David Semah

This book on the subject of love which David Semah began writing was based on the works of al-Shayzari and completed and published after his death by Prof. George Kanazi in 2003. It’s based on a manuscript by 12th century scholar 'Abd al-Rahman al-Shayzari: author, poet and physician from the Syrian city of Shaizar, who was also a qadi and served as a judge in the city of Tiberias. Other than that, very little is known about his life story. The book includes poems, anecdotes about lovers and commentary by al-Shayzari himself, presenting the theme of love as reflected in the culture, literature, and Arabic poetry of that era. The 11-chapter book contains descriptions and explanations of the different types of love, their various levels of manifestation and homosexual love. According to al-Shayzari, love is a disease that can be cured in most cases, and as was customary at the time, the theoretical discussions in the book are written in rhyme. In addition to this book, Abd al-Rahman al-Shayzari wrote six other books on love (listed and reviewed in the book's foreword) that David Semah tried to trace in order to gather further information that would complete the picture in terms of al-Shayzari’s biography and works. Writing the book required restoring and deciphering various copies of al-Shayzari’s manuscript, the main ones found at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and another copy at the Majlis Library in Tehran. David Semah got his hands on these two complementary manuscripts back in the 1970s. After completing as many missing or illegible passages of text as possible, and defining the rhythms of the poems, he published several articles on the subject, including:

Upon his return to Israel in 1969, he joined the department's faculty and held several academic and administrative positions in the department, the university, and other research and academic institutions in Israel. In the early 1970s, he was appointed Head of the Department and also lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and the Yezreel Valley College. He served as the teachers’ representative at the University of Haifa’s Board of Governors, was a member of the Committee of Instruction of the Faculty of Humanities, member of the University Senate and member of the Graduate Studies Council. In 1975–1977, he served as the academic director of Tel-Hai College and took park in the founding of its Department of Arabic Language and Literature. In 1984 he was appointed full professor and in 1986–1990 he was a member of the Council of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo. He served on the editorial board of the journals, Asian and African Studies, and Al-Karmil. Semah died in Haifa on April 29, 1997, leaving behind his wife and three children.

Between ʿAbd Allah and ʿAbd al-Masih, al-Karmil - Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, Vol. XVI, Haifa (1995): 55-65 (Arabic)

In 1980, together with Prof. George J. Kanazi he co-founded the Al-Karmil scientific journal, which was published by the University of Haifa. He served as the editor-in-chief since its founding and until 1989, and continued to serve on the editorial board until his death. This journal, where Semah published articles and reviews, was devoted entirely to studies in the field of Arabic language and literature (classical and modern alike) and was the first in the Western world to publish articles in Arabic. This journal also set a precedent by separating the study of the Arabic language from other topics related to Oriental studies such as history, sociology, and anthropology. This separation was necessary in light of the changes that occurred in universities in Israel, with special departments of Arabic language and literature established separately from the departments of Middle Eastern studies. This journal, which gained prominence among the family of scientific journals in Israel and around the world, publishes articles by some of the best researchers in the field.

Rawdat al-Qulub by al-Shayzari: A Twelfth Century Book on Love", Arabica Vol. XXIV/2 (1977): 58-68

In the years 1960–1965, while working as a translator at the Ministry of Justice, Semah turned to academic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. There he completed a bachelor's degree in Arabic Language and Literature and Middle Eastern history, and a master's degree in 1965 under the guidance of Professor Kister. His thesis focused on the works of Abu Ali al-Muḥassin Al-Tanukhi, “Al-Faraj baʿd al-shiddah” (Deliverance Follows Adversity), and was later presented to the public at the National Library in Jerusalem. In 1966, after taking part in the Concordance Project for Arabic Poetry and working as an Arabic teacher, he was sent on behalf of the Haifa Academic Institute (later named the University of Haifa) to Oxford University in England to pursue his doctoral studies. After graduation, he was intended to help establish the Department of Arabic Language and Literature in Haifa and become a faculty member. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, Four Egyptian Literary Critics, under the auspices of Egyptian scholar Professor Mustafa Badawi on the teachings of four Egyptian literary critics: al-Aqqad, Hussein Heikal, Taha Hussein, Muhammad Mandur. This work was widely acclaimed and published in 1974 by Brill Publishers in the Netherlands (Leiden) as a textbook on modern Egyptian literature, serving as the basis for research papers on Arabic literary critique.

Semah continued to write poems in Arabic in his early days in Israel, some of which were recited on the radio and published in the local Arabic and Hebrew press after translation. He was among the first Jewish writers to publish works in Arabic and was labeled by some as one of the most prolific writers of Arabic poetry in Israel’s early years. He also published articles on Arab culture and literature. In 1954 in Tel Aviv, together with fellow literary enthusiasts and some childhood friends including Professor Sasson Somekh, Professor Shimon Ballas and author Sami Michael, he founded the Arab Literary Club, later named the "Jewish-Arab Literary Club". One of the club’s stated goals was to promote understanding between the two peoples and encourage translations and dialogue between writers working in the two languages. In 1959 he published his book "Hatta Yaji al Rabīʿah" ("Until Spring Comes"), featuring a selection of poems, most of which he wrote in his youth. The book generated much excitement and made a big impact on the Arabic cultural community in Israel.

David Semah was born in Baghdad into a secular Jewish family. His father was a senior official in the State Comptroller's Office of the Iraqi government. He initially attended the "Alliance" School, and upon graduating from the "Shamash" Jewish High School, he immigrated to Israel in 1950 as part of the "Illegal Aliyah" (Illegal Immigration), secretly crossing the border into Iran where he stayed for several weeks. His family joined him a few months later as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Already as a teenager, he wrote prose and poetry and even published some of his works in the local press. He was particularly versed in the theory of metrics and Classical Arabic. He wrote a collection of poems during high school and was about to publish it as a book, but eventually shelved it due to the political tension and the sensitive situation Iraqi Jews faced after the establishment of the State of Israel.

David Semah (September 4, 1932 – April 29, 1997) was an Israeli scholar of Arabic literature in Israel, and a professor at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. As one of the founders, he remained closely involved in the Department's activities from its establishment in the mid-1960s and until his death.

The research topics he studied and the subjects he taught spanned over many fields. He engaged with both modern and classical literature, specialized in past and present literary criticism, studied modern Egyptian literature, and focused on the works of Egyptian writers Tawfiq al-Hakim (the great Arab playwright of his time [1900–1987] whom he met in Cairo after the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt), Taha Hussein, Ahmad Amin, and the poet Al-Mutanabbi. He taught Sufi and Jahili poetry, studied the meters of classical poetry, the relationship between the meters of Arabic and Hebrew poetry in Spain and the meters of Bedouin poetry. Semah often focused on literature and poems revolving the theme of love, and over the years he also explored medieval Arabic culture and literature, the prosody of Classical Arabic poetry from which medieval Hebrew poetry branched, and classical Arab Muwashshah poetry. He also specialized in deciphering texts from ancient manuscripts. In 1993 he wrote the entry "Arabic Prosody" in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and in 1995 he published his book Karmilliyat - Studies on Forms and Metrics in Arabic Poetry, which mainly discusses problems of style, structure and metrics in Arabic poetry, both written in classical language and the kind used in popular dialects.