Jews maintained their forefathers were of the first captivity, and had never returned to Palestine." The family's arrival in Baghdad reflected a revival of that city's fortunes. Baghdad, having been extinguished as a Jewish centre following its capture by Timur in the 14th century was re-emerging as a major Jewish centre when the family arrived in the early 17th century. According to historian Zvi Yehuda, the 15th century sees no reports on Jews in Baghdad or in its surroundings, in Basra, Hilla, Kifil, Anah, Kurdistan, even in Persia and the Persian Gulf. The migration of the Ma’tuk family to Baghdad was one part of the city's incipient Jewish revival. According to the historian and Rabbi David Solomon Sassoon the family were one of the oldest Jewish families of Baghdad. The 19th-century German ethnographer H. Peterman corroborated writing that the oldest Jewish families of Baghdad came from Anah, amongst them the Ma’tuk. Historians of Iraqi Jewry recount that the Ma’tuk or later Yehuda or Judah family achieved great renown as scholars, rabbis, merchants and communal leaders, in Baghdad in the 18th and 19th century including most prominently through the communal leader, poet and astronomer Sliman Ben David Ma’tuk, also is also known to historians under the Anglicised name as Solomon Ma’tuk. Biography Ezekiel Judah, born in 1799 or 1800, is referred to by historians or on monuments in the Calcutta synagogues he erected alternately as Ezekiel Judah, Yehezkel Yehuda or Yahuda, or Ezekiel Judah Jacob Sliman or Sulliman. These three different names reflects a moment in time where the emerging Baghdadi Jewish trading diaspora in Asia still used the traditional Jewish naming system of listing a name simply as the first name of a son, father and grandfather for religious and communal purposes but was slowly evolving towards using the Western custom of surnames as families began to travel internationally and engage with the British Empire. However, Iraqi Jewish historians cite the Ma’tuk clan, descended from Rabbi Ma’tuk of Anah, as having adopted his name as a name of their clan or a form of surname at least by the mid 17th century if not earlier. According to the chronicler of Iraqi Jewish history Efrayim Haddad, Rabbi Judah Jacob Ma’tuk was the father of Ezekiel Judah. In his lifetime the family name was changed to the Yehuda or Judah family, as it was later Anglicised in British India. The name Ezekiel