Skip to content
Wellsprings
Minhat Yehuda

Minhat Yehuda

1859 CE–1942 CE · Modern · Baghdad

R. Yehuda Fetaya (1859-1942) was the leading Baghdadi-Jerusalem kabbalist of the early 20th century — disciple of the Ben Ish Chai and a key transmitter of Iraqi Lurianic Kabbalah to the Land of Israel. Born in Baghdad, he served as a dayan and kabbalist there before making aliyah in 1933 and joining the Beit El kabbalistic yeshiva in Jerusalem.

His Minhat Yehuda is a major kabbalistic-homiletic commentary on the Torah; his Beit Lechem Yehuda is an authoritative commentary on the Arizal's Etz Chaim (pure Lurianic Kabbalah). His Ruchot Mesaprot — a collection of dialogues with spirits dictated by him to a scribe — is the best-known modern Sephardic dybbuk narrative, equally controversial and beloved.

See Minhat Yehuda’s journey on the map →

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the orchard map →

Stop 1 of 21859–1933Born, Dayan, Kabbalist

BaghdadIraq

What they did here

Born in Baghdad; studied under R. Abdallah Somekh and was a junior colleague of the Ben Ish Chai. Served as a dayan and kabbalist in Baghdad for forty years before making aliyah.

Baghdad in this era

Baghdad in the modern era remained home to one of the Middle East's oldest and most culturally rich Jewish communities, even as the wider world convulsed with emancipation, nationalism, and catastrophe. Under Ottoman rule through the nineteenth century and then British mandate after World War I, Iraqi Jews—numbering around 150,000 by the twentieth century's mid-point—enjoyed relative security and prosperity, dominating trade and serving as merchants, money-changers, and professionals. The community maintained vibrant yeshivas where traditional Babylonian Jewish learning flourished, and Hebrew printing presses produced works that circulated throughout the Levantine world. Yet this stability proved fragile: growing Arab nationalism, the founding of Israel in 1948, and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars ignited violent upheaval. Massive Jewish emigration followed, with over 100,000 Iraqi Jews airlifted to Israel between 1950 and 1952 in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. The storied Jewish quarter, once filled with synagogues and study halls stretching back centuries, emptied within a generation. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, born in Baghdad in 1920, carried this heritage of Iraqi Jewry with him into his monumental career as a leading Sephardic halakhic authority and spiritual guide to hundreds of thousands of Jews worldwide.

About Baghdad

Baghdad, on the Tigris, is the capital of modern Iraq. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded it in 762 as his capital, and for five centuries it was a leading centre of Islamic learning, with the House of Wisdom, the Nizamiyya madrasa and many jurists, Sufis and scientists; Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the Qadiriyya order, is buried there. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the caliphate, and the city later passed to Ottoman rule. It was also a seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East and of the exilarch who headed Babylonian Jewry. Its Jewish community, whose foremost nineteenth-century rabbi was Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai), almost entirely emigrated to Israel in 1950-52.

In Baghdad at the same time

Eliyahu Yehoshua Ovadia, Zivchei Tzedek, Ben Ish Chai, Menahem Saleh Daniel, Ezra Dangoor, Shelomoh Tvena

See other sages who lived in Baghdad→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Minhat Yehuda’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Works(1)