Saʿd al-Dawla: a Jewish vizier of Mongol Iran, and the pogrom after his death

To make this event intelligible, a near-universal misconception about 1258 must first be removed. The Mongol capture of Baghdad was for the city's Jews something closer to a relief: the Mongols abolished the dhimmī disabilities, the jizya lapsed, and Jews and Christians were for a time levelled with the Muslims, who were being slaughtered. The Encyclopaedia Judaica puts it cautiously and exactly: the city was taken by the Mongols "and the Jews were not maltreated."

In these conditions Saʿd al-Dawla ibn Ṣafī, a physician and financier, became under the Ilkhan Arghun (r. 1284–1291) vizier and director of the state's finances. This is the high-water mark of Jewish political power in post-Abbasid Iraq—and arguably between the Geonim and the Ottoman ṣarrāf bāshīs. To call him "a court physician who happened to be Jewish" is to say a third of what was the case.

In 1291, on Arghun's death, Saʿd al-Dawla was murdered, and reprisal followed: a contemporary report says that "the streets of the city flowed with Jewish blood." In 1295 the Ilkhan Ghazan converted to Islam, and the dhimmī disabilities returned intensified. Then come documented massacres and forced conversions in 1333 and 1344.

Hence the correction to keep in mind for the whole chapter: for the Jews of Baghdad the catastrophe was not 1258 but 1291, 1333, 1344 and above all 1401. The current formula "the Mongols destroyed the Jewish community of Babylon in 1258" inverts the record; and the fall of Saʿd al-Dawla is the most consequential political event for Iraqi Jewry between the Geonim and the Ottomans.