Yiḥyah Qafiḥ

Yiḥyah Qafiḥ (Hebrew: רבי יחיא בן שלמה קאפח; Arabic: يحيى القافح also known as Yiḥyah ibn Shalomo el Qafiḥ and as Yahya Kapach (his Hebrew name)) (1850–1931),[1] known also as "Ha-Yashish" (English: "the Elder"), served as the Chief Rabbi of Sana'a, Yemen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[4] In the late 19th century, he was the host to the Austrian Arabist and archeologist, Eduard Glaser,[5][6] who conducted research in Yemen, and at the turn of the 20th century, he carried on a written correspondence with one of the chief rabbis of Ottoman Palestine in Jaffa, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kohen Kook, who later took on this role in an official capacity in 1921, in which he and his fellow jurists answered twenty-six questions posed to the Court at Sana'a.

After being incarcerated twice[11] by Muslim authorities in 1914, being released only in Adar of 1915, Rabbi Qafiḥ regretted his earlier reluctance to speak out against aspects of the community with which he disagreed.

"[14] Ethnographer and historian, Shelomo Dov Goitein, gave a poignant description of the new movement in Yemen of which Hayyim Habshush was a member, and which movement in later years, after his death, had been further expanded under the charismatic leadership of Rabbi Yihya Qafih: “...He (i.e. Hayyim Habshush) and his friends, partly under European influence, but driven mainly by developments among the Yemenite Jews themselves, formed a group who ardently opposed all those forces of mysticism, superstition and fatalism which were then so prevalent in the country and strove for exact knowledge and independent thought, and the application of both to life.”[15] This same movement would later be coined the name Daradʻah by Rabbi Yihya Yitzhak Halevi, a word which is an Arabic broken plural made-up of the Hebrew words Dör Deʻoh, which means "Generation of Reason.

For example, his grandson Rabbi Yosef Qafih related one of many Yemenite customs for "חינוך הבית" whereby they would bake plain bread without salt and prepare "the table of appeasement.

Rabbi Yiḥya Qafiḥ sharply opposed these minhagim being of the opinion that, in addition to the stupidity of the matter,[19] they are Biblically forbidden because of darkhei haEmori.

[21] The work for which Rabbi Qafiḥ is most well known is Milḥamot HaShem (Wars of the Lord, which takes the same name as earlier books) and which he began writing in 1914[citation needed] (published in Jerusalem, 5691 [1930/1931]).

"[30] A related work, printed at the same time as Milḥamot HaShem, is Da'at Elohim (published in Jerusalem, 5691 [1930/1931]),[31] written in response to an essay[32] by Hillel Zeitlin that appeared in the Hebrew quarterly HaTekufah, Book 5 (1919).

R. Qafiḥ's portrayal of Oz Le'Elohim as if it were an accepted, legitimate source on the subject was either a major scholarly error, or an intentional misrepresentation in support of his attack against Kabbalah.

[35] Of Rabbi Yiḥyah Qafiḥ's more famous disciples were Mori Yiḥya al-Abyadh who served as the Chief-Rabbi of Yemen (1932–1934) after the death of Rabbi Yihya Yizhak Halevi, and whose most memorable enactment was to erect two new gates at the far north-western extremity of the plain where the Jewish Quarter was built, in order to fix thereby the laws governing the carrying of objects from one domain to another (Eruv), and to prevent Muslims from entering the Jewish Quarter at night to purchase liquor;[36] Rabbi Yosef b. Aharon Amar Halevi (1911–1988), who rose to acclaim in the land of Israel for having punctuated the entire Babylonian Talmud in the traditional manner in which words were pronounced in Sana'a, a work that took him twenty years to complete; and Yisrael Yeshayahu,[37] a member of the Israeli Parliament in 1951, and co-editor of the historical book, Shevuth Teiman, in 1945.