Y. Tzvi Langermann "Mori YusuP: Rabbi YosefKafah (Qãfih) (1917-2000) On July 20, 2000- the night following the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz- the Jewish world lost one of its outstanding personalities, RabbiYosef Kafah. "Mori Yusuf," as he was called by his students, was bornin San'a in 1917. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by his grandfather, Rabbi Yihye Kafah (Qãfih), a great scholarin his own right, most famous for his ultimately unsuccessful campaign to dislodge the Kabbalah from the faith and practice ofhis coreligionists. Rav Yosef began copying manuscripts in early childhood; he showedme one text that he copied whenhe was aboutsix years old. A meticulous scholar with wide-ranging knowledge, an independently minded thinker, and the possessor ofa very intimate knowledge oftraditional Jewish sources and the Arabic language, Rav Yosef was to make a monumental contribution to Jewish studiesin several areas, of which the most important are the thought and writings of Maimonides; the literary output of Saadia Gaon; and the relatively large corpus of medieval Yemeni philosophical texts. Ptolemaic astronomy in itsmedieval Arabic elaborations remained a living tradition in theYemen wellintothesecondhalf of thetwentieth century. Rav Yosefstudied astronomy witha Muslim by thenameof Lutf Hamza; he described this experience in a brief notein Kiryat Sefer, in which he corrected someof theentries in Y. Ratzaby's bibliography Aleph 1 (2001) 333 This content downloaded from 83.137.211.198 on Wed, 25 Feb 2015 05:18:32 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions