Rabbi Ma’tuk fled to Baghdad with his family in the early 17th century due to threats from a tyrannical governor who had persecuted the community.
[1] Rabbi Ma’tuk, as was customary for leaders of prominent Jewish communities in Iraq at the time, had served as the Saraf-Bashi, or treasurer, of the governor.
[2] The historian of Baghdad Jewry, Rabbi David Solomon Sassoon, notes that the Ma’tuk family had been established in Anah for centuries.
[4] Anah, which had previously been a prosperous Jewish center, fell into sharp decline; a Portuguese traveler in 1663 even observed that the only Jews living there made their livelihoods by producing cloth from camel hair.
This was due to the ancient Iraqi Jewish belief that Anah was the site of Nehardea, which features prominently in the Talmud, including as the first seat of the Exhilarch and his Beth din.
[7] This belief was corroborated by Christian missionaries in Anah in the 19th century, who reported that "these Jews maintained their forefathers were of the first captivity and had never returned to Palestine.
[4] According to historian Zvi Yehuda, there are no reports of Jews in Baghdad or its surroundings—including Basra, Hilla, Kifil, Anah, Kurdistan, or even Persia and the Persian Gulf—during the 15th century.
[10] Historians of Iraqi Jewry recount that the Ma’tuk family, later known as Yehuda or Judah, gained great renown as scholars, rabbis, merchants, and communal leaders in Baghdad during the 18th and 19th centuries.
According to historian Abraham Ben-Jacob, "amongst the lords of Baghdad at this time, the Judah family (Ma’tuk) occupied a prominent place.
[11] He was regarded by his contemporaries as the bearer of the aristocratic name of Baghdadi Jews and was respected as a descendant of the renowned Sliman ben David Matuk of Baghdad.
[13][14] Ezekiel Judah was also a relative of David Sassoon, the chief of the powerful merchants and unofficial leader of the Baghdadi Jewish trading diaspora.
[18] The Encyclopaedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel, compiled and published by David Tidhar, notes that Ezekiel Judah was a great Torah scholar who held a yeshiva and educated the poor.
Describing the community of Calcutta, and using the term then in use among Mizrahi Jews to refer to a rabbi, he wrote, "They are all well educated but have no appointed Chachamim; one of the richest commercial men of the town, Ezekiel Jehuda Jacob Sliman, a very enlightened man and an excellent Talmudist, performs the duties of the Chacham.
[25] Ezekiel Judah's enlightened views are evident in his attitude towards the Bene Israel, whom many other Baghdadi Jews sought to separate from and exclude from their synagogues due to their darker skin and Indian origin.
In Calcutta, as in Bombay, Ezekiel Judah, like his relative David Sassoon, sought to align the Baghdadi Jewish community with the British and to publicly support the colonial power.
For a year after his death, his sons invited Rabbis from Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Syria, as well as the poor Jews of Calcutta, to study Torah day and night at his former home.
Rabbi Shlomo Yehezkel Yehuda was bequeathed by his father a share in houses in Calcutta worth £25,000, allowing him to live a life of great wealth and respectability.
[29] Thanks to his father Ezekiel Judah's fortune, Rabbi Shlomo Yehezkel Yehuda played an important role in building the Sephardic Jewish community and rabbinical infrastructure in Jerusalem.
[31] In 1882, Rabbi Faraj Haim Yehuda traveled to India to seek funds from wealthy relatives and the Baghdadi Jewish community there for the Shimon HaTzaddik synagogue, visiting Bombay.
[31] A noted scholar, Rabbi Faraj Haim Yehuda's book VaTitpallel Hanna, printed in 1889 in Jerusalem, contains prayers, ethics, and laws.
Shortly after his arrival in 1854, he shocked the deeply conservative religious society of Jerusalem by marrying his daughter Serah to Yehoshua Yellin, an Ashkenazi Jew and the son of Polish immigrants.
Given the near-complete destruction of Jewish heritage sites in Syria and Iraq, Ben Judah has noted that these are among "the last of our synagogues" built in the traditional Baghdadi style.