Shalom Shabazī שָׁלֵם שַׁבַּזִי

Shalem (Shalom) ben Yosef Mashtā al-Shabazī. His father, Yosef ben Avigad, was himself a rabbi and poet. Shabazī traced his descent from Zeraḥ son of Judah.

Born around 1619 in Najd al-Walīd, in the Shabaz region near Ta'izz; he moved to Shabaz, then to Ta'izz, where he built a prayer house and a mikveh. His tomb in Ta'izz became a place of pilgrimage for Jews and Muslims alike, who came seeking healing—one of the few Yemenite shrines shared by two faiths.

The corpus: the Dīwān, some five hundred and fifty surviving poems attributed to him. The first critical publication is the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 1977. He wrote in Hebrew, Aramaic and Judaeo-Arabic, switching language within a single poem, and signed by acrostic: Shalem, al-Shabazī, Shabazī. The genres: nashīd—an opening in Hebrew or Aramaic, meditative; shīrah—the body, often in Judaeo-Arabic, sung with a drum; hallel—a doxological close. The poems are saturated with Lurianic Kabbalah, with images of exile and redemption, and with the erotic-mystical vocabulary of the Arabic ghazal.

Datable historical anchors in his verse: the headgear decree of 1667; the Mawzaʿ exile of 1679–80, on which he wrote Waṣalnā hātif al-alḥān ("Tidings have reached us")—he was then about sixty. Echoes of the Shabbatai Ṣevi movement of 1666 are present in the corpus and remain disputed.

Five corrections, all of them needed. The death date "1720, aged 101" is almost certainly wrong: Wikipedia and hundreds of derivative pages repeat it, whereas the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives "1619—after 1680," and the last securely datable item in the corpus is the Mawzaʿ lamentation of 1679–80. It should be printed as c. 1619—after 1680. "Shabazī wrote fifteen thousand poems" is legendary amplification: some five hundred and fifty survive, attributed to him with varying confidence, and the Dīwān as sung in Yemen contains the work of many poets—Yosef ben Israel, Sālim al-Shabazī, Sālim ben Saʿīd, Shalem ʿAshrī—which popular memory reassigns to Shabazī. The Dīwān is a communal anthology, not an authorial oeuvre. "Shabazī was a Hebrew poet": his most-sung and most influential works are in Judaeo-Arabic, Aṣʾalak and much of the wedding repertoire among them; to present him as a synagogue payyetan misrepresents both the corpus and its function—he is a domestic, wedding, sung poet, not a liturgical one. The hagiography is hagiography: the flights to Jerusalem for the Sabbath, the contest with the imam's sorcerers, the levitation, the intercession that saved Yemenite Jewry from expulsion—all belong to an oral legend cycle collected mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; what is documented is the poems, a few manuscripts in his hand, and the events his poems name. On all the evidence he was neither a communal rabbi nor a leader of Sana'a. And finally: "Im Nin'alu" is not a Yemenite folk song and not an Ofra Haza composition but a poem by Shabazī sung to a traditional melody; the recordings of 1984 and 1988 are arrangements.