Joseph ben Phinehas

Origins and early life

Joseph ben Phinehas was a Jewish businessman of Baghdad, active from at least 877 and dead before 928, who with his partner and kinsman Aaron ben Amram — who has his own fiche on this site — created what historians of finance regard as the first true banking house of the Islamic world. He was born and lived a Jew, in the Baghdad of the geonim, and never left the community; it was as Jews, excluded from office but trusted with money, that the two men could serve a caliph without becoming his rivals.

Work and career

In 911 or 912 the vizier Ibn al-Furat formally appointed them jahbadh, court bankers, to the caliph al-Muqtadir, a post the Encyclopaedia Judaica calls the most important held under the Abbasid regime by men outside the administration. Their firm advanced the treasury enormous sums against the future revenue of provinces, in effect the first sovereign overdraft, held the deposits of viziers and provincial governors, and above all issued the sakk, the written order to pay that let a merchant in Baghdad collect in Ahwaz or Isfahan without moving coin: the instrument that reached Europe as the cheque, whose very name comes from that Arabic word.

Their branch in Ahwaz operated as a provincial agency. Joseph also used his standing at court on behalf of Babylonian Jewry, and appears in the great quarrel between the exilarch Ukba and the gaon Kohen Zedek reported by Rabbi Nathan the Babylonian. The house passed to his son Netira's family and continued to serve the caliphs for another generation.