Zechariah (Yaḥya) al-Ḍāhirī (, ; – 1608), often spelled Zechariah al-Dhahiri () (16th century Yemen), was the son of Saʻīd (Saʻadia) al-Ḍāhirī, from Kawkaban, in the District of al-Mahwit, Yemen,Amram Qorah, Saʻarath Teiman, Jerusalem 1987, p. 5 a place north-west of Sanaa. 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,Called also maḥbereth, or “word synthesis,” in the Yemenite Hebrew vernacular. Sefer Ha-Mūsar, in the local parlance spoken in Yemen, was called maḥberoth (the plural form of maḥbereth). 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.Adena Tanenbaum, Kabbalah in a literary key: Mystical motifs in Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī’s Sefer Hamūsar, Ohio State University, Brill Co. Leiden 2009, p. 1; Sefer Ha-Mūsar (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari), Introduction, Benei Baraq 2008, p. 14 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.Adena Tanenbaum, Didacticism or Literary Legerdemain? Philosophical and Ethical Themes in Zechariah Aldahiri's Sefer Hamusar, in Adaptations and Innovations: Studies on the Interaction between Jewish and Islamic Thought and Literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Late Twentieth Century, Dedicated to Professor Joel L. Kraemer, ed. Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2008), pp. 355–79 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.
Early life and travels Little is known of the author's early life, other than the fact that he was an Israelite, descended from the Tribe of Reuben.Zechariah Al-Dhahiri, Sefer Ha-Mūsar (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari), Chapter Twenty-five, Benei Barak 2008 (Hebrew), p. 163. This is one of the more extraordinary anecdotes, since the king’s Minister and Prince, Aharon Iraqi Ha-Kohen, had not yet burnt the family registers of the Jews in Yemen, and he recalled on this one page his family’s pedigree. Al-Ḍāhirī spent at least ten years in his travels away from his native Yemen, where he had left behind a wife and children. He writes of himself that he married a second wife in Cochin (India), being a place of Jewish converts,Al-Dhahiri, Zechariah. Sefer Ha-Musar (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari), Bnei Barak 2008, p. 67 (Hebrew). This view is supported by Rabbi Yehezkel Rachbi of Cochin who, in a letter addressed to Tobias Boas of Amsterdam in 1768, wrote: "We are called 'White Jews,' being people who have come from the Holy Land, (may it be built and established quickly, even in our days), while the Jews that are called 'Black' they became such in Malabar from proselytization and emancipation. However, their status and their rule of law, as well as their prayer, are just as ours." See: Sefunot; online edition: Sefunot, Book One (article: "Sources for the History on the Relations Between the White and Black Jews of Cochin") , p. רמט, but in PDF p. 271 (Hebrew) whom he later divorced because of her old age and lack of upper-teeth.Zechariah Al-Dhahiri, Sefer Ha-Mūsar, Introduction (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari), Chapter Eight, Benei Barak 2008 (Hebrew), pp. 67–71. He then travelled to Persia where he took another wife in marriage, which wife bare him twin sons, Joshua and Caleb, but after one year, his young bride died. It was at this time that he decided to leave Persia, leaving his two sons with his brother-in-law, and, presumably, continuing with his travels until eventually he returned home to his family in Yemen.Zechariah Al-Dhahiri, Sefer Ha-Mūsar (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari), Chapter Sixteen, Benei Barak 2008 (Hebrew), pp. 105–106. After a stint in Yemen where he and the Jewish community were imprisoned, he eventually returned to visit his sons in Persia, and found them doing well, although his brother-in-law had by that time died.
The author, while writing about his journeys and experiences, cleverly conceals his own identity while narrating his experiences, and describes the experiences of two men in their journey, the two chief protagonists of his travel narrative: Mordechai Haṣidonī and his old crony, Abner ben Ḥeleḳ the Yemenite, which men are, in fact, the author himself.Zechariah Al-Dhahiri, Sefer Ha-Mūsar, Introduction (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari) Benei Barak 2008 (Hebrew), p. 14. Some scholars had originally thought that the book was largely fictional because of this anomaly. 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. The numerical value of these two names (in Hebrew) is equal to his own real name. 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.Adena Tanenbaum, Kabbalah in a literary key: Mystical motifs in Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī’s Sefer Hamūsar, Ohio State University, Brill Co. Leiden 2009, p. 1 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.
Perhaps the book's most important contribution to historians is in al-Ḍāhirī's description of the Jewish communities in Safed and in Tiberius, during the mid-16th century, as well as a description of Jewish persecution in Yemen during the same century, under the Zaydī imamate. 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. Al-Ḍāhirī's description of Tiberius during that period conforms with that of another writer, viz., that of Rabbi Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, who also described the city's walls.Yosef Stefansky, Archaeologist, Safed and Tiberius in Rabbi Zechariah al-Dhahiri’s Sefer Ha-Mūsar Al-Ḍāhirī is accredited with bringing the Shulchan Aruch to Yemen, as well as kabbalistic books, among other works, which he sold in Yemen at their face value. Other books, he recalls, had been lost at sea.
Upon Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī's return to Yemen in 1568, during the Turkish-Yemeni wars, al-Ḍāhirī was imprisoned in Sanaa, along with other principal persons of the Jewish community, for a period of one year in earnest by the lame theocratic ruler, al-Imām al-Mutahhar b. al-Mutawakkil Yaḥya Sharaf ad-Din, who allegedly suspected them of collaborating with the enemy.Zechariah Al-Dhahiri, Sefer Ha-Mūsar, Introduction (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari) Benei Barak 2008 (Hebrew), p. 13 Al-Ḍāhirī, writing about this experience, says that he saw his own suffering as God's way of punishing him for his having left the Land of Israel and returning to Yemen.Sefer Ha-Mūsar (ed. Yehuda Ratzaby), Chapter Twenty-five, Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem 1965 (Hebrew), pp. 287–288; ibid. (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari), Benei Baraq 2008 (Hebrew), p. 162 It was during this time that he began to write his momentous work, HaMusar – a record of his travel experiences, at the age of thirty-seven, although it was completed several decades later.Zechariah al-Ḍāhirī, Sefer Ha-Mūsar, Introduction (ed. Mordechai Yitzhari) Benei Barak 2008, p. 13, note 1. 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.