Zechariah al-Dhahiri

Origins and early life

Zechariah al-Dhahiri, son of Sa'adia, was a Jewish poet, rabbinic scholar and dayyan, a judge, of sixteenth-century Yemen; he remained Jewish, and the dates of his birth and death are disputed among scholars, roughly between 1519 and 1531 for the one and between 1585 and 1608 for the other, which this fiche states rather than choosing.

Work and career

He travelled, apparently as a trader, across an extraordinary range for his century: Calicut and Cochin in India, Safavid Persia, Ottoman Iraq, Anatolia and Syria, the land of Israel where he met the kabbalists of Safed and studied with Joseph Karo, Rome, Ottoman Egypt and the Adal sultanate in the Horn of Africa. Back in Yemen, he was imprisoned with the rest of the Jews of Sanaa during the Turco-Yemenite war between 1568 and 1573, and it was largely in prison and after it that he composed his major work.

The Sefer HaMusar, the Book of Moral Instruction, is a Hebrew maqama in forty-five chapters of rhymed prose, modelled on the Arabic maqamat of al-Hariri and on the Tahkemoni of Judah al-Harizi, in which two characters recount the author's journeys. It is at once a work of literature, a defence of Jewish learning and a first-hand description of Jewish communities across three continents, and it contains the earliest Yemenite account of Safed and of Lurianic kabbalah. He also wrote commentaries and liturgical poems that entered the Yemenite Diwan.