Abdallah Somekh עַבְדַאללָּה סוֹמֵךְ

Abdallah (Ovadia) ben Abraham Somekh was born in Baghdad in 1813 and died there on 13 September 1889, in an epidemic—plague or cholera.

He began as a merchant and turned to teaching on the judgement that Torah study in Baghdad was collapsing. He headed the Bet Midrash Abu Menashe, founded in 1840 on the endowment of the philanthropist Ezekiel ben Reuben Manasseh; in the 1850s the founder's son expanded and renamed it Midrash Bet Zilkha, and it operated until 1951. A small but necessary correction: "Somekh founded Bet Zilkha in 1840" telescopes two institutions—in 1840 he founded Abu Menashe, and Bet Zilkha is the expanded and renamed successor of the 1850s.

Why Bet Zilkha matters for the whole Sephardi world—three reasons. It re-created in Iraq an institution that trained rabbis for the first time since the Geonic academies: not a school of literacy but a midrash producing ordained ḥakhamim. It supplied halakhic authority to the entire Baghdadi commercial diaspora: Somekh was the recognised supreme decisor for the Baghdadi communities of Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai—merchant communities with no local rabbinate—and his Zivḥei Ẓedeq on slaughter and kashrut was the operative text from Basra to Canton. His students carried Baghdadi halakhah into twentieth-century Israel: among them Yosef Ḥayyim, the Ben Ish Ḥai; Yaakov Ḥayyim Sofer, author of Kaf ha-Ḥayyim; Shimʿon Aghassi; Yehudah Fetaya; Elisha Dangoor. And down the chain Somekh—Ben Ish Ḥai—Ḥakham Ṣadqa Ḥusayn (1876–1961, a Bet Zilkha alumnus who came to Jerusalem in 1924)—Ovadia Yosef, Yitzhak Nissim, Mordechai Eliyahu, the Baghdadi school became a principal component of today's Israeli Sephardi rabbinate. This is arguably the single most important structural fact in all of post-Geonic Iraqi history.

He is often called "chief rabbi of Baghdad." He was not the ḥakham bāshī. He was av beit din and head of the yeshiva—the halakhic authority—whereas the state-appointed chief rabbinate was a separate, political office. The same distinction applies to his student the Ben Ish Ḥai. In Baghdad after 1849 scholarly authority and official rank were deliberately separated, and that is the key to the whole structure of the nineteenth-century community.

His death is usually dated "1889" without the circumstance, and the circumstance matters: he died in an epidemic and was buried near the traditional tomb of Joshua the High Priest; the burial provoked riots and the arrest of communal leaders, and after three months the government ordered the body reinterred in another cemetery. This is a documented case of Muslim-Jewish conflict over shrine space in Baghdad—of a piece with the dispute of 1860 over the Tomb of Ezekiel at al-Kifl and that of 1889 over the Nabī Yūshaʿ shrine, in which the chief rabbi was imprisoned and British intervention secured the governor's removal.