The Maharitz—Rabbi Yiḥye Ṣāleḥ מַהֲרִי"ץ — רַבִּי יִחְיֵא צָאלִח

Yiḥye ben Yosef Ṣāleḥ, by acronym the Maharitz (Morenu ha-Rav Yiḥye Ṣāleḥ). Born in Ḥeshvan 5474, autumn 1713, in Sana'a; died on 28 Nisan 5565, 27 April 1805, in the same city, on a Sabbath.

A rare biographical detail worth keeping: until about the age of thirty he worked as a blacksmith, and then became a sofer, a scribe of sacred texts. This is no incidental: his palaeographic training underlies all his textual work. Then av beit din and chief jurist of Sana'a; in that office he was succeeded by his son, Rabbi Abraham Ṣāleḥ. For most of his life he acted in the shadow of the immensely powerful lay head of the community, Shalom ha-Kohen al-ʿIrāqī (1685–1780), the imam's tax-farmer and nasi.

His books: Tiklāl ʿEṣ Ḥayyim—commentary and edited text of the Baladi rite, first printed in Jerusalem in 1894 by Rabbi Avraham al-Nadaf; Peʿulat Ṣadiq—responsa, more than nine hundred items, the principal source for eighteenth-century Yemenite social history; Zevaḥ Todah on slaughter and terefot; Shaʿarei Qedushah, an abridgement on slaughter; Shaʿarei Ṭohorah on the laws of niddah, written in Arabic for the ordinary reader; Ḥeleq ha-Diqduq on biblical orthography; Meʿil Qaṭan, a commentary on the Shelah; Oraḥ la-Ḥayyim on the Five Scrolls.

Most interesting is how he handled the rite. The Maharitz began as a partisan of the Sephardi, imported usage and around 1776 reversed himself, undertaking the defence and re-editing of Baladi. But his method was not restorationist purism; it was controlled synthesis: he kept the Maimonidean-geonic spine, admitted Lurianic and Shulḥan ʿArukh elements that had already taken hold in Yemen, and rejected others. The specific decisions are known: he added Mizmor le-Todah to the morning service on Shulḥan ʿArukh authority; instituted Ṣidqatekha after Minḥah on Shabbat; expanded the waving of the lulav to further directions; and rejected the innovation of Keter Yitenu, retaining the Baladi Naqdishakh.

Hence three corrections. "The Maharitz saved Baladi from Sephardi contamination" is a later framing, of the Dor Deʿah era: he codified a hybrid, and in the twentieth century Baladi purists—Yiḥye Qāfiḥ, then Yosef Qāfiḥ in Tiklāl Shivat Ṣiyyon—had to correct the Maharitz back toward Maimonides. He is the compromiser, not the purist. Further, not everything in ʿEṣ Ḥayyim that differs from the older manuscripts is his own initiative: he himself states that he adopted usages because they had already become general in Yemen; he is often the recorder of change rather than its author. And he was not "chief rabbi of Yemen": no such office existed; he headed the court of Sana'a, whose authority radiated but was not national in law.

One last, bibliographical, caution: an imprint for Peʿulat Ṣadiq reading "India, 1789" appears on Hebrew websites, but it is implausible and uncorroborated, and should not be printed without an autopsy of a copy.