The Shindukh family were communal leaders, rabbinic scholars, and kabbalists in Baghdad from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The etymology of the family name is unclear; in (rather obscure) literary Arabic, shindakh means “gratuity,” while shundukh/shundakh means either “tall and powerful,” “lion,” or “repast upon completion of a journey or building.” As a Jewish surname, Shindukh first appears in seventeenth-century Baghdad. (There is an Iraqi Arab tribe named al-Shandūkh [pl. al-Shanādikha], and it is not unknown for Je…