Daniel ben Ḥisdai דָּנִיאֵל בֶּן חִסְדַּאי

Died around 1174–75. In the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 he appears as Daniel ben Solomon (ben Ḥasdai): the article proposes that his father Solomon and the exilarch Ḥisdai, teacher of the messianic claimant David Alroy, are the same man.

Benjamin of Tudela, in Baghdad around 1168, described his title, his investiture by the caliph—al-Muqtafī or his successor al-Mustanjid—his right to appoint communal officers and levy taxes, and the Muslim escort crying: "Make way for our lord, the son of David!" All of this is independently corroborated by Petaḥyah of Regensburg.

And here comes the chief correction to this whole stretch of Iraqi history. The exilarchate ended around 1174–75, not in 1258. Daniel died childless, and the Jewish Encyclopedia already in 1906 records 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 and later. The clean "1258—the end of the exilarchate" is a textbook convenience.

A second, less obvious but substantial point: Daniel's tenure was not a restoration of Geonic power but a brief flare. The Jewish Encyclopedia calls it a "short-lived recrudescence of the resh galuta" and states plainly: "Nothing is known of Daniel's political or literary activity." The real intellectual weight in the Baghdad of those years lay not with the exilarch but with the head of the yeshiva, Samuel ben Ali (d. c. 1194)—the same man who became Maimonides' chief antagonist in Baghdad and the teacher of Rabbi Moses of Kiev.