262 r Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad
- Baghdad and al-Hakham
Iraq of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a battleground be-
tween the two great empires of the time—the Persians, who were mostly
Shiites, and the Ottomans, who were mostly Sunnites. The seventeenth
century added another catastrophe for Iraq: plagues that came from the
Far East through India and Persia beset the country and caused the deaths
of a large number of the people. Only from the mid-nineteenth century
was this problem finally solved, through the aid of international organiza-
tions (Rappel 1978, 64).
The leadership of prominent rabbis such as the Aleppo-born Rabbi
Sdaqah Husin (1699–1733) and the most prominent and admired Rabbi
̔Abdallah Somekh (1813–89) brought significant improvements in the life
of this community, and during the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, Jews became influential in Iraq in both commerce and government.
One of their major achievements was the foundation of an educational
system for Jews and for the wider population of Iraq (Hakak 2005, 15).
However, this situation did not last long. From the 1930s onwards, the
conditions of life for the Babylonian Jews deteriorated rapidly, coming
to a tragic peak in the farhud (pogrom), the massacre and looting of 1941
(Ben Ya ̔akov 1971, 90).
Life went back to normal; however, Zionism gained increasing public-
ity among the Jews and thus provoked frequent protests against them and
discriminatory legislation by the Iraqi government. After 1945, the situ-
ation deteriorated, resulting in the mass exodus of the Jews in 1950 and
1951, only two years after the establishment of the state of Israel (Spector-
Simon 2003:351).
Al-Hakham (1835–1909), known also as Ben Eish Hay (A Living Man),
was a rabbi, poet and the last spiritual leader of the Babylonian Jewry
on the eve of their mass emigration from Iraq (Ben Ya ̔akov 1965, 194).
He was known as a progressive halakhic authority whose leadership was
widely recognized by all Jewish communities, Babylonians as well as oth-
ers in the East and West (Stillman 1995, 21).
Al Hakham’s Poetry
Al-Hakham was a prolific writer of both rabbinical works and poetry. He
wrote more than two hundred poems, all of which reflect the influence of