Menahem Saleh Daniel

Origins and early life

Menahem Saleh Daniel was born in Baghdad in 1846 into one of the great Jewish landowning families of Iraq, of Georgian Jewish origin according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and he lived and died a Jew, head of his family and a leading figure of the Baghdad community, which at the time made up about a third of the city's population.

Work and career

He was elected a deputy for Baghdad in the first Ottoman parliament of 1877, the short-lived assembly of the constitutional experiment, and after the First World War and the creation of the Iraqi kingdom under Faisal I he was appointed to the Senate in 1925, holding the seat reserved for the Jewish community until his death. He was one of the largest landowners of the country and used the income for public works: he built and endowed schools, both Jewish and mixed, hospitals and charities that served Jews and Muslims alike, and he was the community's chief intermediary with the Ottoman and then Iraqi authorities.

He is also remembered for a letter of 1922 to the Zionist Organization in London, in which he set out with precision the position of a community that had lived in Mesopotamia since the Babylonian exile: Iraqi Jews, he wrote, were bound to their country and to their Muslim neighbours, and an overt Zionist campaign in Iraq would put them in an impossible position between two loyalties.

Later years

This fiche records that letter plainly, as the considered judgment of a man who knew his country; the destruction of Iraqi Jewry after 1948 and the flight of nearly the whole community to Israel followed within a generation of his death in 1940. His son Ezra Menahem Daniel succeeded him in the Senate and has his own fiche here.