שלמה מעתוק

Rabbi Shlomo (Salman) Ma’tuk (eighteenth century) was a chacham, paytan, astronomer and communal leader of Baghdad, whose piyutim entered the liturgy of the kehillot of Iraq and are sung to this day. He was famed across the Jewish East for his library — the greatest in Baghdad, holding above seven thousand volumes in print and manuscript, among them Arabic renderings of the Chumash, the Megillot and Sefer Daniel — and its catalog testifies to how the chachamim of Baghdad stood linked to the whole Sephardi world of learning.

His surviving poems carry the burdens of his community: many tell of the sufferings of Baghdad’s Jews under a tyrannical governor, and one of the most famous recounts how he hid in a Turkish bath to escape the persecution, after which he left Baghdad with his family for Basra. As an astronomer he left geometrical manuscripts, among them a treatise on the astrolabe with commentary — the learning of the heavens serving, as ever among the chachamim of the East, the halachot of the calendar.

When he passed away he was eulogized by the poet Saleh ben Yosef Masliach of Baghdad; his manuscripts found their way to the great collections, where they preserve the voice of Baghdad’s Torah in its quiet century.