Saʿd al-Dawla סַעְד אַלדַּוְלָה

Saʿd al-Dawla ibn Ṣafī served as vizier and director of finances to the Ilkhan Arghun (r. 1284–1291)—the high-water mark of Jewish political power in post-Abbasid Iraq and arguably between the Geonim and the Ottoman ṣarrāf bāshīs.

To see how this became possible one must remember that the Mongol capture of Baghdad in 1258 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 Muslims. The Encyclopaedia Judaica's formulation is cautious and exact: the city was taken by the Mongols "and the Jews were not maltreated"—against a Muslim population that was slaughtered.

In 1291, on Arghun's death, Saʿd al-Dawla was murdered, and the reprisal that followed was terrible: 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, and in 1401 Timur sacked Baghdad, and the Jewish refugees from the surrounding villages who had sheltered in the city perished. That, and not 1258, is the demographic end of Babylonian Jewry.

Hence two corrections that belong together. "Saʿd al-Dawla, a court physician who happened to be Jewish" understates it badly: he was the state's chief financial administrator. And 1258 was not a Jewish catastrophe: the near-universal formula "the Mongols destroyed the Jewish community of Babylon in 1258" inverts the record. The destroying was done in 1291, 1333, 1344 and above all 1401.