Rabbi Abraham Ariyas (Arias) was a poet and musician in nineteenth-century Izmir (Smyrna). He was a contemporary of the Jewish composer Shem Ṭov Shikar, and a colleague of Rabbi Abraham Pallache (1809–1899). According to early-twentieth-century historians of the Sephardic world, he wrote eighty pizmonim (hymns) and piyyuṭim (paraliturgical religious poems), including sections of the mafṭirim tradition of Ottoman Turkey. Abraham Ariyas, not to be confused with his relative Behor Arias, chief rabbi of Izmir in 1915, was admired not only by Jews but by music-minded…