Beguiling Guidance

Zechariah Alḍāhirī’s Sefer Hamusar, a Hebrew Maqāma from 16th-Century Yemen

Series: 

Author:
Adena Tanenbaum
The only Hebrew picaresque maqāma from Yemen, Sefer hamusar captivates its readers with trickster tales of wandering and adventure while offering moral guidance and a spiritual ascent via kabbalistic study. In Beguiling Guidance, Adena Tanenbaum explores these tensions, along with the literary, social-historical, philosophical, and kabbalistic aspects of Sefer hamusar, and situates the work in its broader 16th-century framework. Applying a fresh reading, she analyzes Alḍāhirī’s maqāma as a rich repository of intellectual history; treats his travel narratives as composites of fiction and fact; and uncovers the cultural assumptions and self-definitions underlying his representations of Muslims, which she shows to be far more variegated and nuanced than previously acknowledged. Beguiling Guidance should appeal to readers interested in transregional cultural exchange and the diffusion of texts; pre-modern fiction and travel writing; and Muslim-Jewish power relations in the late medieval/early modern Middle East. It also serves as an introduction to the vibrant culture of a Jewish community that traced its presence in South Arabia back to antiquity.
Copyright Year:
2026
E-Book (PDF)
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-73378-7
Publication:
22 Sep 2025
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-73379-4
Publication:
02 Oct 2025
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Adena Tanenbaum, Ph.D. (1993), Harvard, is an Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the Ohio State University. Author of The Contemplative Soul: Hebrew Poetry and Philosophical Theory in Medieval Spain (Brill, 2002), she works on medieval Hebrew literature and Jewish intellectual history in Islamic lands.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
 1 Historical Context
 2 Medieval Versus Early Modern
 3 Authorial Sensibilities
 4 Distinguishing Features of Sefer hamusar
 5 Literary Continuities and New Departures
 6 Kabbalah and Philosophy
 7 Receptivity to Printed Books
 8 A Unique Case?
 9 Earlier Perspectives on Sefer hamusar
 10 Postscript: Sefer hamusar as Auto/biography Manqué?
 11 Chapter Outline

1 Literary Dimensions: Maqāma, Musar, Narrative and Poetic Techniques
 1 Setting the Scene: Author’s Introduction
 2 The Maqāma Genre
 3 The Idea of Fiction in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature
 4 Sefer hamusar: Structure, Texts, and Paratexts
 5 Stylistic and Narrative Techniques
 6 The Role of the Formal Poems

2 Travel in Many Guises: Journeys Real and Imagined
 1 Reassessing Pre-modern Arabic and Hebrew Travel Narratives
 2 Toponyms
 3 Reading the Travel Accounts in Sefer hamusar
 4 Arabic and Hebrew Antecedents to the Travel Narratives
 5 Links between Framing Itineraries and Embedded Tales
 6 Symbolic Links: Damascus
 7 Thematic and Lexical Links: Ḥaḍramawt
 8 Socio-Cultural Relevance: Cochin
 9 Stasis and Movement: Writing from Prison
 10 Alḍāhirī’s Conception of Space
 11 Periphery and Center
 12 Stimuli to Travel in Sefer Hamusar
 13 Mobility and the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge and Practices
 14 Journeying and Questions of Identity
 15 The Significance of Place Names
 16 Cultural Orbits of the Travel
 17 Crossing Boundaries and Depicting Other Jewish Subcultures
 18 Other Eastern Jews
 19 Ashkenazim
 20 Romaniots?

3 A Distinctive Sense of Self: Transregional Contacts with Jews in the Land of Israel
 1 Introduction
 2 Encounters with the Emissary from the Holy Land
 3 Talmud Study in the Land of Israel
 4 Ottoman Sephardi Dominance
 5 Pronunciation as a Marker of Difference
 6 The Impact of Print Culture

4 Representations of Muslims: Perspectives on the Dominant Faith
 1 Techniques of Representation
 2 Conclusion: Historical and Imaginary Muslims

5 Didacticism or Literary Legerdemain? Philosophy, Ethics, and the Picaresque
 1 Philosophical and Medical Conceptions of the Soul: The “Internal Senses”
 2 The Soul’s Moral Qualities
 3 A Poetic Coda
 4 Reliable Transmission?
 5 Pietist Pose
 6 Medical Imposture and Abstract Cures
 7 Sham Preachers and Moral Ambiguities

6 A Conduit for Kabbalah: Belles-Lettres as a Medium for Mysticism
 1 The Kabbalistic Chapters
 2 Alḍāhirī as a Conduit for Kabbalistic Learning and its Reception in Yemen
 3  Alḍāhirī’s Relationship to Lurianic Kabbalah and the Poetry of the Safed Mystics
 4 Recurrent Kabbalistic Themes
 5 The Interplay between Kabbalistic and Narrative Elements
 6 Conclusions

7 The Urge to Be Immortalized: Auto-Epitaphs, Eulogies, and the Afterlife of Sefer hamusar
 1 The Conflation of Author and Protagonists
 2 The Structural Function of the Epitaphs
 3 The Epitaph: Apology or Swan Song?

Bibliography
Indices
Scholars/graduate students in Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, Medieval/ Early Modern Literature, Ottoman Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Indian Ocean Studies. Specialists and non-specialists interested in pre-modern Yemenite Jewry. Academic institutions and libraries.
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Publisher:
Brill
Language:
English
Pages:
xii, 564 pp.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004733787

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