The Abbasid caliph al-Nasir Li-Din Allah is famous for restoring Abbasid sovereignty in Iraq. As Angelika Hartmann has argued, he promoted the Caliphate as the sole spiritual and secular center of the Islamic world. To this end, he reorganized the futuwwa (mystical brotherhoods) and ulama of Baghdad, positioning himself as the supreme authority of the fityan and as a hadith transmitter. He also tried to unite Sunnis and Shiites under his rule. In this paper, I ask what al-Nasir’s administrative reforms meant for Iraq’s Jewish community. In addition to the traditional sources typically used to study al-Nasir’s reign—the chronicles of Ibn al-Sa?i, Ibn al-Fuwati, and Ibn al-Jawzi—I will draw on Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts produced by Jews in Iraq during the same period. These include: letters and copies of letters written by Jewish communal leaders in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries (most notably those of Samuel b. ‘Ali Ibn al-Dastur, the head of the Rabbinic Academy of Iraq) that were preserved in the Cairo Geniza, as well as the Diwan of El ‘azar b. Ya‘aqov Ha-Bavli, a collection of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic poetry composed in honor of Jewish elites in thirteenth-century Baghdad. I will argue that al-Nasir’s administrative reforms also impacted non-Muslims. Al-Nasir was the first caliph to grant a title of investiture to the head of the Rabbinic Academy of Iraq. As a result, during al-Nasir’s reign, rabbinic leaders relied on the Abbasid state to a greater degree than ever before to advance their rule over Jewish communities throughout Iraq, particularly those in Kirkuk, Mosul, and Erbil. In doing so, they equated obedience to the state with obedience to God’s precepts. At the same time, Iraq’s rabbinic leadership expressed some ambivalence about their new political status; in their writings, they almost never referred explicitly to the Abbasid state itself. Instead, they advanced an ideology whereby the rabbis themselves invested gentile kings with authority and gave them license to rule—not the other way around.