At a Yemenite synagogue in Jerusalem, a group of men sit down at 5:30 every Saturday morning to study the weekly Torah portion. The custom is hardly extraordinary; but the curriculum is.
They begin, commonly enough, by reading a verse from the Hebrew text. This they follow by its Aramaic translation—also a not uncommon practice, dating back to talmudic times. But then they read the Arabic translation, in the Judeo-Arabic version—that is, Arabic written in Hebrew characters—composed in the ninth century by the Babylonian sage Saadia Gaon.
Why? Because such is the multilingual Jewish tradition of Sanaa (in Hebrew, Tzanaa), the ancient capital of Yemen. Committed to maintaining a precise knowledge of correct Hebrew pronunciation, a superior command of Aramaic, and a connection to classical Arabic, it is a tradition grounded in the rationalistic interpretation of Judaism that emerged in the Judeo-Arabic milieu of the Middle Ages, articulated preeminently in two canonical sources: Saadia's Book of Beliefs and Opinions and Moses Maimonides' 12th-century Guide of the Perplexed.
Rational religion often means lukewarm religion. Not in this case: the Jews of Tzanaa can be intensely pious. But their piety is powered by fidelity to the way of their rationalist forefathers. In the early 20th century, a zealous wing of the community even went so far as to condemn the Zohar—the central text of Jewish mysticism—as an idolatrous deviation from the true faith. If you look hard enough today, you can still find Yemenite Jews in Israel who remain firm in their anti-kabbalism.
But the community is not just a curiosity. In the figure of Yosef Kapach, Tzanaa Jewry produced one of the outstanding rabbinic scholars of the 20th century. Born in 1917, Rabbi Kapach moved to Israel in 1943, where he died in 2000. Over the course of an active career—in 1950, thanks to his prodigious scholarship, he was appointed a religious judge—he single-handedly prepared an edition of Maimonides' legal code, the Mishneh Torah, and translated the classics of the Judeo-Arabic rationalist tradition into a rabbinic-inflected modern Hebrew. In so doing, he bucked the anti-philosophical trend that has afflicted the Orthodox establishment for much of the 20th century and into our own. Believing, in true Tzanaa fashion, that his way was both old and good, he wrote boldly that Saadia and Maimonides "considered what today is referred to as 'Jewish Thought' to be the foundation of the foundations of the Torah."
Today you can visit Rabbi Kapach's Jerusalem office where, according to his son, nothing has been moved since his death. Hanging on the wall is an engraved photo of Yehiya Kapach, the rabbi's scholarly grandfather. The old gentleman is wearing an open, full-length Arab-style jalabiya, a talit, and a turban, while on the table behind him and to his left lie various scientific instruments—an image, in short, of the classical commitment to both reason and revelation that predates modern hyphenated syntheses.
Will the Jewish tradition of Tzanaa endure? Certainly not in its pure form: like all the Jewish communities that have moved to the land of Israel, the Tzanaa Jews are becoming part of a re-united people. But Rabbi Kapach's vision will continue to live in the translated classics that line the bookshelves of learned Jews. Despite the steady decrease of knowledgeable Arabic-speakers among them, in 2008 members of the Tzanaa community published a new edition of Saadia's Arabic translation of the Torah, with the Hebrew characters now fully vocalized. Years from now, groups of men—and women, too?—may still be getting together before Sabbath-morning services to learn the Torah in classic Tzanaa fashion.
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