Connections Between Baghdad and Aleppo

The traveller Wolf (William) Schur, who visited the Jewish communities of the Middle East during the mid-1870s, noted that Aleppo and Baghdad were the only two of those communities where yeshivas were still presided over by serious talmudic scholars:

Only in Aram Zova [Aleppo] and in Baghdad, which is Babylon, are there still people who know how to swim in the sea of Talmud, to plunge to its depths and to extract its pearls. But in other places—in Syria, Kurdistan, and Arabia—there is no one who knows how to cast his net over that great sea. The paths of the earlier authorities [posekim] are also not paved before them, they follow only the path of the Shulḥan arukh.

Is it a mere coincidence that advanced Torah study was evident in these two particular communities at the time Schur was writing? One hundred and thirty years earlier, Torah learning in Baghdad had been in a state of severe decline. Local tradition attributes this state of affairs to a cholera epidemic that ravaged the city during 1742–3, killing most of its scholars. In fact, we know very little of the Baghdad community's history and its spiritual and material leadership prior to the outbreak of the epidemic, as Rabbi Ezra Reuben Dangoor, chief rabbi of Baghdad from 1923 to 1928, noted in his introduction to Rabbi Sadkah Houssin's Tsedakah umishpat: