Zechariah Dhahiri

Zechariah (Yaḥya) al-Ḍāhirī (Hebrew: זכריה אלצ'אהרי, pronounced [zăχarˈjɔ ˈdˤdˤaːhiri], b. circa 1531 – d. 1608), often spelled Zechariah al-Dhahiri (Arabic: زكريا الضاهري) (16th century Yemen), was the son of Saʻīd (Saʻadia) al-Ḍāhirī, from Kawkaban, in the District of al-Mahwit, Yemen, a place north-west of Sana’a. 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, Sidon, Jerusalem, and Hebron in Ottoman Syria, and finally to the Egypt Eyalet in Egypt and the Adal Sultanate in Ethiopia, where he returned to Yemen by crossing the Red Sea and alighting at a port city near Mocha. He wrote extensively about his travels and experiences in these places, which he penned in a Hebrew-language rhymed prose narrative, eventually publishing them in a book which he called Sefer HaMusar (The Book of Moral Instruction), in circa 1580.

The book is one of the finest examples of Hebrew literary genius ever written in Yemen, its author making use of a poetic genre known as maqāma, a prosimetric literary genre of rhymed prose with intervals of poetry in which rhetorical extravagance is conspicuous, to describe his journeys. The vocalization of HaMusar gives insight unto scholars into Yemenite Hebrew pronunciation. 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. His vivid descriptions of Safed and of Joseph Karo’s yeshiva are of primary importance to historians, seeing that they are a first-hand account of these places, and the only extant account which describes this yeshiva. With his broad Jewish education and his exceptional skills in his use of the Hebrew language, Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī is an important source in the study of Jewish history in the Land of Israel during the Renaissance and of Jewish persecution in Yemen at that time.