Aaron ben Amram

Origins and early life

Aaron ben Amram lived as a Jew in Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries, at the heart of the Abbasid caliphate.

Work and career

With his partner Joseph ben Phinehas he held the official post of jahbadh, court banker to the caliphate — the pair collected state revenues, issued and honored government bills of exchange, and advanced loans to the caliph's administration, while also serving as private bankers to the viziers. The historian Walter Fischel placed the two men at the origin of banking in the medieval Islamic world. Their house was also a Jewish institution: donations sent by diaspora communities to the great talmudic academies of Babylonia traveled as letters of credit drawn on his bank.

In the calendar controversy that divided the Jewish world in the 920s he sided with Aaron ben Meir, the Gaon of the Land of Israel, against Saadia Gaon — whose confidence his sons, inheriting the family position, later nonetheless enjoyed. He died after 924, and his bank outlived him.