Ṣedaqa Bekhor Ḥusayn צְדָקָה בְּכוֹר חוּצִין

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 it came books, responsa, marriages and trading houses. The whole of Baghdad's later nineteenth century—Abdallah Somekh, the Ben Ish Ḥai, the Bet Zilkha midrash—stands on this foundation, and cannot be understood without 1743.

Here too one claim current in popular accounts must be removed. "Rabbi Yaakov ben Yosef, who revived Baghdad after 1534" occurs in no source I could verify, 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 documented reviver of Baghdadi learning is precisely Ṣedaqa Bekhor Ḥusayn, from Aleppo, from 1743—two centuries later. The name may be a garbling of Sheikh Isḥaq Gaon, whose Baghdad shrine—the sixteen-columned Bet ha-Keneset Sheikh Isaac Gaon—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. That shrine, incidentally, was restored by Iraq's remnant community in 2025—the first restoration of a Jewish shrine in Iraq in generations.

And a third thing worth holding about this whole period: Suleiman's capture of Baghdad in 1534 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. Seventy years after the Ottoman conquest, Baghdad was still a minor Jewish town. The recovery is a seventeenth-century phenomenon, consolidated only after 1743.