In autumn 1889, several Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish leaders had been arrested following an incident of intercommunal violence, which itself had been sparked by the burial of the chief rabbi ‘Abdullah Somekh at a shrine compound venerated by both Muslims and Jews outside the city-center. The raging cholera epidemic and state-imposed quarantine had prevented his burial inside the inter muros Jewish cemetery. To alleviate the situation by seeking out help and justice, Baghdadi Jewish community members petitioned the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and publicized the events in the press consumed by the European Jewish diaspora. In this paper, I argue that the Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community’s mobilization of support should be examined both within Ottoman channels and within confessional diasporic networks. In a moment of crisis, the Jewish community utilized its diasporic network for help when the Ottoman system of justice and idea of Ottomanism appeared to fail, thus, acting as both Ottomans and Jews and perceiving their identity as such. While it was within Ottoman state protocol to manage such local crises such as riots, Ottoman authorities were displeased with foreign intervention and negative foreign press, especially after the implementation of the Tanzimat reforms and the strengthening of Ottomanism as a civic ideology and legal-national identity. This paper demonstrates how the burial of the Baghdadi chief rabbi and the subsequent communications concerning the violence and arrests exhibit a non-dominant community navigating the limits of Ottomanism. Moreover, this paper shows how when this community felt threatened, it exercised its entitlement to justice as Ottoman on an imperial level, and as Jewish on an international level. To examine the story of an Ottoman community utilizing its global diasporic networks and both pushing the limits of and working within the traditions of the Ottoman state, I investigate sources from the Ottoman Archives Interior Ministry collections, British consulate records, the Alliance Israélite Universelle records, and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) press. The multilingualism of these sources, as well as their wide geographical spread, point to the self-inclusion and connectivity of the leaders of the Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community during the late-nineteenth century.