Yiḥye Qāfiḥ יִחְיֵא בֶּן שְׁלֹמֹה קָאפִח

Yiḥye ben Shelomo Qāfiḥ. He was chief rabbi—ḥakham bāshī—officially for only one year, 1899–1900, but remained a member of the Sana'a court until his death. In 1909 he was appointed headmaster of the Jewish school opened by the Ottoman authorities in Sana'a, where arithmetic, geography, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish were taught alongside Torah.

In 1912 he founded the movement Dor Deʿah, "the generation of knowledge"; its adherents were the Dardaʿim. The dispute was about three things. The Zohar is not the book of Shimʿon bar Yoḥai but a composition of the late thirteenth century: Qāfiḥ assembled the linguistic, historical and doctrinal arguments in Milḥamot ha-Shem, begun in 1914 and printed in Jerusalem in 1931. Lurianic Kabbalah imports a theology incompatible with Maimonidean monotheism, and has corrupted the Yemenite liturgy. Therefore the Baladi rite must be returned to its Maimonidean form, purged of what the Maharitz admitted into it.

Then came bans and counter-bans in 1913–14; the Jerusalem rabbinate, Yemenite rabbis resident there included, laid a ban on Qāfiḥ and printed the anti-Dardaʿi collection Emunat ha-Shem. And both sides appealed to the Zaydī imam: Imam Yaḥyā intervened in a dispute over the authenticity of the Zohar and at one point imprisoned Qāfiḥ.

Corrections. Dor Deʿah was not "Yemenite Reform" and not Haskalah: the movement was rigorously halakhic and hyper-Maimonidean, rejecting the Zohar and elevating the Talmud and the Mishneh Torah to sole authority; the whole quarrel runs inside the halakhic frame. The trigger came from outside: through Aden and the Indian Ocean network—from Protestant missionaries, European biblical criticism and printed European Hebrew books, Jacob Emden's Mitpaḥat Sefarim among them. The ban was contested and ineffective: even opponents of the Dardaʿim did not observe it, and went on intermarrying and praying together. And "Milḥamot ha-Shem, 1931" is the year of printing, not of writing: it was begun in 1914.

One thing he did apart from the polemic, and which outlived it: he preserved the Yemenite manuscripts of Maimonides. It was from them that his grandson, Rabbi Yosef Qāfiḥ, later edited the whole Maimonidean corpus—and that proved to be the most durable consequence of the entire controversy.