Born in Baghdad on December 11, 1895, Yitzhak Nissim moved with his parents to Jerusalem in 1906, but returned to Baghdad in 1914 to study under Iraqi masters of Torah such as Simeon Agassi. After World War I he combined commercial, scholarly, and communal activities. He married in November 1919 and with his wife moved to Jerusalem in 1924. He held no rabbinic post but was deeply involved in rabbinic scholarship and had intellectual and spiritual contacts with the leading rabbis of his time, Sephardic and Ashkenazic, pro- and anti-Zionist. In 1955 he was elected Sephardic chief rabbi (rishon…