Yosef Qafih

Yosef Qafiḥ (יוסף קאפח, يوسف القافح), widely known as Rabbi Yosef Kapach (27 November 1917 – 21 July 2000), was a Yemenite-Israeli authority on Jewish religious law (halakha), a dayan of the Supreme Rabbinical Court in Israel, and one of the foremost leaders of the Yemenite Jewish community in Israel, where he was sought after by non-Yemenites as well.

He is widely known for his editions and translations of the works of Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, and other early rabbinic authorities (Rishonim), particularly his restoration of the Mishneh Torah from old Yemenite manuscripts and his accompanying commentary culled from close to 300 additional commentators and with original insights.

He was the grandson of Rabbi Yiḥyah Qafiḥ, a prominent Yemenite leader and founder of the Dor Deah movement in Yemen.

Qafih was the recipient of many awards, as well as an Honorary Doctorate from Bar-Ilan University.

Yosef Qafiḥ was born 27 November 1917 in Sana'a in Yemen.

His father was Rabbi David Qafiḥ, who died after being assaulted by an Arab man, when his son Yosef was less than one year old.

At the age of five, Yosef also lost his mother and was raised by his grandfather Rabbi Yiḥyah Qafiḥ, under whom he studied Torah.

In 1927, Yosef helped his grandfather retrieve the oldest complete Mishnah commentary from the Jewish community's genizah in Sana'a, containing Rabbi Nathan Ben Abraham's elucidation of difficult words and passages in the Mishnah.

Rabbi Yosef Qafih, recalling the event, describes it as follows: "There is a custom had among most of the people who assume oversight over the synagogues in Yemen that any book that has become worn-out or become very old they'd store it away in the vault situated beneath the hekhal (Ark) and this is its genizah. From time to time, when a sufficient quantity of books, fragments of books, pages and worn-out leaves [of books] has been amassed there, they collect them, place them inside earthenware jars and bury them in the cemetery, near one of the righteous men, and occasionally there are buried books, pages and leaves of valuable worth, which the same person who is meant to oversee [the affairs of the synagogue] has not fully appreciated their worth. To our happiness, many times the grave diggers are too lazy to dig deep, well beneath the earth. Wherefore, occasionally, after the rainy season, especially in the years that are blessed with plenty of rain, the heads of these jars are exposed because of rain erosion, where it eroded and made thin the upper layer of earth.

My grandfather who is now deceased, the Rabbi Yihya Qafih, of blessed memory, would complain about the overseers of the synagogues and reprimand them over burying in the genizah things which contain pearls of great beneficial use, and of invaluable worth, without allowing for a man who is more adept [than he] and who knows how to examine them first and to determine what is worthy of being buried and what is still worthy of being used by the coming generations, so as to give some merit to the congregation.

He commanded one of the caretakers of the cemetery that, in the event that the heads of the jars such as these should ever be exposed, he was to inform him, before he proceeded to dig deeper in order to bury them once more.

I remember when I was about ten years old, the man came to inform my grandfather, of blessed memory, that such [a jar] that had been buried was now exposed.

I remember that it was on a Thursday, before nightfall.

On the next day, on Friday morning, my grandfather took me with him, and we went out together to the place of the genizah, according to where the informant had directed us.

Now since my grandfather, of blessed memory, was already old, above eighty years in age, and it was difficult for him to bend down, I was the one who took out books and fragments of books, and ordinary pages that were wet and moldy, dusty and muddy, both hand-written manuscripts and printed texts; my grandfather, of blessed memory, sitting throughout all this time upon a stone, examining them and sorting them, one by one, until the early afternoon, and then we returned the rest inside the jar and covered it up.

We took with us what we had sorted and returned to the city.

At the departing of the Sabbath, my grandfather sat down to sort through his spoils, to take-apart the pages [of books] that had already stuck together because of the wetness from the rains that had penetrated within the jar.

In this genizah we found hand-written pages from the Babylonian Talmud, and also fragments from Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, from Mishnah commentaries, from the commentaries of Rabbi Saadia Gaon, from the Midrash Hagadol, and many more.

Whatsoever our hook brought up on that blessed day is today in my possession.

Some of them still show upon them the vestiges of the soil and clay to this very day.

Among the spoils, we found an old hand-written book, the majority of whose pages were already sticking together, clumps upon clumps.

My grandfather sat a long time, slowly soaking them in water and with great patience, after he had checked and saw to his satisfaction that the letters were not being erased by soaking them in water.

I still remember how the pages were strewn across the entire room of my grandfather's workshop, of blessed memory, so that they could dry.

After drying and arranging the pages, it was clear that this was the very Mishnah commentary which we now present before our readers.

This book was the only surviving sort of its kind in the world, which, had it not been for this action, it would have been lost to the world.

In 1943 he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he studied at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva and qualified as a dayan at the Harry Fischel Institute.

In 1950 he was appointed as a dayan (rabbinic judge) in the Jerusalem district court.

The book was missing a few pages, in the Order known as Moed, at the introduction to Tractate Shabbat, it was missing perhaps one page, and in Tractate Pesahim it was again missing perhaps one page, as also in Tractate Yoma it was missing perhaps one page, but the remainder of the book, to our delight, was found altogether complete, from beginning to end" (Six Orders of the Mishnah - Commentaries of the Rishonim, vol. 1, pub. El ha-Meqorot: Jerusalem 1955, s.v. Appendix: Perush Shishah Sidrei Mishnah [Introduction], p. 6). The commentary was later published in Israel. (Young children in Yemen were often employed as copyists of ancient manuscripts.) At the age of thirteen, Yosef wrote out a complete copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed in Judeo-Arabic.

When Yosef was 14, his grandfather died.

When he and two of his acquaintances went to visit the burial-site of Yosef's grandfather, and then his father, they were accused of having burnt the grave of his grandfather's chief disputant, and were arrested and held in bonds.

Because of the rift in the community between those who adhered to kabbalah and the rationalists, the two informers told the Arab authority about the young Yosef being a Jewish orphan, and that under the laws of the state's Orphans' Decree he was required to be taken under the arms of the Islamic State and converted to Islam.

The child was questioned about his father and upon the realization that his forced conversion to Islam was the informants' intent–with the arson accusation being a means to render him vulnerable to Muslim authority and attention–he did not answer his interrogator, and was released by the prison authority for no explained reason.

The Imam, Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din, urgently requested that they find him a bride to bypass forced conversion to Islam as an orphaned child.

Rabbi Yihye al-Abyadh (the king's physician) arranged for Yosef's marriage to Bracha Saleh (Tzadok) in the same year of his grandfather's passing.

In his early years, he worked as a silversmith.

After Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was invited to serve on the Jerusalem beth din in 1958, in addition to Rabbi Qafih and Rabbi Waldenberg, rabbis Qafih and Yosef together would constitute a non-Ashkenazic majority in the beit din of three.

In 1970, Qafih was appointed as a dayan in the Supreme Rabbinical Court.

Throughout the course of more than half a century, numerous rabbis sat on various rabbinical courts with him, including Rabbis Tzvi Pesach Frank, Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, Ovadia Yosef, Avraham Shapira, Mordechai Eliyahu, and the Tzitz Eliezer.

Rabbi Yosef Qafiḥ was a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council of Israel and president of the Yemenite community in Jerusalem.

He died on 21 July 2000 at the age of 82, and is buried in Jerusalem's Har HaMenuchot cemetery.