נתנאל בן ישעיה

Rabbeinu Netanel ben Yeshaya (first half of the fourteenth century) was among the earliest of the great chachamim of Yemen whose works reached us — a commentator on the Torah and on halachah whose Meor HaAfelah is a crown of Yemenite Torah. He began the work — in Arabic, Nur al-Zulam, “Light out of Darkness” — on 15 Tammuz of the year 1640 of the Seleucid count (5089/1328), writing in the mixture of Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew of the Yemenite batei medrash.

The commentary is a treasury of the ancient midrashic literature, in which Yemen was uniquely rich, ordered on the parshiyot with a clear eye and a straight derech. Its spine is the school of the Rambam — the paramount authority of Yemen, whom he quotes at length — yet he weaves in the machshavah of Rav Yehuda HaLevi and the Ramban as well, and tells the reader in his introduction that he has written for every level: matters for the many, matters for the wise, and matters that he who cannot receive them may treat as unwritten. He adorned the work with diagrams — the Mearat HaMachpelah, the mizbeach, the menorah — and set three of his Hebrew poems within it.

He wrote as well a commentary on the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, tracing its sources in the two Talmuds and opening its difficult passages — a work learned in the batei medrash of Sanaa nearly to the last generation of the exile of Yemen. It was the traveler Rav Yaakov Sapir who first told the world of the Meor HaAfelah, having seen a manuscript in Yemen in 1863 — “the sefer is held by them pure and holy,” he wrote, “and I could not obtain it”; a century later Rav Yosef Kafach printed it in the original with translation, and with that, the “light came out of the darkness” for all (מאור האפלה).