Shalom Shabazi

Origins and early life

Shalom Shabazi, born Shalom ben Yosef in 1619 in the Yemeni highlands and known in Arabic as Salim al-Shabazi, was a rabbi, weaver and poet who remained Jewish all his life and is revered by Yemenite Jews as a tzaddik.

Work and career

He wrote in Hebrew, in Judaeo-Arabic and in Aramaic, often braiding the three within a single poem, and his verse is saturated with the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria as it had reached Yemen from Safed. Tradition credits him with some fifteen thousand poems, of which several hundred survive, and they form the core of the Diwan, the songbook of Yemenite Jewry, sung at weddings, at the Sabbath table and at festivals. He lived through the expulsion of 1679, when the Jews of Sanaa and other towns were driven into the desert of Mawza and about two thirds of them died, and he wrote the elegies that preserved the memory of it; his poems also plead directly for redemption and for the end of exile.

His language moves between the intimate and the messianic, and his poems on the soul and on the Sabbath entered the liturgy itself. Nearly all Yemenite Jews came to Israel in the airlift of 1949 and 1950, and they brought his songs with them; his verse underlies much of the Yemenite and Mizrahi music of modern Israel, from Bracha Zefira to Ofra Haza. His tomb near Taiz became a shrine visited by Jews and Muslims alike seeking healing.