Rav Yehuda Fatiyah רבי יהודה פתיה
the Baghdad kabbalist who wrote of the hidden in a practitioner's plain hand
Baghdad taught him the open and the hidden at the same tables: as a youth he sat under Rav Abdallah Somech beside the Ben Ish Chai, and in ripeness became his generation's master of the Etz Chaim: his Beit Lechem Yehuda leads the reader through Vital step by step, as a teacher leads, not as a preacher soars.
The Minchat Yehuda is a book unafraid of plainness: dreams, troubles, mendings of souls, prayers over named people with named outcomes. The communities of the East read it as testimony: this is what Kabbalah looks like when it is service, not ornament.
In 1933 he moved to Jerusalem. In the war, as Rommel's army drove toward the Land of Israel, the old man led the people in prayer at the city walls—prayers remembered still. He died in 1942; his grave is on Har ha-Menuchot.
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Beit Lechem Yehuda and Minchat Yehuda — his commentary on the Etz Chaim and the records of his practice
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Baghdad and Jerusalem; 1859–1942
Basis: Talmud and midrash.