March 3 1186 – 10 Adar II 4946
The great warrior leader Saladin signed a peace treaty giving him control of the city of Mosul after he’d fail to conquer it four years earlier. The Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela had visited Mosul some twenty years earlier, and described its Jewish population as amounting to some 7,000 souls. The community was led by Zakkai ha-Nasi, who claimed to be a descendant of King David. Mosul was a major Jewish center, to the extent that in the thirteenth century the head of the community signed himself Resh Galuta, head of the diaspora, in a letter to Maimonides. Local Jewish tradition maintains that the prophets Obadiah, Jonah and Nahum were buried in the city, a fact which at the very least testifies to the antiquity of Mosul’s Jewish community.