The Torah Atlas

person · P0300

Shalom Shabazi רבי שלום שבזי

The poet of Teiman: liturgist, kabbalist, and folk-saint whose diwan of hundreds of poems — in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic — is the living songbook of Yemenite Jewry to this day. He lived through the Mawza exile of 1679 and gave the catastrophe its lament. No teacher of his is attested; his formation is drawn from the Yemenite written canon, at whose center the community placed the Rambam's Mishneh Torah.

I. Who

Hebrew
רבי שלום שבזי
Also known as
Shalem Shabazi, Abba Sholem Shabazi, Salim al-Shabazi
Era
acharonim

II. When

Traditional
5379 – c. 5480 AM
Academic
1619 – c. 1720 CE (death date uncertain; some sources place it decades earlier)
Lifespan (traditional)
≈101 years
Precision
approximate

III. Where

Places
Ta'izz

V. How do we know

ClaimEvidenceConfidenceSources
He is the preeminent poet of Yemenite Jewry: some 550 poems of his diwan survive, in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Aramaic, and they remain the core of Yemenite song and liturgy. tradition external ★★★★☆
He lived through the Mawza exile (1679–1680), in which the Jews of Yemen were expelled to the Tihama lowlands, and his poems lament the expulsion — the community's own record of its darkest hour. tradition external ★★★★☆
His prose anthology Midrash Chemdat Yamim on the Torah weaves together the received written corpus — talmudic and midrashic sources, the Rambam, and kabbalistic literature — the documented textual formation behind the writings-reception edge drawn here; Yemenite tradition as a whole held the Mishneh Torah as its halakhic canon.
No personal teacher of Shabazi is attested, so no received_from edge is drawn; the writings edge to the Mishneh Torah rests on the Yemenite canon and his own compilatory work rather than on a surviving citation-by-citation record.
tradition reconstruction ★★★☆☆
His tomb in Ta'izz was for centuries a pilgrimage site venerated by Jews and Muslims alike. tradition external ★★★★☆