Two Hundred on the Benches

Around 1567 a Yemenite poet and traveller, Zechariah al-Dhahiri, journeyed through the Land of Israel and came to Tzfat. Years later, back in Yemen, he wrote a book in rhymed prose describing his travels — and in it he left us the only eyewitness description of Rabbi Yosef Karo teaching in his beit midrash.

He went, he writes, one Shabbat, to see the great man’s seat of learning. So overawed was he that he sat down by the entrance, beside the doorpost of the gate. Inside, the aged sage sat on a chair and spoke. With his words, al-Dhahiri says, he lifted people out of the burdens of their days and drew them near to God, and clothed them as it were in fine garments, as he expounded the verse “The Torah of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul” — explaining both its plain meaning and its hidden one.

Before him, on benches, sat about two hundred students — “very admirable and distinguished,” in the traveller’s words. When the master finished, he motioned to one of the disciples opposite him to speak. The young man spoke so eloquently, with such convincing arguments about the soul, that the old sage was astonished, and raised him up and honoured him above all the others present.

Al-Dhahiri stayed a while longer, until the master signalled to his students to rise, and gave each of them a Mishnah to learn. And so they went their ways.

This is the hall you stand in when you visit. The benches are different, the walls have been rebuilt; but this is where the two hundred sat.