Yosef Qāfiḥ יוֹסֵף קָאפִח

Born in Sana'a in 1917, died in Jerusalem in 2000. Grandson of Rabbi Yiḥye Qāfiḥ, the founder of Dor Deʿah, and his student.

His work was editorial, and in its consequences it is probably the largest thing to come out of Yemenite Jewry. Qāfiḥ edited the entire Maimonidean corpus—the Mishneh Torah, the Guide of the Perplexed, the Commentary on the Mishnah, the Book of Commandments, the responsa—working from the Yemenite manuscripts his grandfather had preserved and which proved to be the best surviving copies: the Yemenite tradition had copied Maimonides continuously and without European accretions. Each edition came with a Hebrew translation from the Judaeo-Arabic and a critical apparatus. From Yemenite manuscripts he also edited Saadia Gaon, Nethanel al-Fayyūmī's Bustān al-ʿUqūl (Jerusalem, 1954), Ḥovot ha-Levavot and much else, as well as Tiklāl Shivat Ṣiyyon—the Baladi rite corrected back toward Maimonides—and Halikhot Teiman (Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 1961), the classic ethnography of Yemenite practice, without which there is nothing to write the community's daily life from.

In Israel he served as a judge of the Supreme Rabbinical Court and received the Israel Prize in 1969.

Two corrections. The first is simple but worth stating: the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Virtual Library give his dates as "1943–2000," and 1943 is not his year of birth; he was born in 1917. The second matters more: he should not be presented as "the leader of the Dardaʿim." He distanced himself from the polemic over the Zohar and carried on the editorial-Maimonidean project rather than the dispute. That is precisely why his legacy is accepted even by those who disagree with Dor Deʿah: the Maimonidean texts from Yemenite manuscripts are used by everyone today.