The plague in Baghdad and the rabbi from Aleppo

In 1743 plague in Baghdad killed most of the city's rabbis. The community applied to Aleppo, and from there R. Ṣedaqa (Sadqa) Bekhor Ḥusayn was sent as chief rabbi, and with him some fifty Sephardi families.

This event matters more than it looks in a list of dates: it is what made Iraqi practice Sephardi and tied Baghdad into the Livorno–Salonica–Aleppo network, along which came books, responsa, marriages and trading houses. The whole of Baghdad's later nineteenth century—Abdallah Somekh, the Bet Zilkha midrash, the Ben Ish Ḥai—stands on this foundation.

What came before must be remembered to see the scale. The Ottomans took Baghdad in 1534, but that produced no immediate revival: Pedro Teixeira in the early seventeenth century found a city of twenty to thirty thousand houses, of which two or three hundred were Jewish. The recovery is a seventeenth-century phenomenon, consolidated only after 1743.

And along with it, what should be struck out. "Rabbi Yaakov ben Yosef, who revived Baghdad after 1534" occurs in no verifiable source, and should not be printed: neither the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, nor the Encyclopaedia Judaica, nor the community catalogues know such a sixteenth-century rabbi. The name may be a garbling of Sheikh Isḥaq Gaon, whose Baghdad shrine—the sixteen-columned synagogue of his name—was a focus of the revived community; but he is a figure of the Geonic era whose tomb was venerated, not a sixteenth-century rabbi.

And one further structural consequence to keep beside it. In 1849, under the Tanzimat rationalisation, the ḥakham bāshī was established in Baghdad—a chief rabbinate appointed from Istanbul. This was not the same office as the older nasi, the lay head of the community, who usually combined it with that of ṣarrāf bāshī, the wālī's chief banker. The creation of the ḥakham bāshī broke the Sassoon-type monopoly on communal leadership; which is why the departure of the great Baghdadi families in the 1820s–40s and the reform of 1849 are parts of one story. From those same years, in Baghdad, scholarly authority and official rank were deliberately separated: Abdallah Somekh and the Ben Ish Ḥai were supreme decisors without being ḥakham bāshī.