Latest / The Podcast of Jewish Ideas / 82. Zechariah al-Dhahiri | Dr. Adena Tanenbaum

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82. Zechariah al-Dhahiri | Dr. Adena Tanenbaum · The Podcast of Jewish Ideas

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Speaker 1: that info and more is in the podcast description. On
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Speaker 1: today's episode, we will be traveling to a place that
1:26
Speaker 1: is rarely visited by students of Jewish intellectual history, namely
1:30
Speaker 1: the area of Yemen. For many centuries, relatively isolated for
1:33
Speaker 1: much of the Jewish world, Yem Night Jury developed a
1:35
Speaker 1: fascinating cultural and intellectual cosmos of its own. Today, we
1:39
Speaker 1: will be discussing Yem Night Jury in the sixteenth century,
1:42
Speaker 1: and especially the life and works of one of its
1:44
Speaker 1: most extraordinary thinkers and writers, Zaharia al Dahiri. Joining us
1:50
Speaker 1: to discuss this fascinating subject is doctor Adina Tannenbaum, who's
1:53
Speaker 1: an associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern and
1:55
Speaker 1: South Asian Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. An
1:59
Speaker 1: expert on medieval je intellectual history, Professor Taddenbam has recently
2:02
Speaker 1: published a splendid monograph titled Beguiling Guidance Zacharia al diaeherries
2:07
Speaker 1: Sepa ham Mussar, published by Brill in twenty twenty five,
2:10
Speaker 1: upon which we will be basing much of our discussion.
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Speaker 1: It is a pleasure to welcome the professor to the
2:14
Speaker 1: podcast today, Professor Taddenbaum, thanks for joining us.
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Speaker 2: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
2:20
Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent. So let's dive in. And I have to
2:23
Speaker 1: be honest, reading up for this particular conversation was quite
2:27
Speaker 1: a humbling experience, and I realized that even though I
2:29
Speaker 1: have what is I think quite an extensive of Jewish education,
2:32
Speaker 1: my knowledge of Yemen, and especially late medieval Yemen, was
2:36
Speaker 1: extremely shallow, to put it, mard, and I think that's
2:38
Speaker 1: the case with many of us who will give them
2:40
Speaker 1: sort of a typical Western Jewish education. So let us
2:43
Speaker 1: try and give a little bit of background in context.
2:45
Speaker 1: We're traveling back to sixteenth century or roughly that time
2:48
Speaker 1: in Yemen. So what is going on there? What is
2:52
Speaker 1: the Jewish community like, how are they living, how they
2:54
Speaker 1: what are the social and say intellectual contexts in which
2:57
Speaker 1: they are in. Tell us about this place to which
2:59
Speaker 1: we will be traveling today.
3:01
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, by the sixteenth century, the Jews had lived
3:06
Speaker 2: in Yemen for well over a millennium. It's a very
3:10
Speaker 2: ancient community, long standing community, and they by that point
3:15
Speaker 2: had produced an extensive corpus of texts in an array
3:19
Speaker 2: of different fields. And despite the stereotype of Yemen as
3:25
Speaker 2: a remote isolated and Yeminit Jewry in particular as a
3:29
Speaker 2: remote isolated community, Yeminit Jews maintained strong ties with Jewish
3:35
Speaker 2: communities in other parts of the world really from late Antiquity,
3:39
Speaker 2: through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period.
3:44
Speaker 2: And this was accomplished through a number of channels, through
3:49
Speaker 2: trade and epistolary exchanges, the import of books, visits and
3:55
Speaker 2: later periods visits of rabbinic emissaries from on the land
4:00
Speaker 2: of Israel, also European Jewish merchants, and there was migration
4:05
Speaker 2: to and from Yemen for mercantile purposes. Yemen, because of
4:11
Speaker 2: its strategic location, was a pivotal locale in the Indian
4:17
Speaker 2: Ocean trade, and Jews were very much involved in that.
4:21
Speaker 2: In terms of internally the yemen and Jewish community, I
4:25
Speaker 2: should say, and I'm often guilty of, you know, referring
4:29
Speaker 2: to the Yemen and i Jewish community, but it was
4:31
Speaker 2: not monolithic or uniform. A lot of the scholarship until
4:36
Speaker 2: recently has really been what we might call sana a centric,
4:40
Speaker 2: meaning that you know, sana was the capital of Yemen
4:44
Speaker 2: and also probably the major urban Jewish community, and it
4:51
Speaker 2: produced a wealth of scholars and cultural creativity, and so
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Speaker 2: very often I think the tendency is to extrapolate from
5:01
Speaker 2: Sanaa and sort of generalized. But outside of sana and
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Speaker 2: other urban areas, Jews lived in over a thousand villages,
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Speaker 2: many of them and outlying tribal areas spread across Yemen.
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Speaker 2: And because of the topography and the geography of Yemen,
5:21
Speaker 2: the terrain you have this in the interior of the country,
5:25
Speaker 2: you have this mountainous terrain that makes passage from one
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Speaker 2: community to another quite treacherous, especially in the pre modern period,
5:35
Speaker 2: and Jews would travel on foot as vimmys. As protected
5:39
Speaker 2: minorities under Muslim rule, they were often prohibited from riding
5:45
Speaker 2: beasts of burdens. So it was really very dangerous challenging
5:50
Speaker 2: to travel from one community to the next, which meant
5:53
Speaker 2: that the natural barriers kind of created a landscape that
5:56
Speaker 2: isolated blocks of population. And this is true not just
5:59
Speaker 2: for but for Muslims as well, and this gave rise
6:03
Speaker 2: to linguistic distinctions, sartorial differences, and even the turgical variations
6:08
Speaker 2: between different regional Jewish communities within Yemen. In Sanaa, which
6:13
Speaker 2: as we mentioned was the is the capital of Yemen,
6:20
Speaker 2: tended to be the seat of rabbinic authority, although there
6:24
Speaker 2: were also very productive and active rabbis in a city
6:29
Speaker 2: further north called Saada, and those two rabbinic bodies often
6:34
Speaker 2: did not see eye to eye. Then you have the
6:39
Speaker 2: shut up region in the south west, which gave rise
6:44
Speaker 2: to in a later period in the seventeenth century, gave
6:47
Speaker 2: rise to this kabalistic circle of Shalam Shahbazi, and that's
6:52
Speaker 2: geographically and culturally distinct from the region of Sannah. And
6:57
Speaker 2: then the culture around the port of Yemen was in
7:00
Speaker 2: the south at the very southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula,
7:03
Speaker 2: was different. Yet again, so you have, you know, a
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Speaker 2: certain degree of variety, but also obviously major commonalties culturally
7:14
Speaker 2: and religiously in terms of the political situation in the
7:21
Speaker 2: sixteenth century, so these natural boundaries that I mentioned in
7:26
Speaker 2: terms of the topography also ensured that no one dynasty
7:29
Speaker 2: ever gained centralized control over the entire land of Yemen.
7:34
Speaker 2: So Upper Yemen was controlled in this period by a
7:39
Speaker 2: Shii group called the Zaidi's and then there were a
7:44
Speaker 2: series of Sunni dynasties that ruled from the south, and
7:48
Speaker 2: then in the sixteenth century, and this is relevant to
7:50
Speaker 2: al Dahiri, the Ottomans gained their first foothold with the
7:55
Speaker 2: occupation of Aden in the port city of Aden in
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Speaker 2: the south in fifteen thirty eight to fifteen thirty nine,
8:03
Speaker 2: and then they conquered the capital Sna in fifteen forty seven.
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Speaker 2: But even they never succeeded in gaining control of the
8:12
Speaker 2: entire land. And one of the things that in terms
8:18
Speaker 2: of further sort of elaboration of the situation is that
8:22
Speaker 2: that is a bit of a challenge, is that there's
8:25
Speaker 2: a dearth of surviving records of sixteenth century Yemini jewry.
8:31
Speaker 2: In terms of Jewish sources, we kind of have a blackout,
8:35
Speaker 2: so to speak, no extant sources, and in general Muslim
8:41
Speaker 2: chronicles don't bother to discuss internal Jewish affairs. So that's
8:49
Speaker 2: why Stefaha Mussar by zahariel Dahary, which we'll be talking about,
8:54
Speaker 2: although it's a literary work and I would argue it's
8:57
Speaker 2: largely a fictional work, became a very pressure source of
9:00
Speaker 2: information for knowledge about the Jews of Yemen during this.
9:05
Speaker 1: Period interesting and so before getting specifically into him and
9:09
Speaker 1: into into what sort of what you mentioned there was
9:14
Speaker 1: a blackout, But in the centuries leading up to this,
9:17
Speaker 1: what kind of let's say, intellectual activities were scholars of
9:21
Speaker 1: Yemen getting into Mean, you mentioned Kabbala a little bit there,
9:24
Speaker 1: but you know what kind of works were being produced there?
9:27
Speaker 1: What kind of topics was there focused on Kabala or
9:30
Speaker 1: perhaps philosophy or pasha, I know what I mean? What
9:32
Speaker 1: were the areas the genres that that we can tell
9:36
Speaker 1: that yemen Night scholars were we're delving into.
9:40
Speaker 2: So there was a very rich intellectual history, tradition of
9:44
Speaker 2: intellectual history, and it was particularly marked by accomplishments in
9:50
Speaker 2: the fields of Midrashic literature, a laja, poetry, philosophy, and science.
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Speaker 2: And then Kabalai really becomes al Dahiri is kind of
10:01
Speaker 2: a conduit for the transmission of Kabala t Yemen apparently,
10:07
Speaker 2: but Kabbala really gains the ascendency in the seventeenth century,
10:11
Speaker 2: so just after our period, but in particular the fourteenth
10:16
Speaker 2: and fifteenth centuries saw an incredibly intense and creative activity
10:21
Speaker 2: in the field of Midrashic literature, and this is a
10:24
Speaker 2: period when Midrashic anthologies are compiled. Probably the best known
10:29
Speaker 2: to our audience would be Midlasha Gadol, but there was
10:33
Speaker 2: also a whole series of Torah commentaries that Professor SVII Langerman,
10:40
Speaker 2: who really has elucidated this material for us, has called
10:44
Speaker 2: philosophical Midrashen. And here we can name a few outstanding names,
10:49
Speaker 2: although some of them will be familiar and possibly others
10:53
Speaker 2: will not. But at the beginning of the fourteenth century
10:56
Speaker 2: we have Nitan El ben Shaya, who wrote a philosophical
11:02
Speaker 2: commentary on the pentatuok On Tora called an Arabic nur
11:07
Speaker 2: a v lam, which means the illumination of darkness. Then Zaharaofe,
11:13
Speaker 2: who was an incredibly prolific author. He has a fourteen
11:17
Speaker 2: twenty seven philosophical Tora commentary that's called me Draa. Hefet
11:22
Speaker 2: Ter ben Schlombo, whose works were published and analyzed by
11:26
Speaker 2: David Blumenbal wrote Stelage Lukul, meaning light of the intellect.
11:32
Speaker 2: He's a younger contemporary of Zaharil Arufa. And then David
11:36
Speaker 2: Venesha Halevi in the late fifteenth century a really key
11:40
Speaker 2: commentary called the Legiso Murni the Sufficient Compendium, and these
11:45
Speaker 2: are all philosophically informed Tora commentaries. They're very much inspired
11:52
Speaker 2: by Mamanidian philosophy and sort of inspired by the Mimanidians dance.
12:00
Speaker 2: These authors held that the Torah contains profound philosophical truths
12:08
Speaker 2: that the prophets and the stages deliberately conveyed through parables
12:13
Speaker 2: for the benefit of the masses. So you have this
12:15
Speaker 2: kind of Momanitian esotericism and to elicit these deeper truths,
12:20
Speaker 2: the Yemenite commentators engaged in what is known in Arabic
12:25
Speaker 2: as a wheel, which is non literal or allegorical reading
12:29
Speaker 2: of scripture. But these particular thinkers and authors were engaged
12:37
Speaker 2: in moderate allegorical interpretations, so they were very careful. They
12:41
Speaker 2: made it very plain that the non literal interpretation should
12:45
Speaker 2: not in any way negate the plain meaning of the
12:48
Speaker 2: Biblical text or have an antinomian effect where you would
12:53
Speaker 2: you disregard the legal implications of a particular passage. And
13:00
Speaker 2: actually they were quite critical of those who took the
13:03
Speaker 2: method to extremes, and there was a major controversy around
13:08
Speaker 2: this time in Yemen over extreme allegorical interpretation. So this
13:14
Speaker 2: mode of exegesis, the impetus for it came, This allegorical
13:19
Speaker 2: philosophical interpretation came both from the Mimenityan tradition but also
13:23
Speaker 2: from the Yemenites local Ismaili Milia. The Ismailis used these
13:30
Speaker 2: terms of lahir and botan for the exoteric and the
13:34
Speaker 2: esoteric meanings. And in that in the Ismaili interpretive tradition,
13:38
Speaker 2: the boton the the interior, deep profound meaning is the
13:43
Speaker 2: one that carried the greater weight. And I should say,
13:46
Speaker 2: you know, since we mentioned my monodies that Yemenite Jewish
13:50
Speaker 2: scholars medieval period, early modern period, really up until modernity,
13:56
Speaker 2: they revered my monodies and they took his imperative to
14:01
Speaker 2: philosophical inquiry very seriously. And as Langerman has pointed out,
14:09
Speaker 2: his rationalism really shaped the Yemenite scholarly ideal of intellectual
14:14
Speaker 2: contemplation in quest of knowledge of the divine. And even
14:20
Speaker 2: when they deviated somewhat from my Monetti's position, for example,
14:26
Speaker 2: by incorporating astrology, which he was not he did not
14:32
Speaker 2: approve of, they still considered themselves to be faithful to
14:37
Speaker 2: his philosophical legacy, and I think it's fair to say
14:40
Speaker 2: that my Monodes writings attained near canonical status in Yemen,
14:47
Speaker 2: to the point where these thinkers and scholars composed Judeo
14:52
Speaker 2: Arabic commentaries pretty much on his entire corpus so on
14:56
Speaker 2: the Guide the Perplexed Irin, but also all of his
15:03
Speaker 2: major Halaric works, so all of which, by the way,
15:07
Speaker 2: and I think sometimes people forget about this, but all
15:10
Speaker 2: his Alaric works except the Mission Etah were written in
15:14
Speaker 2: Judeo Arabic, so you have a kind of direct access,
15:19
Speaker 2: you know, in terms of linguistically and culturally to these works.
15:23
Speaker 2: So you get commentaries and glasses on and dictionaries of
15:27
Speaker 2: the Mission. And in fact, Joseph Tubi has pointed out
15:30
Speaker 2: that this proliferation of glasses and dictionaries on the or
15:37
Speaker 2: for the purposes of understandings may in fact have to
15:41
Speaker 2: do with the fact that these are Arabophone Jews for
15:44
Speaker 2: whom the Missionae Hebrew of the Mission was not as
15:50
Speaker 2: comfortable a medium. But you get commentaries also on Stephra
15:55
Speaker 2: Hamid's vote and portions of my Monety commentary on the Mishnah,
16:02
Speaker 2: Lots of commentaries interestingly on Rita. And when I first
16:06
Speaker 2: encountered this, I didn't quite appreciate why, but then and
16:10
Speaker 2: reading some of the secondary literature, became apparent that precisely
16:14
Speaker 2: because you have all of these small communities that are
16:18
Speaker 2: separated by natural barriers, each little community, and very often
16:24
Speaker 2: in these mountainous regions, needed its own shore, and therefore
16:28
Speaker 2: there was a proliferation of commentaries on ma mon visa
16:33
Speaker 2: for practical purposes, for training of shortm So that's ex Jesus,
16:40
Speaker 2: philosophical ex Jesus. You have productive activity in the exact sciences,
16:45
Speaker 2: particularly in astronomy. There's an interest there's a practical application,
16:49
Speaker 2: which is an interest in intercalation.
16:52
Speaker 1: Uh.
16:52
Speaker 2: And one of these thinkers whom I mentioned, David Benesha Halevi,
16:57
Speaker 2: who was also an astronomer, and so he had particular
17:01
Speaker 2: technical take on mimonodes laws of the Consecration of the
17:05
Speaker 2: New Moon Hodesh. But there are also medieval Yemeni Arabic
17:12
Speaker 2: astronomical tables that are transcribed into Hebrew characters. So there
17:15
Speaker 2: was clearly an interest in that as well. In the
17:20
Speaker 2: area of poetry, which will come to in greater detail
17:24
Speaker 2: further on. But the sort of conventional or received periodization
17:31
Speaker 2: of the development of poetry in Yemen is that Andalusian
17:34
Speaker 2: Hebrew poetry from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from the
17:37
Speaker 2: so called Golden Age to also have reached Yemen from
17:42
Speaker 2: Spain not long after its composition, and it was copied
17:46
Speaker 2: and collected by local devotees, and large numbers of Andalusian
17:51
Speaker 2: pew team entered Yemeni prayer books and non liturgical poems,
17:55
Speaker 2: circulated and specially compiled d WANs, which was d One
17:59
Speaker 2: was in Islamic culture as well as in Judoeira agriculture,
18:04
Speaker 2: was a collection of poems, and then original Yemenite Jewish
18:12
Speaker 2: poetry began to appear in the fourteenth century with the
18:16
Speaker 2: d One of Abraham ibn Haalfon, and then gradually came
18:22
Speaker 2: into its own with the extensive creativity of Zahari al
18:25
Speaker 2: Dahiri in the sixteenth century, and then of course Shalam
18:28
Speaker 2: Shabazi in the seventeenth century is a universally venerated Kabbalistic
18:32
Speaker 2: poet and also exeg You have up until into the
18:37
Speaker 2: modern period the Yemenite d One, which is a book
18:42
Speaker 2: of para liturgical poetry and the poems are sung and
18:48
Speaker 2: often accompanied by dance. And these are recited and sung
18:53
Speaker 2: at social occasions weddings, circumcision, ceremonies, other communal celebration. So
19:02
Speaker 2: all of this really testifies to a very rich and
19:05
Speaker 2: intense intellectual life in the centuries leading up to the
19:10
Speaker 2: sixteenth century.
19:11
Speaker 1: So this is that was a very thorough wonderful answer
19:14
Speaker 1: to that question. And the truth is that it should
19:16
Speaker 1: be better known and better explored the rich intellectual life
19:19
Speaker 1: of Yemen, and I jury because it is fascinating, I
19:22
Speaker 1: think surprising, especially for those who you have naja typically
19:26
Speaker 1: been written off. So let us dive in to our
19:30
Speaker 1: main character of today, Zaharia al Dahiri. I think I'm
19:34
Speaker 1: pronouncing that someha correctly. Yes, possibly, So let's le let's
19:37
Speaker 1: dive into his life. I mean, who was he? What
19:39
Speaker 1: do we know about his life, his education, his milieu,
19:43
Speaker 1: and and yes, let's talk about him and his accomplishments
19:46
Speaker 1: for a little bit and then we'll dive into Musa.
19:49
Speaker 2: So al Dahiri was an accomplished author and a poet
19:55
Speaker 2: and a biblical exegit. He wrote a esoterically informed Bible
19:59
Speaker 2: com terry as well, called se Da Lad, and he
20:03
Speaker 2: was based in Sanah, in the capital in the sixteenth century.
20:07
Speaker 2: He was clearly from his writings, he was clearly conversant
20:11
Speaker 2: with the writings of medieval Jewish philosophers, not just my Mondodes,
20:15
Speaker 2: and he was interestingly instrumental in as I mentioned before,
20:21
Speaker 2: transmitting Kabbalah to Yemen. It seems clear that he read
20:26
Speaker 2: Arabic Bellatristic literature in the original He had access to
20:31
Speaker 2: it since he was native speaker of Arabic, and he
20:36
Speaker 2: crafted elegant Hebrew versions of popular Arabic folk tales that
20:42
Speaker 2: may have been transmitted to him orally by Muslim informants
20:47
Speaker 2: in his environment or elsewhere. And the interesting thing is
20:53
Speaker 2: one of the striking things that comes across from his
20:56
Speaker 2: literary works at Aha Musak is that he he lived
21:01
Speaker 2: in the first century of Hebrew printing, and even though
21:05
Speaker 2: there was no printing press that was ever established in
21:08
Speaker 2: his native land, he was quite taken with this new
21:12
Speaker 2: and unfamiliar mode of textual reproduction. And I can come
21:18
Speaker 2: back to this later, but this whole phenomenon of the
21:22
Speaker 2: import of printed books had a major impact on Yemenite
21:26
Speaker 2: Jewish intellectual and also religious traditions. What significant among other
21:33
Speaker 2: things about al Dahiri is that he, because of this
21:38
Speaker 2: lack of corroborating sources, for lack of a better term,
21:42
Speaker 2: he left us some of the only extant Yemenite Jewish
21:46
Speaker 2: writings from the sixteenth century, and this jurth of surviving
21:50
Speaker 2: records has led scholars to quarry even his literary text.
21:55
Speaker 2: This Sefraham Ussar for very pressure biographical, historical, geographical information,
22:04
Speaker 2: which means that until I would say, until now, there's
22:08
Speaker 2: been a tendency to kind of downplay the significance of
22:11
Speaker 2: its fictional and literary content, which is what I'm arguing for.
22:16
Speaker 2: But in terms of his life and education in Milia,
22:19
Speaker 2: we don't have We lack a lot of information. We
22:23
Speaker 2: don't have precise information about his dates, and the dates
22:28
Speaker 2: that are often provided are kind of inferred on the
22:34
Speaker 2: basis of I would say, a certain degree of speculation.
22:39
Speaker 2: Scholars have attempted to reconstruct his chronology because there are
22:44
Speaker 2: various dates that are furnished by his invented characters in
22:48
Speaker 2: Stephaha Mussar. But the problem is, or the difficulty, is
22:52
Speaker 2: that there's been a kind of facile tendency to identify
22:56
Speaker 2: him with his two invented fictional characters, so that anything
23:03
Speaker 2: they say about themselves has been understood to apply to
23:07
Speaker 2: al Dahiri. Having said that we can situate him historically.
23:13
Speaker 2: What we do know, and this is because al Dahiri
23:16
Speaker 2: tells us this speaking as himself and his author's introduction
23:20
Speaker 2: to this work, is that he lived through a very
23:23
Speaker 2: tumultuous period. It was a period of a short lived
23:29
Speaker 2: Zaidi overthrow of the Ottomans in fifteen sixty seven in
23:34
Speaker 2: sanah Ah. This was following the death of Suleiman the
23:37
Speaker 2: Magnificent in fifteen sixty six, and in the wake of
23:41
Speaker 2: this temporary overthrow of Ottoman authority, the Zaidi's imprisoned the
23:47
Speaker 2: men of the sana A Jewish community, apparently including al Dahiri,
23:54
Speaker 2: probably because they suspected them of being a fifth column,
23:58
Speaker 2: and a great deal of weight has been attached to
24:03
Speaker 2: this account, since Sepaha Mussar is, as we've mentioned, the
24:07
Speaker 2: only extant witness to these incidents. We don't seem to
24:13
Speaker 2: have a mention of the imprisonment in Muslim chronicles or
24:18
Speaker 2: other works of Jewish provenance, and so there unfortunately, there's
24:24
Speaker 2: little else about these events of the sixteenth century Yemeny
24:27
Speaker 2: Jewish Muslim encounter that we can reconstruct, but there are
24:33
Speaker 2: other indicators of a rough chronology. These include his protagonist's
24:39
Speaker 2: visits to fought to Saphid precisely during the Great mystical
24:44
Speaker 2: Revival of the sixteenth century. There the sixth chapter of
24:50
Speaker 2: Stephaha Mussar, and I'll talk about the internal structure of
24:53
Speaker 2: the work in just a moment. The sixth chapter is
24:55
Speaker 2: set in the yeshiva of the renowned mystic and legal
24:59
Speaker 2: scholar Joseph Carro. This is an instance. It's one of
25:03
Speaker 2: the rare instances in which Alvahiri introduces a historical figure
25:08
Speaker 2: into his otherwise largely fictional and his characters also while
25:17
Speaker 2: in Spot mentioned in passing the distinguished cabalist Moshe Codevero
25:25
Speaker 2: and also Rabbi Moses di Trani who was on the
25:29
Speaker 2: Saffed Rabbinical Court, and these basically just mentioning their names
25:34
Speaker 2: that they're associated with the intellectual efflorescence in Spot. These
25:43
Speaker 2: passing mentions have led scholars to assume that al Dari
25:47
Speaker 2: himself traveled to Spot and met these luminaries, which I
25:52
Speaker 2: think is a bit of a leap, but certainly he
25:55
Speaker 2: was aware of them. We can say that at a minimum.
26:00
Speaker 2: I think that in general we have to be wary
26:02
Speaker 2: of the biographical fallacy. But these details, along with the
26:07
Speaker 2: dates that the rogue hero in the work provides in
26:12
Speaker 2: his prognostications of the imminent redemption, these dates do seem
26:17
Speaker 2: to situate al Dahiri squarely in the sixteenth century, which,
26:22
Speaker 2: as we also know, is a period of widespread millenarian expectations,
26:25
Speaker 2: and not just among Jews in different parts of the world,
26:28
Speaker 2: but also Christians and Muslims. As far as his place
26:33
Speaker 2: of birth, there's some debate about this as well. It's
26:36
Speaker 2: clear that he was active in sanah Ah. There is
26:40
Speaker 2: some of the secondary literature maintains that he was from Palcaban,
26:44
Speaker 2: which is just northwest of Sana, but again it's not
26:48
Speaker 2: entirely clear that the basis for this deduction stands up
26:53
Speaker 2: to scrutiny. Unfortunately, we don't know anything about his early
26:56
Speaker 2: childhood or youth. Given his air judition, one might suppose
27:03
Speaker 2: that he came from a rabbinic family, and this conjecture
27:08
Speaker 2: is lend weight by the fact that he seems to
27:14
Speaker 2: have been a silversmith. In addition, to his other talents,
27:20
Speaker 2: because yem Night rabbis were especially prominent in that profession
27:24
Speaker 2: across the ages, and both his ma common his Torah
27:29
Speaker 2: commentary reflects familiarity with the properties of precious metals, and
27:34
Speaker 2: this comes to the four when he's talking in his
27:36
Speaker 2: gloss on the Golden Calf, which is very interesting. So
27:41
Speaker 2: again we can reconstruct his intellectual biography if even if
27:48
Speaker 2: we don't have precise dates for his birth and death,
27:54
Speaker 2: and it's clear that he was part of this intellectual
27:59
Speaker 2: flower ring of late medieval yem and I jury that
28:01
Speaker 2: extended from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
28:04
Speaker 1: Right, yes, exactly. There's one facet of his life that
28:07
Speaker 1: I want to focus on for a moment, and I
28:10
Speaker 1: think that'll bring us neatly in to se from Mussar,
28:11
Speaker 1: which is his peregrinations, the fact that he moved to places,
28:16
Speaker 1: he traveled so and this is a fascinating parts of
28:20
Speaker 1: his life. The truth is not so terribly unusual. There
28:23
Speaker 1: were quite a few Jews who such of the medieval
28:25
Speaker 1: and late medieval era, who did travel quite far and
28:28
Speaker 1: who wrote about their extensive experiences. I mean, this is
28:31
Speaker 1: a whole genre of itself but let me ask, I mean,
28:33
Speaker 1: first you to where did he travel, why did he
28:36
Speaker 1: travel there? And what seems to have been the sort
28:39
Speaker 1: of the activities the interests that he had while he
28:41
Speaker 1: was traveling. He was actually possibly one of the most
28:44
Speaker 1: well traveled Jews anywhere by the time he finished. And
28:48
Speaker 1: so can you tell us about his journeys and to
28:52
Speaker 1: what extent or to what degree these were sort of
28:54
Speaker 1: a manifested on the page.
28:56
Speaker 2: So I'm going to reframe this slightly in so far
29:02
Speaker 2: as previous scholarship has, as I mentioned, identified al Dahiri
29:09
Speaker 2: with his two protagonists, his narrator and his rogue hero,
29:15
Speaker 2: and has assumed that the travels in this work, they
29:21
Speaker 2: are the ones who are doing the traveling. And so
29:23
Speaker 2: the assumption has been that these travels were those of
29:28
Speaker 2: the author, and this has led to reading the work
29:32
Speaker 2: through a positivist lens as a travelogue that can be
29:38
Speaker 2: mined for concrete historical facts. So we need to bear
29:42
Speaker 2: in mind the fact that the travel that's that's described
29:46
Speaker 2: and it's fascinating that's described in Czipha Homosong is related
29:49
Speaker 2: on the authority of an unreliable, fictitious narrator. And I
29:56
Speaker 2: think we have to acknowledge that the travel narra arratives
30:00
Speaker 2: are composites of fiction and fact UH, and this is
30:07
Speaker 2: not uncommon for UH travel writing. In the medieval and
30:15
Speaker 2: Renaissance periods. There's a great deal of literature on this,
30:19
Speaker 2: now secondary literature. So this is Defahamasar is not travel
30:24
Speaker 2: literature in the sense of a diary that records an
30:27
Speaker 2: ordered progression through far away places. Having said that, there's
30:33
Speaker 2: no inherent reason to doubt al Dah's mobility, it's just
30:39
Speaker 2: that I'm a little bit agnostic about his travels and
30:43
Speaker 2: part of the One of the things that has to
30:46
Speaker 2: be taken into consideration is that some of these some
30:51
Speaker 2: of the place names, some of the toponyms that you know.
30:54
Speaker 2: Each each chapter is framed by an opening itinerary, so
30:59
Speaker 2: it always sort of starts in a similar way Mordeca
31:02
Speaker 2: Mordechaida Sidonian, who's the narrator, says I travel from place
31:07
Speaker 2: X to place Y, and this is all phrased in
31:11
Speaker 2: elevated Biblical Hebrews. So some of these place names really
31:15
Speaker 2: have to be discounted as kind of rhetorical ornamentation, or
31:19
Speaker 2: they're used for purposes of rhyme. For example, and I'll
31:22
Speaker 2: just give you an example Biblical place names that no
31:26
Speaker 2: longer correspond to a geographic reality, but they're used for
31:30
Speaker 2: rhyming purposes. So at the beginning of one chapter, Mordecai says,
31:36
Speaker 2: I journeyed from the land of mid Team to the
31:38
Speaker 2: land of the Ritin, where the Philistines and Aramians were encamped.
31:42
Speaker 2: Of course in Hebrew at all rhymes very nicely. Or
31:46
Speaker 2: in another chapter he uses a place name, a biblical
31:50
Speaker 2: place name, again really for its lexical meaning, which is
31:53
Speaker 2: very it's very clever. He's got a chapter set in
31:58
Speaker 2: a town of scholars. This is based on actually a
32:01
Speaker 2: chapter a plot in the Makamat of Alhariri, who is
32:06
Speaker 2: one of his models, and we'll get to that in
32:08
Speaker 2: a moment. So it's set the place is identified as
32:12
Speaker 2: being on the Euphrates, but it's a town of scholars,
32:16
Speaker 2: so he calls a kuriat cepher, you know, the town
32:19
Speaker 2: of the book. So I guess I'm just a bit
32:22
Speaker 2: more agnostic about his own travels, and I've tended to
32:27
Speaker 2: view the work through the lens of his invented characters wanderings.
32:31
Speaker 2: Having said that, and by genre, this definition of this
32:35
Speaker 2: genre sorry of the Makama features two parapatetic characters, the
32:39
Speaker 2: narrator and the hero, and they crisscross from place to place.
32:43
Speaker 2: And what's very interesting and Sipahamusar is that they really
32:48
Speaker 2: traverse tremendous distances back and forth. Their travels take them
32:54
Speaker 2: to Yemen, and much of it is in the Islamic world.
32:57
Speaker 2: That's what's so very interesting. Yemen, in Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria,
33:02
Speaker 2: the land of Israel, Egypt. And what's interesting is that
33:05
Speaker 2: they go as far west as Ottoman Anatolia and the
33:09
Speaker 2: Balkans and Greece. And this is kind of unprecedented. In
33:13
Speaker 2: Macamma literature. Macamal all Macammat and Hebrew Macamot as well
33:19
Speaker 2: are characterized by this kind of wandering and traveling, but
33:25
Speaker 2: Al Diaries is really unprecedented in terms of many of
33:28
Speaker 2: the places that are visited. So the narrator he joins
33:33
Speaker 2: overland caravans, and he sails on ships, and he dabbles
33:37
Speaker 2: in trade. And while he's traveling, he explicitly is out
33:42
Speaker 2: to gain hawachik competence and capitalistic wisdom, but also he's
33:48
Speaker 2: in search of what is termed mussar. And I'll talk
33:51
Speaker 2: more about the significance of this term in a moment.
33:55
Speaker 2: But this is not only moral instruction, but also this
33:59
Speaker 2: term is the evil Hebrew equivalent of what's known in
34:03
Speaker 2: Arabic as a dub. So when he's searching for this mussar,
34:08
Speaker 2: this a dub. This is a wide range of refined disciplines,
34:12
Speaker 2: including folk tales and anecdotes and proverbs. And in the
34:17
Speaker 2: process of and he's also traveling in search of the
34:20
Speaker 2: rogue hero because they meet up in every single one
34:23
Speaker 2: of these self contained chapters. So this pursuit leads to
34:28
Speaker 2: encounters with unfamiliar Jewish communities whom the protagonists either admire
34:34
Speaker 2: for their piety and their learning or they deplore them
34:38
Speaker 2: for their ignorance and immorality. I mean, you have these
34:41
Speaker 2: kind of snap judgments in many instances, and in doing so,
34:46
Speaker 2: it's very interesting because these are really encounters with Jewish
34:50
Speaker 2: others that are channeled through a fictional lens. But nevertheless
34:55
Speaker 2: they reflect certain culture the determined limitations, shall we say,
35:03
Speaker 2: as far as being able to comprehend or appreciate these
35:08
Speaker 2: unfamiliar groups of Jews. One of the interesting things is
35:12
Speaker 2: in one of the a couple of the chapters are
35:16
Speaker 2: set in a place that the narrator calls Roma, which
35:20
Speaker 2: presumably is rendering the Arabic term ballad a room, which
35:26
Speaker 2: is a term that originally designated the Roman Empire and
35:29
Speaker 2: then subsequently Byzantine lands, and in this period it's Ottoman, Anatolia,
35:36
Speaker 2: and the Balkans. But in one of these chapters that's
35:40
Speaker 2: located in this vicinity, the narrator has a very brief
35:45
Speaker 2: description of the local Jews he encounters. And again you
35:49
Speaker 2: can't because he's using biblical phrases and he's sort of
35:55
Speaker 2: constrained by rhyme schemes. You really don't know how much
36:00
Speaker 2: read into this or how much to infer from it.
36:02
Speaker 2: But he said that the majority of the Jews in
36:05
Speaker 2: this particular unnamed town in Roma were Ashkin Azim, and
36:10
Speaker 2: this is the only time that ashkan Azema' ever mentioned
36:12
Speaker 2: in the entire work. But it's not at all clear
36:15
Speaker 2: that in fact, this is what they are. It's possible
36:18
Speaker 2: that the Romanio Jews. Clearly they're unfamiliar and he kind
36:22
Speaker 2: of exoticizes them, but there's not a very long discussion
36:26
Speaker 2: of their cultural traits, or there are practices or any
36:32
Speaker 2: other identifying characteristics.
36:35
Speaker 1: Let me interject here because there's a word that you've
36:38
Speaker 1: used a futures which I want to try and try
36:43
Speaker 1: and nail down a little bit. It's actually it's a
36:45
Speaker 1: wonderful form of prose poetry called macama that you have
36:49
Speaker 1: noted a few times. That is the literary form of
36:51
Speaker 1: this books. Let me ask you a little bit about that,
36:53
Speaker 1: because I mean, it is a form of a literary
36:57
Speaker 1: form that one sees fairly often, especially in rabbinic literature
37:01
Speaker 1: and sort of introductions and other plays as well. But
37:04
Speaker 1: could you please describe what it is, what his main
37:06
Speaker 1: characteristics are, and also why al Dahiri would have wanted
37:10
Speaker 1: to specifically write in that, I mean, why was this
37:12
Speaker 1: form employed?
37:13
Speaker 2: Okay, So I think that off of that, we have
37:16
Speaker 2: to distinguish between the medium of rhymed prose, which was
37:21
Speaker 2: used for rabbinic introductions or epistles or many different genres
37:27
Speaker 2: of writing in Arabic as well as in Hebrew. In
37:31
Speaker 2: Arabic it's called saja. We have to distinguish between the
37:34
Speaker 2: medium of rhyme prose, which could be used for a
37:36
Speaker 2: whole host of purposes, and the genre of the makama
37:42
Speaker 2: and sometimes the term is used, you know, very broadly.
37:46
Speaker 2: But Adahari's work is a picuresque macrama and it's the
37:51
Speaker 2: only one known to us from Yemen across the sentries,
37:54
Speaker 2: which makes it very, very striking. So what is a makamma.
37:57
Speaker 2: Makamma is a rhyme prose narrative that's interspersed with formal poems.
38:02
Speaker 2: And in Sepharamasar and al Dahari's Makama, he interweaves these
38:09
Speaker 2: travel accounts, folk tales, trickster stories, and he's got on
38:15
Speaker 2: the other hand, moral instruction and inter religious polemic, philosophical discourse,
38:20
Speaker 2: kabbalistic themes. So in terms of the convention of the genre,
38:25
Speaker 2: and this is borrowed from adapted from Arabic literature, it's
38:30
Speaker 2: an episodic genre. So each chapter is a self contained episode,
38:36
Speaker 2: and the one thing that really binds all of them
38:39
Speaker 2: together is the consistent presence and activity of the narrator
38:46
Speaker 2: who's a bit credulous, and the rogue hero. And a
38:50
Speaker 2: typical macamma scenario is that in a given chapter, these
38:55
Speaker 2: two arrive in a particular city wherever it is, and
39:01
Speaker 2: the rogue hero will be in disguise and very often
39:06
Speaker 2: he's not even recognized by his friend and narrator until
39:09
Speaker 2: something gives him away. And then the rogue hero is
39:14
Speaker 2: a master artor'. He's actually a very interesting kind of
39:19
Speaker 2: figure because he is exceedingly literate and he tends to
39:26
Speaker 2: he always gathers a large crowd around him, whether in
39:30
Speaker 2: Arabic ma commat, whether it's you know, the mosque or
39:33
Speaker 2: the marketplace, and there are analogs obviously in the Hebrew
39:39
Speaker 2: ma commat, and he produces, he performs and remarkable rhetorical display,
39:48
Speaker 2: just completely wows his audience. Spectators gather around him and
39:53
Speaker 2: he manages to fleece them of their their funds. And
39:59
Speaker 2: this is kind of a standard, the standard scenarios. So
40:03
Speaker 2: you have these escapades of these two itinerant characters, and
40:07
Speaker 2: they basically beguile everybody us as readers, but also the
40:12
Speaker 2: internal audiences as well beguile us with these tales of
40:16
Speaker 2: disguise and deception and swindling. And it's all based on
40:22
Speaker 2: this brilliant rhetorical display. In Arabic literature, the inauguration of
40:29
Speaker 2: the macama genre is traditionally ascribed to a figure named
40:33
Speaker 2: Alhamadani who was active at the end of the tenth century,
40:38
Speaker 2: and this was a major literary accomplishment which earned him
40:42
Speaker 2: the sobriquet of Badi as a Man al Hamadani, which
40:46
Speaker 2: translates as the marvel of the age. And then the
40:50
Speaker 2: genre was really brought to prominence and given what's considered
40:54
Speaker 2: to be its definitive form about a century later by
40:57
Speaker 2: Alhiri of Basra, and his Ma Commat, which he edited
41:02
Speaker 2: very carefully, consists of fifty self contained chapters, and that
41:06
Speaker 2: became kind of the paradigmatic number for many of these
41:11
Speaker 2: collections of tales of Ma combat. So Alharizi Juda al Gharizi,
41:18
Speaker 2: who was one of the models for zajarrel Dahiri, he
41:22
Speaker 2: has fifty chapters. Aldahiri himself has forty five, so not
41:26
Speaker 2: that far off. But there are other Arabic macmmat that
41:29
Speaker 2: also aspired to a similar number of chapters. And one
41:34
Speaker 2: of the things that characterizes the macamma, whether in Arabic
41:37
Speaker 2: or in Hebrew, is a language very extremely florid or
41:42
Speaker 2: innate recherche. In fact, Alhiri's language was so so very
41:53
Speaker 2: elevated and florid and often obscure frankly that there's so
42:00
Speaker 2: many puns and plays on words and illusions that it
42:04
Speaker 2: gave rise to a whole tradition of commentary. The fictional
42:09
Speaker 2: Hebrew rhyme prose narratives began to emerge in the early
42:12
Speaker 2: twelfth century in Iberia, and the earliest authors didn't really
42:17
Speaker 2: feel constrained to adopt all the elements of the model
42:20
Speaker 2: that al Hari had furnished. But Judah al Ghaizi, who
42:30
Speaker 2: originated in Iberia and then traveled to the East, he
42:35
Speaker 2: wrote a very well known macamma called the Takimoni, and
42:41
Speaker 2: there he really does adhere very closely to the norms
42:44
Speaker 2: and conventions of the picturesque Arabic makama. And he's the
42:48
Speaker 2: one who really adapts this Arabic literary form for Jewish purpose.
42:53
Speaker 2: He judaizes all of the place names in place of
42:57
Speaker 2: Quranic citations, he has Biblical sitations. And al Dahiri, in
43:03
Speaker 2: his author's introduction, tells us that explicitly that he consciously
43:08
Speaker 2: modeled his own Stepha Mussar not only on Alhariri, but
43:13
Speaker 2: also on Alharizi's Tacimoni, And he says that you know,
43:18
Speaker 2: Alharizi blazed the trail with his magnificent Hebrew Makamat and
43:24
Speaker 2: he Alharizi in turn learned his craft from Alfariri, who
43:28
Speaker 2: was the peerless Muslim master of Arabic eloquence. So he
43:31
Speaker 2: has tremendous admiration for these two literary predecessors. What he
43:37
Speaker 2: doesn't say, which is very interesting this is an unacknowledged
43:43
Speaker 2: Jewish Hebrew source, is that he also makes fairly heavy
43:47
Speaker 2: use of Mabaro de Manuel the rhyme pro's narratives of
43:54
Speaker 2: Manuel of Haromi, Emmanuel of Rome thirteenth to early fourteenth entry,
44:00
Speaker 2: and that comes from a completely different cultural world. It's
44:04
Speaker 2: this is a work that's replete with Emmanuel's sonnets. There's
44:07
Speaker 2: a lot of sexual innuendo. He draws on Italian Renaissance ideals.
44:12
Speaker 2: So it's interesting a culturally that al Dahiri makes use
44:16
Speaker 2: of that. And it's not entirely clear to me how
44:19
Speaker 2: much he could really appreciate Emmanuel's cultural milia, but he
44:24
Speaker 2: sees he sees this work as an antecedent Macama, and
44:30
Speaker 2: there are plots or portions of plots that are clearly
44:34
Speaker 2: adapted from it. Also phraseology. Periodically, he has responses to
44:40
Speaker 2: some of Emmanuel's poems, and as far as why he
44:45
Speaker 2: doesn't acknowledge his use of the Mao Demanuel, we can
44:49
Speaker 2: speculate that it's perhaps precisely because at this period the
44:55
Speaker 2: work is banned by Josef Carro for its pointed errat
45:01
Speaker 2: So in a very we want to generalize a very
45:06
Speaker 2: you know, sort of conservative or you know, halockically observant
45:13
Speaker 2: traditional society. Perhaps that wouldn't have gone over so well
45:17
Speaker 2: if he had trumpeted the fact that he was working
45:20
Speaker 2: with Emmanuel.
45:21
Speaker 1: So just trying to sort of put some order into this,
45:24
Speaker 1: we have this rather extraordinary book. It's a very large
45:27
Speaker 1: work of written in this very elaborate and ornate and
45:31
Speaker 1: florid poetic style Macma, and it delineates the peregrinations, the travels,
45:37
Speaker 1: the ideas that experiences, of the debates of its characters.
45:41
Speaker 1: To what extent can we see in it, let's say,
45:45
Speaker 1: aspects of the intellectual trends to which he was to
45:49
Speaker 1: which he was reading or interacting with the meaning you know,
45:52
Speaker 1: again we've mentioned a few of these before, but you know,
45:54
Speaker 1: is there a coherent philosophy that emerges from this book?
45:58
Speaker 1: Is there a I don't know set of ethics or
46:00
Speaker 1: metaphysics or anything like that, which which arises from this work?
46:04
Speaker 1: And what ways does he argue for it or always
46:08
Speaker 1: is it presented let's and does that plostph include elements
46:11
Speaker 1: of come alad and includes various other elements. What kind
46:14
Speaker 1: of it's a intellectual portrait or what kind of worldview
46:19
Speaker 1: is being presented in this book?
46:20
Speaker 2: If any, I think that it is highly reflective of
46:26
Speaker 2: the intellectual milieu that I tried to describe previously. It's
46:30
Speaker 2: very very It's really a very rich repository of intellectual history,
46:35
Speaker 2: which is interesting because you have this combination of working
46:39
Speaker 2: with a literary genre that has certain conventions. You're constrained
46:45
Speaker 2: to a certain extent by the fact that you're constantly
46:49
Speaker 2: rhyming your narrative, and yet there are these very strong
46:53
Speaker 2: indications of Aldahiri's intellectual mindset. So it's both philosophically informed
47:07
Speaker 2: and also, as we mentioned, there's the element of Kabbala,
47:12
Speaker 2: and these characters travel to different places, including Fat, but
47:18
Speaker 2: not exclusively it's Fat, also to Tiberius and elsewhere where
47:23
Speaker 2: they encounter people studying Kabbala. They engage in cabalistic discussions
47:29
Speaker 2: and really through the protagonists of Sephahamos al Dahiri champions
47:34
Speaker 2: the cultivation of Kabbalah, and one gets the impression that
47:38
Speaker 2: the broader reception of Kabala and Yemen is in its
47:42
Speaker 2: infancy at this point. And that's corroborated by some cabalistic
47:47
Speaker 2: works that emerge from seventeenth century Yemen, which seemed to
47:50
Speaker 2: be very basic in their orientation. I should note that
47:55
Speaker 2: one of the interesting things about the cabalistic content of
48:00
Speaker 2: Sephaha Mussar is that even though the characters visit spot
48:07
Speaker 2: and by the way, there is no mention of Luria
48:10
Speaker 2: uh in for what it's worth, in uh Sephahamusa, but
48:15
Speaker 2: certainly they're there at a period when Luriana Kabbala is,
48:18
Speaker 2: you know, emerging and flourishing and expanding throughout the Jewish
48:23
Speaker 2: world very rapidly. But the Kabbalistic content if you look
48:28
Speaker 2: closely in terms of certainly the texts that Altho he mentioned,
48:31
Speaker 2: and he's a real bibliophile, so he's constantly mentioning titles
48:35
Speaker 2: of different Jewish texts, and he has poems in praise
48:39
Speaker 2: of various texts, you know, like Joseph Abbo garim and
48:44
Speaker 2: works of mimonodies and all sorts of works. He's got
48:48
Speaker 2: poems in their praise and sort of hanagyrics. So what
48:54
Speaker 2: does he mentioned in terms of Kabbalistic works. It seems
48:58
Speaker 2: that all his his corpus was really classical Spanish kabbala
49:05
Speaker 2: pre Lurianic kabbala. So what his his characters they advocate
49:10
Speaker 2: the study of the Zohar. He's got poem you know
49:14
Speaker 2: about He's he's advising people to come and learn study.
49:19
Speaker 2: Sohar Ma jud Kyat's commentary on Marada Jikatila's share aurahur
49:30
Speaker 2: Aramzaba and Iakov. So, but at the same time, there's
49:37
Speaker 2: at least one uh Lurianic or or one liturgical custom
49:42
Speaker 2: that emerges from Lurianic circles that is also advocated in
49:47
Speaker 2: one of the poems that he writes, which which, by
49:50
Speaker 2: the way, this poem bears certain resemblances Todd. And it's
49:55
Speaker 2: clear there's this scholarly literature on this that there were
49:59
Speaker 2: of variety of poems that emerged from spot in its
50:04
Speaker 2: environs in this period that bear striking resemblances points of
50:09
Speaker 2: contact with Lendo di So in this poem he says,
50:14
Speaker 2: and I'm not remembering the exact wording, but basically he
50:18
Speaker 2: encourages people to insert into the Friday Niki dou va
50:26
Speaker 2: vaivok yomaishi in order to encode the tetragrammaton. So clearly
50:33
Speaker 2: this was something that was being introduced to Yemen at
50:36
Speaker 2: that point, and there's corroboration in his biblical commentary as well.
50:41
Speaker 2: So we have the kabitalistic aspect, we have the philosophical aspect.
50:47
Speaker 2: The sixth chapter that I mentioned previously, that is set
50:50
Speaker 2: in Kiro's Yeshiva. Apart from the fact that it's set
50:54
Speaker 2: in Karo's Yeshiva, and that the that the rogue hero
50:57
Speaker 2: wows Joseph Karro, the rest of it is you know, fictional,
51:03
Speaker 2: and the hero who is obviously disguised, and the narrator
51:09
Speaker 2: cottons onto the fact somewhat later on that this is
51:12
Speaker 2: in fact his good buddy Avner ben Reelek he is
51:16
Speaker 2: a star student in Kio' Zyeshiva. Caro begins by explicating
51:23
Speaker 2: apparently cabitalistically. I mean, there's a very brief reference the
51:27
Speaker 2: verse from you know, Tatasha Tomma and then Mishivat Nafish
51:34
Speaker 2: that's the Nephish is the kind of the point of
51:36
Speaker 2: departure for this whole chapter. And then the rogue hero
51:41
Speaker 2: who's in disguise as a as a brilliant Yeshiva student,
51:44
Speaker 2: is called upon to talk about the soul, and he
51:47
Speaker 2: gives this whole long peroration on the internal senses according
51:53
Speaker 2: to the medieval Jewish philosophical and medical tradition, and the
51:58
Speaker 2: faculties is the soul, and it's extremely philosophically informed, and
52:04
Speaker 2: he's drawing on the Aristatilian tradition. But also there are
52:10
Speaker 2: sections that are reminiscent of works by Solomon and the
52:14
Speaker 2: gubby Rohl Judaha Lay, So he's very okura as far
52:18
Speaker 2: as the medieval philosophical tradition is concerned. As well. In
52:24
Speaker 2: terms of a worldview, it's a little hard to pinpoint.
52:29
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there are many contradictions and sort
52:32
Speaker 2: of creative tensions in this work. So it seems clear
52:35
Speaker 2: that the author is very much a product of an
52:39
Speaker 2: extremely traditional, very learned world of Yemenite Jewish scholarship. At
52:47
Speaker 2: the same time, for whatever reasons, he doesn't feel that
52:51
Speaker 2: there's any contradiction between that orientation and writing a work
52:59
Speaker 2: like this aping a genre that can often be very
53:04
Speaker 2: it's intended to be entertaining as well as edifying, but
53:08
Speaker 2: can be at times quite provocative in terms of you know,
53:12
Speaker 2: these tales can be the behavior of the hero can
53:15
Speaker 2: be quite transgressive. And this is a tension that goes
53:17
Speaker 2: back to the original Arabic models of the of the macama.
53:22
Speaker 2: So that you have al Hariri in his author's preface
53:26
Speaker 2: kind of apologizing for the transgressive nature of the the
53:33
Speaker 2: hero's behavior because in the for example, in his Makamat,
53:40
Speaker 2: the protagonist is caught drinking wine, which obviously transgresses you know, Shariellah,
53:48
Speaker 2: but at other times he appears as a preacher as
53:51
Speaker 2: an aesthetic. In any case, I think that, you know,
53:54
Speaker 2: some of these tensions just mean that these different orientations coexist,
53:59
Speaker 2: which is one of the things that so you know,
54:01
Speaker 2: we tend to often project onto the pre modern period,
54:06
Speaker 2: these kind of binaries. You know, well, no, of course,
54:09
Speaker 2: people they were orthodox quote unquote right, But there's an
54:14
Speaker 2: openness here which may go along with the whole traveling
54:18
Speaker 2: motif to a variety of influences. I would say it's
54:25
Speaker 2: also worth knowing and worth commenting on that there is
54:28
Speaker 2: in this work and also in al Dahiri's his Toura commentary,
54:34
Speaker 2: there is a coexistence or he's very comfortable integrating Mamanidian
54:40
Speaker 2: rationalism with Kabbalah. And again, you know the it's not
54:46
Speaker 2: really until the modern period, until the early twentieth century
54:51
Speaker 2: that you get a kind of much more binary distinction
54:56
Speaker 2: between the two in Yemen. And part of this has
54:59
Speaker 2: to do with contact with i would say European Musquiline
55:04
Speaker 2: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, so that
55:06
Speaker 2: you have a major controversy and a whole circle that
55:11
Speaker 2: is centered around Yehja who is Joseph's grandfather, who is
55:17
Speaker 2: the sort of founder of this movement called the Donda,
55:21
Speaker 2: which is extremely anti kind baalistic and wants to revert
55:25
Speaker 2: to the and this is all in the you know,
55:30
Speaker 2: subsequent to the seventeenth century ascendency of Kabalah with Shalam Shabazi.
55:34
Speaker 2: But he wants to revert to the rationalist quote unquote
55:38
Speaker 2: authentic Yemeni tradition, which also is aligned with an earlier
55:44
Speaker 2: liturgical right, which was then subsequently displaced by the arrival
55:49
Speaker 2: of printed prayer books from Eretisrael containing the Safari right
55:54
Speaker 2: of Veritisrael. So at that point you get a very
55:58
Speaker 2: sharp distinction between Kabbala philosophy, but not in our diarious works.
56:02
Speaker 2: He I think he sees his well his metaphysical sources
56:05
Speaker 2: as as equally legitimate and valid means of drawing closer
56:12
Speaker 2: to the divine and attaining knowledge of the divine.
56:17
Speaker 1: I would, okay, by fair enough. I mean, I guess
56:19
Speaker 1: the last sort of significal question I want to ask
56:23
Speaker 1: is the is a better afterlife this or the effects
56:27
Speaker 1: of Seth Mussara? I mean, you know, it's it's sort
56:33
Speaker 1: of nowadays, it's it's fallen into a little bit. Oh
56:37
Speaker 1: shall we say he's not particularly well known. It put
56:39
Speaker 1: that way suddenly in the twenty five centry, until of course,
56:42
Speaker 1: your book becomes a bestseller and suddenly it's, you know it,
56:45
Speaker 1: she's a worldwide fame once again. But it's more media context.
56:49
Speaker 1: What was known about it? Did it make waves? Did
56:52
Speaker 1: it was it at least well received in its native Yemen?
56:54
Speaker 1: Did it across any into any other Jewish communities? What
56:57
Speaker 1: was the effect of this work?
56:59
Speaker 2: That's an excellent question again, because we lack any kind
57:04
Speaker 2: of corroborating sources, we really don't know how it was
57:08
Speaker 2: received by his contemporaries. One of the traditions attached to
57:15
Speaker 2: the performance of the macama, and this again goes back
57:20
Speaker 2: to Alhamadani and Ahariri, is that these works were read
57:25
Speaker 2: aloud in public. They were recited publicly to a crowd
57:30
Speaker 2: of auditors and onlookers, so that it almost became, you know,
57:35
Speaker 2: a kind of theater. There's an element of performativity to
57:38
Speaker 2: the works. But alas we really don't have any records
57:43
Speaker 2: of how the Fahamusar in its day was performed or
57:50
Speaker 2: was received. There is manuscript evidence that has been read
57:56
Speaker 2: in a variety of ways. So Ratzabi rat Sabi, who
58:00
Speaker 2: edited this text, pointed to the fact that there were
58:04
Speaker 2: about twenty manuscripts of Yemenite provenance, and he thought that
58:09
Speaker 2: that was a relatively small number and that that meant
58:12
Speaker 2: that the work hadn't circulated very widely. Other people have
58:16
Speaker 2: read that differently. Shlomo d of Gooittein, for example, thought
58:19
Speaker 2: that that was an indication of the work's popularity. And
58:23
Speaker 2: then yet another Yemenit Israeli scholar he concurred that this
58:30
Speaker 2: is a shala medina that the work. He concurred that
58:34
Speaker 2: the work had relatively low visibility in its day, but
58:39
Speaker 2: he suggested that the reason that this was the case
58:43
Speaker 2: is that Stefaha Musar was kind of internally suppressed because
58:48
Speaker 2: it contains and we didn't touch on this, but it
58:51
Speaker 2: contains very forthright critiques of Islam in elevated scriptural biblical
58:58
Speaker 2: Hebrew poetry, but very very it's very striking that Aldairi
59:05
Speaker 2: is not restrained. And even though you might think, oh, well,
59:09
Speaker 2: this is written in Hebrews, so Muslims aren't necessarily going
59:12
Speaker 2: to read it, there's always the word of mouth factor,
59:14
Speaker 2: and word could have gotten out that this is a
59:17
Speaker 2: work that's highly critical of Muhammad of the Qur'an, and
59:21
Speaker 2: that would have been really that would have jeopardized the
59:25
Speaker 2: welfare of the Jewish community. So that's another sort of
59:29
Speaker 2: speculation about why the work didn't circulate widely. What we
59:33
Speaker 2: can say is that there was definitely a revival of
59:36
Speaker 2: interest in the work in the nineteenth century. We have
59:40
Speaker 2: most of the manuscripts that we have are from the
59:43
Speaker 2: nineteenth and twentieth century, and there is a prominent figure
59:48
Speaker 2: in Yeamanni Jewish culture. His name is Sadya Mansura, who
59:52
Speaker 2: died in eighteen eighty, so late nineteenth century, who wrote
59:56
Speaker 2: this wonderful curious elegy eulogy for for Zahari al Dahiri
1:00:02
Speaker 2: he he he eulogizes a number of eminences in Yemeni
1:00:07
Speaker 2: Jewish culture. And this this, by the way, is based
1:00:11
Speaker 2: on the final chapter in Sepha Mussar, where al Diary
1:00:17
Speaker 2: effectively puts his own epitaph into the mouths of his protagonists.
1:00:21
Speaker 2: So they each eulogize, they each request from the other
1:00:25
Speaker 2: to eulogize themselves. So Mortifi asks Mordechai is very, very
1:00:30
Speaker 2: concerned about his posthumous reputation, and so he asks the
1:00:35
Speaker 2: hero afder ben Reelik to eulogize him. And then they
1:00:38
Speaker 2: they the tables returned. And in any case, so Dadya
1:00:42
Speaker 2: Mansoura writes this really curious elogy, and I'm just going
1:00:45
Speaker 2: to read you part of it because it's so striking.
1:00:48
Speaker 2: He says, the great rabbi are revered teacher. Yeah, yeah, Dahiri, yeah.
1:00:53
Speaker 2: He has an equivalent for Zaharier and Jim in Yemeni
1:00:57
Speaker 2: Jewish nomenclature are revered teacher Yeh Dahiri, whose influential wisdom
1:01:03
Speaker 2: and commanding reputation were known throughout Yemen and whose deeds
1:01:07
Speaker 2: were renowned throughout the land. Was a master of scripture,
1:01:11
Speaker 2: mishnah talmud Agada, Sifran, sifray, epigrams, riddles, animal fables, washerman's tales, mischlotkovsim,
1:01:23
Speaker 2: demon's speech, Sirati dim, the speech of palm trees, Sirat Khalim,
1:01:29
Speaker 2: and the speech of the ministering Angels St. Mashid. He
1:01:33
Speaker 2: was an expert in the sciences of astronomy, mathematics, geometry,
1:01:38
Speaker 2: and politics, ochma medinit as well as in natural science,
1:01:44
Speaker 2: grammar and music, which is the science and melody formata musikamata,
1:01:49
Speaker 2: nigun masherim, and above all in metaphysics, which enables one
1:01:54
Speaker 2: to know the divine stature shiukoma, the very very striking yuji.
1:02:00
Speaker 1: And that's an impressive CV.
1:02:03
Speaker 2: Well, it's ritually embroidered. But what's interesting is kind of
1:02:07
Speaker 2: the coexistence of these very rigorous intellectual disciplines and kind
1:02:13
Speaker 2: of occult sciences. But it's written with great esteem, and
1:02:18
Speaker 2: it's it's very clear that in later centuries, you know,
1:02:22
Speaker 2: Al Dahiri is very highly venerated and esteemed, and he
1:02:29
Speaker 2: turns up in other Yemenite sort of bibliographies of key works.
1:02:35
Speaker 2: So the jury is out on how he was appreciated
1:02:38
Speaker 2: in his own day, but it's clear that that his
1:02:41
Speaker 2: work did have an afterlife. And I should just say,
1:02:45
Speaker 2: just as a kind of PostScript, that in I think
1:02:48
Speaker 2: it was in two thousand and eight, one of the
1:02:50
Speaker 2: leading figures of the Yeminit Jewish community in Israel and
1:02:53
Speaker 2: then named Morgahitari, he brought out sephal Amostar in his
1:02:58
Speaker 2: own edition, which it's not a critical edition, which was
1:03:02
Speaker 2: AB's Red Subbies, is very highly annotated, but still nevertheless
1:03:08
Speaker 2: very welcome, and in his preface he sorry talks about
1:03:11
Speaker 2: the fact that his family owned a manuscript. This is
1:03:15
Speaker 2: part of the impetus of Sefromussa, and that in his childhood,
1:03:20
Speaker 2: on leisurely occasions, on Hagem and other occasions of get togethers,
1:03:27
Speaker 2: the work would be read out loud to people, you know,
1:03:31
Speaker 2: family members who had gathered for the occasion, and that
1:03:35
Speaker 2: he knew by heart. At least two of the episodes.
1:03:40
Speaker 2: One is full of animal fables and the other one
1:03:44
Speaker 2: is this very striking it's the forty third chapter, which
1:03:47
Speaker 2: is a very striking chapter. About mimonodies, which instead of
1:03:52
Speaker 2: focusing on his intellectual output, actually is based on these
1:03:59
Speaker 2: very strange and curious folk legends about my minorites childhood
1:04:06
Speaker 2: and upbringing. And these are legends that were known throughout
1:04:10
Speaker 2: the throughout the Middle East, throughout the Middle Eastern Jewish communities.
1:04:15
Speaker 2: So we have the testimony of essentially a twentieth century
1:04:20
Speaker 2: yeh and I jew to the continuing after life of
1:04:24
Speaker 2: Stepha homosap So, in.
1:04:26
Speaker 1: Which case this is bringing me to past my very
1:04:28
Speaker 1: last question, given that we've read this eulogy and this
1:04:31
Speaker 1: extraordinary cv of the gentleman, and there is a question
1:04:34
Speaker 1: I asked many of my guests as sort of a
1:04:36
Speaker 1: parting a question which is the following. If you if
1:04:39
Speaker 1: you could sit down with him tonight for dinner al diary,
1:04:43
Speaker 1: what would you be asking him? What would you want
1:04:46
Speaker 1: to know from him? What are the questions in your
1:04:48
Speaker 1: mind that are unresolved? First, let's say, what do you
1:04:52
Speaker 1: think that experience would be like, how do you think
1:04:54
Speaker 1: you'd enjoy it? And what'd you be asking him?
1:04:57
Speaker 2: Well, it's a very interesting question because I mean, one
1:05:00
Speaker 2: of the things about that emerges from Stephahamosa is that
1:05:04
Speaker 2: this is a it's a very homo social environment there.
1:05:10
Speaker 2: There aren't the only women who feature in stephaha musa
1:05:15
Speaker 2: are there's a misogynist set piece that actually is in
1:05:19
Speaker 2: a chapter that's set in Kochin, which is very interesting.
1:05:23
Speaker 2: But for the most part there women are absent in Sephamosa.
1:05:27
Speaker 2: So we'd have to kind of take a leap of
1:05:31
Speaker 2: what would we say, that sort of suspension of disbelief
1:05:34
Speaker 2: to think that, you know, that he would deign to
1:05:41
Speaker 2: have dinner with me. But okay, let's let's make that assumption. Also,
1:05:45
Speaker 2: it's a little bit I'm an Ashkenazi, yeah, sort of
1:05:50
Speaker 2: trying to immerse myself in his world. But what I
1:05:53
Speaker 2: would like to ask him, I guess you know, the
1:05:56
Speaker 2: sixty four thousand dollars question is why is this the
1:06:00
Speaker 2: only picaresqua macamma that we have from Yemen? Is it
1:06:03
Speaker 2: just that it's the only one that survived? Were there
1:06:06
Speaker 2: other people who were writing in this genre? Or if not,
1:06:12
Speaker 2: how was it that he felt secure and comfortable enough
1:06:16
Speaker 2: to cultivate this genre which can often be quite portions
1:06:22
Speaker 2: of which can often be quite you know, provocative, suggestive, transgressive,
1:06:28
Speaker 2: When he was really a very well respected Halachic scholar
1:06:32
Speaker 2: and biblical exegeet and people he issued responda you know
1:06:37
Speaker 2: as well. So it's just it's very very interesting. You
1:06:40
Speaker 2: get a sort of different writerly personality that comes across
1:06:43
Speaker 2: in different genres, and so I'd like to know more about,
1:06:46
Speaker 2: you know, really what motivated him. And then I just
1:06:52
Speaker 2: have to ask him about one chapter. There is one
1:06:54
Speaker 2: just really hilarious story, and I write about this in
1:06:59
Speaker 2: the section on his re presentations of Muslims in the book,
1:07:02
Speaker 2: which is it's basically a tale of one upmanship between
1:07:07
Speaker 2: a Christian Muslim and Jewish thief. And the Jewish thief,
1:07:12
Speaker 2: of course, is the is the hero in disguise, but
1:07:15
Speaker 2: the Christian and the Muslim, they they kind of taunt
1:07:19
Speaker 2: the heroes, saying that, you know, Jews are so weak,
1:07:22
Speaker 2: they're so pathetic that they can't even pull off a theft.
1:07:27
Speaker 2: And of course he disproves them, and he goes to
1:07:30
Speaker 2: very elaborate ends to do so. And it's just such
1:07:35
Speaker 2: a striking tale. And many of the tales, you know,
1:07:37
Speaker 2: they have, they sort of feature motifs that are known
1:07:41
Speaker 2: from the repository of international folklore. This one I haven't
1:07:46
Speaker 2: tracked down, and I would be really curious to know
1:07:49
Speaker 2: whether this was totally a figment of his imagination, whether
1:07:53
Speaker 2: he got it from somewhere. I mean, the upshot is
1:07:54
Speaker 2: that he that the way that he engineers the denoument
1:07:58
Speaker 2: of the of the tale well is in such a
1:08:01
Speaker 2: way that Jews and you know, end up with the
1:08:07
Speaker 2: upper hand. And and so this whole accusation of weakness
1:08:11
Speaker 2: is completely disproven, which is one of the things of
1:08:15
Speaker 2: that here he does in general when he depicts confrontations
1:08:19
Speaker 2: with Muslims in the work. But I guess those are
1:08:21
Speaker 2: some of the things I would want to ask him
1:08:23
Speaker 2: fair enough.
1:08:24
Speaker 1: That seems that seems very reasonable, sounds like would be
1:08:27
Speaker 1: an interesting conversation. And and uh, yeah, that that passage
1:08:32
Speaker 1: with the the thieves, it's well, I'd like to know
1:08:36
Speaker 1: more about that as well. Okay, professor. At the end
1:08:39
Speaker 1: of time, an thank you so very much joining us
1:08:40
Speaker 1: today on the podcast Jewish Ideas. This has been a pleasure,
1:08:44
Speaker 1: and we look forward to more people reading your works
1:08:47
Speaker 1: and the works of this extraordinary gentleman. And uh and
1:08:50
Speaker 1: we hope to discuss this further another opportunity. Thank you
1:08:52
Speaker 1: for joining us.
1:08:53
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me JJ, this was really just wonderful.
1:08:56
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
1:08:59
Speaker 1: This has been podcast of Jewish ideas by Tora in Motion,
1:09:02
Speaker 1: produced by Alisa Kellman and myself JJ Kimbri, edited and
1:09:06
Speaker 1: mixed by Alicia Kelmer. You can stay up to date
1:09:09
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1:09:11
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Speaker 1: motion dot org. Slash donated