David Saliman Tsemah

The Hebrew poet David Saliman Tsemah was born and educated in Baghdad, where he studied at both a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and a modern yeshiva. He worked as a dealer in books and manuscripts, a rabbi, and a mohel. He wrote poetry (much of it in medieval Hebrew meter) and published scholarly articles on medieval Spanish Hebrew poetry. He also published Judeo-Arabic collections of fables, proverbs, and poems. He visited Mandate Palestine twice: in 1932, when he became friendly with Bialik, and in 1935, when he worked with David Yellin on an edition of the work of the medieval Spanish mystic Todros Abulafia. In 1949, when the status of Iraqi Jewry deteriorated, he settled in Israel. He was the first poet of Mizrahi origin to protest the treatment of immigrants from Arab lands.