David ben Zakkai II/III

David ben Zakkay II

David ben Zakkay II (d. ca 1216) may have been the full name of a member of the Babylonian exilarch family named David who resided in Mosul at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century. According to the travel account of Petahiah of Regensburg, who visited Iraq around the year 1175, the Jewish community was divided between two candidates for the exilarchate, the cousins David and Samuel from the city of Mosul.

A colophon stating that Rashi’s commentary on tractate Bava Meṣiʿa of the Babylonian Talmud was copied in 1192 for “David the Exilarch” may refer to the former, and if so indicates that he succeeded in obtaining the post. Support for this is provided by a pair of documents from 1197 and 1201 in which “David, the head of the Diasporas of all Israel,” appoints a father and a son as beadles of the synagogue of Ezra the Scribe.

Judah al-Ḥarīzī and Abraham Maimonides both mention a contemporary exilarch named David, and if he was the contender described by Petahiah, this would be evidence that his period in office spanned several decades. His patronymic, Zakkay, His patronymic, Zakka, is derived from a list of ancestors of the thirteenth-century exilarch David ben Daniel, in which the latter’s grandfather is identified as David ben Zakkay (I).

Arnold Franklin

Bibliography

Gil, Moshe, The Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004).

Goode, Alexander, "The Exilarchate in the Eastern Caliphate, 637-1258" Jewish Quarterly Review, n. s. 31 (1940): 149-169.

Mann, Jacob, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature repr. ed.(New York: Ktav, 1972).

Arnold Franklin. "David ben Zakkay II." Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Executive Editor Norman A. Stillman. Brill Online, 2013.

Reference. Jim Harlow. 30 August 2013 <http://brillonline.nl/entries/encyclopedia-of-jews-in-the-islamic-w...>