Netira

Origins and early life

Netira was a Jewish businessman and banker of Baghdad who died in 916; he was born and lived a Jew, married the daughter of Joseph ben Phinehas, the court banker who has his own fiche on this site, and joined that firm, the first true banking house of the Islamic world.

Work and career

He rose to prominence under the caliph al-Mu'tadid from 892 and remained close to al-Muqtadir, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica says he wielded considerable influence both at the caliphal court and in the Jewish society of Babylonia. The sources for what he did with that influence are Jewish: the chronicle of Nathan the Babylonian, written a generation later, tells that Netira intervened to have a decree of persecution against the Jews revoked — one account has him warning the caliph of a dream, another has him buying the counsellors — and that when a heavy fine or a massacre was threatened he stood between the community and the throne.

This fiche states plainly that these accounts are late and partly hagiographic, and that the details differ between them; the fact of his standing at court, and of the community's reliance on it, is not in doubt. He was decisive in the great quarrel over the exilarchate: he supported the gaon Kohen Zedek against the exilarch Ukba, and later helped install David ben Zakkai, so that the political leadership of Babylonian Jewry passed through his hands.

His sons Sahl and Isaac carried on the house and continued as court bankers under later caliphs, and the family remained the principal Jewish financial power of Baghdad into the eleventh century, funding the academies of Sura and Pumbedita whose responsa shaped Jewish law across the world.