Zechariah Dhahiri
He is recognized as one of the most gifted Yemenite Jewish poets and rabbinic scholars who left South Arabia in search of a better livelihood, travelling to the Zamorin-ruled Calicut and Cochin in the Indian subcontinent, Hormuz in Safavid Iran, Ottoman-ruled Basra and Irbil in Ottoman Iraq, Bursa and Istanbul in Ottoman Anatolia, Rome in Italy, Aleppo, Damascus, Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Hebron in Ottoman Syria, Sidon in the Damascus Eyalet, and the Egypt Eyalet, and finally to the Adal Sultanate in Ethiopia, where he returned to Yemen by crossing the Red Sea and alighting at a port city near Mocha.
Al-Ḍāhirī, who was very adept in Hebrew, admitted to having modeled his poetry – two-hundred and seventy-five of which poems are found in his HaMusar and his Sefer Haʻanaḳ – on the Taḥkemoni of Yehuda Alharizi, who, in turn, was influenced by the Arabic maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī of Basra.
However, modern Israeli scholars now agree that the author was referring to himself in concealed terms (his alter ego), just as he says explicitly about himself in the Introduction to his book, HaMusar.
This remarkable literary work interweaves folktales, animal fables, riddles, poems, epistles, and travel accounts with pious admonitions, religious polemics, messianic speculations, and philosophical disquisitions in a most engaging fashion.
[10] It is not uncommon for al-Ḍāhirī to repeat episodes of his travel narrative, or some important event which happened to the Jewish community of Yemen, in more than one of the book's forty-five chapters.
Modern archaeologists are grateful to Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī and credit him with giving a precise description of the location of Tiberias in the 16th century, whose city's walls adjoined the Sea of Galilee.
[14] Al-Ḍāhirī's travel accounts are styled after the maqāmāt of the famous Spanish schools of poetry, with a rhyming syllabary composed in metered verse, after an exquisite and flowering manner.
It was during this confinement to the towers (between 1569-1573) that Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī also completed another momentous work, which he composed mainly in the late hours of the night, viz., the book, Ṣeidah la’derekh (Victuals for the Road),[18] being a commentary on the Pentateuch where he interweaves kabbalistic themes and philosophy drawn from the Zohar, Rabbi Saadia Gaon, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, Yosef Albo's Sefer Ha`iqarim and Rabbi Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla’s Sha'are Orah.
[21] Al-Ḍāhirī, however, deemed it necessary to explain in a letter addressed to the said emissary that the Jewish people in Yemen were too poor themselves to render any assistance to their brothers in the Land of Israel.
Scholars of comparative Arabic-Hebrew literature are quick to point out that these hardships facing the Jewish community in Yemen often gave rise to messianic aspirations in al-Ḍāhirī's rhymed prose.
Al-Ḍāhirī patterns his Sefer Ha`anaḳ (A treatise on Hebrew homonyms) after a work by a similar name written by Moses ibn Ezra.
[28] Even so, al-Ḍāhirī levels harsh words of criticism against Spanish Jewry's lack of poetic style in their daily communications and belles lettres, which, by that time, had mostly been lost by them.
[32] Within the synagogues and midrashic study halls I had come to hear the expositors who expound upon a certain matter in several ways, seeing that they know every secret thing, from the walls of the ceiling, all the way down to its foundation – but, especially, the great luminary, even the wise man, Rabbi Joseph Karo, from whose seat of learning the wise men of Safed do not quit themselves, for in his heart the Talmud is stored, after he had sat down in learning for seven years, within a confined chamber.
Rabbi Joseph Karo) heard the words of that disciple, he was astonished by his eloquence of speech who had given plausible arguments about the soul, and he then raised him up and exalted him above all the pupils that were with him… I stayed there awhile, until the wise man (i.e.
[34] Al-Ḍāhirī's description of the city of Tiberius is on this wise: “…Now, I quickly passed through that land of great drought, until I reached the far end of the Sea, known as Kinneret , and, lo!
[37][38] There is to be noted in al-Ḍāhirī's style a marked transition from the early Spanish-type of poetry typical of Yemen prior to his time (depicted in the prosaic writings of Daniel berav Fayyūmī and Avraham b. Ḥalfon, both, of Yemenite Jewish provenance) and the later classical Yemenite poetic writings (as depicted in the liturgical poems composed by Yosef ben Israel and Shalom Shabazi).
[40] Some of al-Ḍāhirī's poems are panegyrics influenced by the Arabic madiḥ, in praise of great Jewish scholars, such as Rabbeinu Yerucham (1290-1350),[41] a Provençal rabbi who moved to Spain in 1306, following the expulsion of the Jews from France.
[43] Most scholars agree that al-Ḍāhirī's greatest achievement is not just in his making use of rhymes, but rather in his ability to interweave biblical verse and rabbinic sayings taken from the Talmud and Midrash within those same strophes, which, by Jewish literary standards, is the true sign of genius.
