Frajī (Farajī) Shawwāṭ was born in Fez in the second half of the sixteenth century. Like a number of other Moroccan rabbis, he migrated to Beja in Tunisia. He holds a unique place among the poets of Tunisia and certainly was that country’s finest Hebrew poet. His poetry was loved and distributed widely in Tunisia and throughout North Africa.

The great majority of Shawwāṭ’s piyyuṭim (liturgical poems) deal with the theme of exile and redemption, a subject so central to his thought that poems on other topics make up only a sixth part of his oeuvre, and even th…