Ezekiel Gabay

Ezekiel (Yehezkel) Gabay, born in Baghdad, was a Jewish community leader, Ottoman government official, and journalist. He served as secretary of the Meclis Pekidim, the lay council of notables in charge of communal affairs, which was established in Istanbul in 1860 with the goal of reforming the community administration. This council, which consisted of members of the Sephardic pro-Western elite, propagated its ideas through the first long-lived Ladino periodical, El Jurnal israelit (1860–1873), edited by Gabay, and eventually banned by the rabbis. In 1869, Gabay became a government official and, subsequently, president of the supreme criminal court. An expert in Islamic law, in 1865 he wrote “The Organic Statute of the Jewish Nation in Turkey” (Hahamhane Nizamnamesi) in Ottoman Turkish, which was later incorporated into the Ottoman civil code; he also created syllabi for Jewish schoolchildren.