Benjamin of Tudela in Baghdad and the end of the exilarchate

The office of exilarch came to an end eighty years before the Mongols took Baghdad. Around 1168 Benjamin of Tudela reached Baghdad and described the exilarch Daniel ben Ḥisdai: the title adonenu rosh ha-golah shel kol Yisraʾel, his investiture by the caliph, his right to appoint communal officers and levy taxes, the Muslim escort crying "Make way for our lord, the son of David!" He also enumerated the community: by one recension, forty thousand Jews, twenty-eight synagogues, ten yeshivot with their heads; by another, about a thousand families and twenty-three synagogues. He named too the head of the yeshiva, Samuel ben Ali (d. c. 1194)—the future chief antagonist of Maimonides in Baghdad and the teacher of Rabbi Moses of Kiev.

The existence of a functioning exilarchate with caliphal recognition in those years is accepted by scholarship: it is independently corroborated by Petaḥyah of Regensburg, in Baghdad a decade later, and by Abraham ibn Ezra, who passed through in mid-century. The figures are not accepted: forty thousand and twenty-eight synagogues against a thousand families and twenty-three are two recensions of one text, and Petaḥyah counts three synagogues plus one ascribed to the prophet Daniel.

But the main thing here is how it ended. Daniel ben Ḥisdai died around 1174–75 childless, and the Jewish Encyclopedia records already in 1906 that the claim moved to Mosul, where David ben Hodaya and a certain Samuel became rival claimants; Judah al-Ḥarizi, writing after 1216, met at Mosul "a descendant of the house of David, whom he calls David, the head of the exile." Arnold Franklin has shown that Davidic families bore the title into the fourteenth century.

Hence a correction that rearranges the whole post-Geonic Iraqi chronology: the exilarchate ended around 1174–75, not in 1258, when the Mongols took Baghdad. The clean "1258—the end of the exilarchate" is a textbook convenience. And a second: Daniel's tenure was not a return of Geonic power but a brief flare—the Jewish Encyclopedia states plainly that nothing is known of his political or literary activity, and the real weight in the Baghdad of those years lay with Samuel ben Ali.