Zechariah Dhahiri
Zechariah (Yaḥya) al-Ḍāhirī (, , b. "circa" 1531 – d. 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, a place north-west of Sana’a. He is recognized as one of the most gifted Yemenite Jewish poets and rabbinic scholars who left Yemen in search of a better livelihood, travelling to Calicut and Cochin in India, Hormuz in Persia, Basra and Irbīl in Babylonia, Bursa and Istanbul in Anatolia, Rome in Italy, Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, Safed and Tiberias, as well as Jerusalem and Hebron in the Land of Israel (then part of Ottoman Syria), Sidon in Ottoman Lebanon and Egypt, and finally unto Abyssinia where he returned to Yemen by crossing the Erythraean Sea and alighting at a port city near Mocha, Yemen. He wrote extensively about his travels and experiences in these places, which he penned in a Hebrew rhymed prose narrative, and eventually publishing them in a book which he called Sefer Ha-Mūsar ("The Book of Moral Instruction"), in circa 1580.
Zechariah Dhahiri
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", a prosimetric literary genre of rhymed prose with intervals of poetry in which rhetorical extravagance is conspicuous, to describe his journeys. The vocalization of "Sefer Ha-Mūsar" gives insight unto scholars into Yemenite Hebrew pronunciation. Al-Ḍāhirī, who is clearly very adept in the Hebrew tongue, admits to having modeled his own poetry – two-hundred and seventy-five of which poems are found in his "Sefer Ha-Mūsar" and in his "Sefer Haʻanaḳ" – on the Hebrew work "Taḥkemoni" of Alḥarizi, who, in turn, was influenced by the Arabic "maqāmāt" of al-Ḥarīrī. His vivid descriptions of the town Safed and of Rabbi 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 the "yeshiva" of the great Sephardic Rabbi, Joseph Karo. 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.