the presence of the caliph Al-Mansur, who granted his favor.

The story so closely fits polemical clichés about the personal motives of "heretics" that it is open to grave doubt. Moreover, Leon Nemoy notes, "Natronai, scarcely ninety years after Anan's secession, tells us nothing about his aristocratic (Davidic) descent or about the contest for the office of exilarch which allegedly served as the immediate cause of his apostasy." He later notes that Natronai, a devout Rabbinic Jew, lived