jews of the seed of royalty of the House of David. He hearkened and sent him one from there, a magnate and sage, Rabbi Makhir by name. And [Charles] settled him in Narbonne, the capital city, and planted him there, and gave him a great possession there at the time he captured it from the Ishmaelites [Arabs]. And he [Makhir] took to wife a woman from among the magnates of the town; *...* and the King made him a nobleman and designed, out of love for [Makhir], good statutes for the benefit of all the Jews dwelling in the city, as is written and sealed in a Latin charter; and the seal of the King therein [bears] his name Carolus; and it is in their possession at the present time. The Prince Makhir became chieftain there. He and his descendants were close [inter-related] with the King and all his descendants.
“Makhir” lore’s there and here; yesterday I perused the 1972 Columbia dissertation which expanded into a 500-page book (hey, my equivalent at UCLA had that many pages and that many footnotes), that being what professorial aspirants do, on this and similar texts. Unfortunately, its author insists on emending “Goths” as “Jews” in a key passage based on his own hunches, to show that the latter ruled the roost by handing over the Narbonaisse (a splendid municipal term) citadel of the blow-in Moors to their uncircumcized Gentile enemies. Arthur Zuckerman interprets this in hurried fashion, while never clarifying why this proof-text extant’s been forged, recast, and back-dated. Predictably, the parlous state of records surviving from this distant era left his own argument open to the same charges of invention or imagination. Still if one must search for Freud’s “family romance,” I’ll choose this illusion. To hope for a glimmer of truth within a hard kernel of dark doubt or occlusion (appropriate Kabbalah image).
Arthur J. Zuckerman’s A Jewish princedom in feudal France, 768-900 (Goodreads review)
This appeared in 1972, and has since been largely discredited. So why did I read it? Well, “my Hebraic ancestors” of fable were among those featured, and even if as a "trained medievalist" myself I know well the dangers of conjecture based on scanty material, alleged forgeries, and paleographic or onomastic errors on the behalf of the scholar, as have been charged against this author, I remain intrigued by it. Who wouldn't want to be related to the wanderers who sailed across seas to Spain?
Genealogists leapt in to include Zuckerman's thesis to boost family trees like mine, which at this attenuated extent inevitably stretch into legend anyway, right (or wrong)? His thesis of how Babylonian Jews sought, at least for one lucky/ luckless exiliarch, a new home among the Frankish court who welcomed an alliance with the Ummayid dynasty against occupying Moors in Iberia ca. 700-800 posits daringly, if by conjecture, a supposed "Jewish kingdom" around Narbonne, Septimania.
They survived, in this account, by managing to stay on the side of the winners, against the Arian Visigoths, the Franks, the Cordovan Berber-Arab incursions, and the determined Catholic campaigns to eradicate the Jewish communities, while they negotiated ways to endure, hold land, keep slaves, unfortunately, and in the case of (in)famous "Judaizer" Deacon Bodo-Eliezer, to offer bold sanctuary to a convert from Christianity. Eventually, assimilation appears to have taken hold, inevitably, and the Jewish descendants of the arrivals from Persian realms likely bowed to intermarriage or "Rome" rule. There's no strong tie between Septimania and later Jewish Narbonne.
Their appeal, as Zuckerman interprets the fragmentary testimonies, may lie in Charlemagne's desire to link his bloodlines to those of rabbis said to be from the House of David. The better to boast of their claims, perhaps, as messianic messengers as they sought to build upon glories of empire and of the heirs to the same royal house from which their Savior was prophesied to spring from? I wish we'd be aware of contextual proof along these, to me, provocative allegations. Others counter that it's a jumbled passage from the Zohar that's erasing the original's Pepin and the Goths.
Trouble is, a millennium later, we just can't fit all the jagged shards together to connect the earlier to the later Jewish pattern with continuity. Zuckerman insists on reading a fundamental passage in the text he uses as a proof to mean not "Goths" but "Jews" regarding the fall of Moorish Narbonne, but fails to ground his interpretation in other than his own surmise that the writer fudged the two terms on purpose to erase the latter from the tale. It's certainly confusing and rather opaque.
This period left much across Europe in disarray, and this era didn't manage to keep up or at least pass on the largely monastic-created (and biased) documents. Yet reading into the scanty evidence one's own theory without it being justified by other sources, but rather one's own determination for it to be so, undermines the validity of his statement, upon which rests the foundation of his diss.
To be fair, Dr Zuckerman acknowledges the paucity of material when it comes to linking the court of "nasi" [Jeremy Cohen’s astute 1977 response] Jews to the later culture that flourished with learning in the 12c in this region, leading to the Zohar itself being written. There's an undeniable gap between the fall of Carolingian rule and the rise of the Iberian renaissance of knowledge shared among its learned peoples. Although the convivial spirit is romanticized recently by those eager to find a counter-model to Ashkenazi Rhineland-Crusades conditions. It's another danger to conjure up a multicultural diverse paradise in another corner of the West where Christians, Muslims, and Jews supposedly got along better. I kept wondering if this professor had in his subsequent career corrected or refined his own proposal.
To his credit, he tries in the chansons, historical records, polemics, and chronicles to sort out what might have been the predecessor for the Jewish efflorescence a few centuries prior to its zenith along the Mediterranean, where present-day France and Spain blur. He has to make a lot of leaps of faith to justify his dissertation, and naturally, academics in decades since have picked apart a lot of his conclusions. All the same, it opens up material that Jonathan Levi in his 2016 Septimania mined, although I wish that turned out to be a tighter story than it was, as an aside...
And here’s that review, to end on a whirling if not bang than louder than a whimper.
This is a smart but ultimately a narrative mess. Levi ambitiously, and that's an understatement, tries to craft a Dan Brown-meets-Umberto Eco mash-up of sinister thriller and intellectual adventure. He's much better on character than control over an overly imaginative plot. The latter veers wildly all over the place, into improbable situations. One day so-and-so is in the middle of England, the next such-and-such is being made a green-vested cardinal in haste to elect a "Polish Pope." And then that barely gets mentioned again, as the mad tale gallops on. Mathematics, secret cabals, the organ, Rome, the (pseudo-scholarly though you'd not suspect it herein) "Jewish kingdom of Septimania," and all kinds of maddening coincidences, astonishing births kept secret for decades, and inevitably love lost and won again after many intervening years and dalliances: it's all here. Jonathan Levi's clever, but inventive energy gets ahead of coherence in this sprawling saga.