Acknowledgments
My initial encounter with Yehuda Ratzaby’s long out-of-print edition of Zechariah Alḍāhirī’s Sefer hamusar occurred with the acquisition, many years ago, of a used copy from the library of A.S. Halkin. Still occupied at the time with completing my doctoral dissertation, I placed the large book bound in green cloth and its original 1965 dust jacket on a shelf, with the intention of returning to it at a later date. When I finally began to dip into it, I was mesmerized by the work’s beguiling tales, its elegant, ornate Hebrew, and its distinctive Yemenite coloration. As a graduate student I had been privileged to read medieval Judeo-Arabic texts with Professor Ratzaby, whose enthusiastic textual glosses drew on realia from his childhood in Yemen as well as the living tradition of Yemenite Jews in Israel. The same blend of erudition and lived experience informs his annotations to Sefer hamusar. Alḍāhirī’s inquiring mind and refined literary sensibilities, his concurrent rootedness in 16th-century Yemen and receptivity to external developments piqued my curiosity. The more I read, the more I became convinced that Sefer hamusar deserved a broader audience.
All translations of Alḍāhirī’s poetry, rhymed prose, and biblical exegesis in this book are my own. Translations of biblical verses are drawn mostly from The Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh (Philadelphia, 1985), although on occasion I have used the Revised Standard Version, and at times have modified both of these to reflect, or set off, his reading of a particular passage. For citations of rabbinic literature I have used the Soncino Press translations of the Babylonian Talmud (London, 1935–1952) and Midrash Rabbah (London, 1939). Where secondary sources in Hebrew have existing English titles I have endeavored to use them; otherwise the Hebrew title is given in transliteration. Hebrew names have generally been given in their Latin forms (Judah, rather than Yehudah), and hyphens have been omitted from Jewish family names, even if Arabic in origin (Alḥarizi, rather than al-Ḥarizi). I have, however, retained certain forms as they appear in bibliographic references.
This book has benefited from the help of colleagues and teachers who have generously shared their expertise, whether in response to queries or in reading earlier versions of individual chapters. For their invaluable insights and suggestions I am grateful to: Reuven Ahroni
For their gracious, expert assistance, I thank Yael Okun of the Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts of the National Library of Israel (formerly the Jewish National and University Library), Jerusalem; Ofra Friesel, Zmira Reuveni, and Shai Chazan of the NLI; and Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection of the New York Public Library. For his unfailing willingness to obtain materials, no matter how out of the way, and for drawing my attention to relevant new publications, I am deeply grateful to Yossi Galron, Jewish Studies Librarian at The Ohio State University. Without his tireless and unstinting help, this project would not have been possible. My thanks to Gillian Steinberg for her exceptional editing and to Alexander Trotter for his meticulous indexing. Final preparation of the manuscript was generously supported by the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, and the Division of Arts and Humanities at The Ohio State University. My warm thanks to Morgan Liu, Chair, and Naomi Brenner, Acting Chair of NESA; to Hannah Kosstrin, Director of the Melton Center; and to Dana Renga, Dean of Arts and Humanities.
Portions of several chapters of this book appeared in preliminary form as independent articles. Chapter 3 substantially revises ideas previously presented in “Of Poetry and Printed Books: Cultural Contacts and Contrasts Between the Jews of Yemen and the Land of Israel in Zechariah Aldahiri’s Sefer Hamusar,” JSQ 12/3 (2005): 260-280. One section of Chapter 4 appeared as “Polemics Real and Imagined in Zechariah Aldāhirī’s Sefer Hamusar,” in Giving a Diamond: Essays in Honor of Joseph Yahalom, edited by Wout van Bekkum and Naoya Katsumata (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 243–263. I have adapted Chapter 5 from “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, edited by Y. Tzvi Langermann and Josef Stern (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2008), 355–379. Preliminary, unrevised versions of Chapter 6 and 7 appeared respectively as “Kabbalah in a Literary Key: Mystical Motifs in Zechariah Aldahiri’s Sefer Hamusar,” JJTP 17/1 (2009): 47–99 and “The Urge to be Immortalized: Zechariah Aldahiri’s Poetic Epitaphs for Himself,” in Studies in Arabic and Hebrew Letters in Honor of Raymond P. Scheindlin, edited by Jonathan Decter and Michael Rand (Gorgias Press, 2007), 181–210. I thank the publishers of these journals and Festschriften for permission to use this material. My thanks also to Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper for permission to reproduce the map from her catalogue, The Yemenites: Two Thousand Years of Jewish Culture (Jerusalem, 2000), and to Matt Carissimi and Madeleine Fix of the Ohio State University Library Technology Center for digitizing the image.
While working on this book I had the opportunity to present some of my research at conferences sponsored by the Ben Shalom Center for the Study of Yemenite Jewry at the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem; at the Faces of the Infinite Conference sponsored by the British Academy and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London; at a conference in New York on “Shared Cultural Values of Jews and Muslims in Yemen and Beyond” sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation, the Princeton Institute of Semitic Studies, and the E‘eleh BeTamar Association for Yemeni Jewish Heritage in Israel; at the Shalom Spiegel Institute of Medieval Hebrew Poetry at the Jewish Theological Seminary; the Medieval Hebrew Poetry Colloquium at Harvard University, sponsored by Brandeis University, The Real Colegio Complutense, and Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies; and at KU Leuven with the support of the European Association for Jewish Studies. I am grateful to all of these institutions and for the valuable feedback I received from colleagues on these occasions.
Over the course of this project my family has been patient and supportive. My husband, Daniel Frank, has always been helpful with bibliographic queries and has kept an eye out for colloquia and publications pertaining to yahadut teiman. Our daughter, Naama Frank, has provided all sorts of delightful distractions;
Locations of Jewish communities
Courtesy of Dr. Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper