Zivchei Tzedek
1813 CE–1889 CE · AH · Baghdad
R. Abdallah Somekh (1813-1889) was the architect of the 19th-century Baghdadi halachic renaissance. After a century of decline, the Baghdad community needed a new generation of trained dayanim; Somekh founded the Beit Zilkha yeshiva in 1840 and personally trained nearly every major Baghdadi posek of the next generation — most famously the Ben Ish Chai (R. Yosef Hayyim), who called him 'my master who showed me light'.
His Zivchei Tzedek — a three-volume halachic compendium on Yoreh De'ah — became the standard Baghdadi reference on the laws of shechita, melicha, niddah, and mourning. His Mizmor LeDavid and his collected responsa shaped Baghdadi pesak for the rest of the century. Without Somekh, there is no Ben Ish Chai.
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BaghdadIraq
What they did here
Born and lived in Baghdad. Founded the Beit Zilkha yeshiva in 1840; trained the entire next generation of Baghdadi poskim including the Ben Ish Chai. Authored Zivchei Tzedek and dozens of responsa here. Died in Baghdad 1889.
Baghdad in this era
Baghdad in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries lay under Ottoman dominion, a sprawling metropolis straddling the Tigris where merchants, soldiers, and scholars moved through bazaars dense with spice-smoke and conversation. The Jewish community, numbering in the thousands by the eighteenth century, occupied distinct quarters and maintained their own courts, schools, and charitable institutions under Ottoman millet governance—a framework that granted them autonomy in religious and communal affairs while subjecting them to special taxes and restrictions. Torah study flourished in the city's yeshivas, where Babylonian Talmudic traditions were cherished as local inheritance; the intellectual atmosphere blended rigorous halakhic reasoning with growing interest in Kabbalistic interpretation. The Ben Ish Chai, arriving in the late nineteenth century, found a community engaged in both traditional learning and commercial life, their presence woven into Baghdad's economic fabric as brokers, physicians, and textile merchants. The Tigris itself remained the artery of the city, its waterfront lined with warehouses and boats—a geographical fact that had anchored Jewish settlement there for over a millennium.
About Baghdad
Major Mizrahi center; home of Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai).
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.