Rabbi Salim Shabazi and Sufism: Synthesis or Juxtaposition?

Abstract

In eighteenth-century Yemen, Jews began to write paraliturgical poetry using the Arabic language or alternating stanzas of Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. This form of poetry is identified with one semi-legendary rabbi, Salim Shabazi (1619-c. 1679) and is labeled “Shabazian style” after him. There are two schools of thought in Jewish literary history as to the reasons for the emergence and efflorescence of “Shabazian style” in Yemen. The dominant school of thought holds that Lurianic Kabbalah, which emerged at roughly the same time, was responsible for the innovation, which emerged solely from within Hebrew literature. It has also been argued that the Sufi poetry of the Jews’ Muslim neighbors constituted a much more likely vector of influence for Shabazian poetry. Using a new database consisting of the works of Yemeni Sufi poets and Arabic material from two early Shabazi manuscripts, this chapter addresses the larger question of how the poetry of Shabazi and his successors made use of Sufi concepts, themes, and motifs in order to popularize Kabbalistic-sephirotic concepts. It argues that Shabazi’s poetry does not synthesize particular Sufi and Kabbalistic ideas in a seamless manner but rather that its juxtaposition of, and alternation between, sharply contradictory modes of anthropomorphism provides the momentum for a medium that sought to spread Kabbalistic concepts among Arabophone Jews.