The Yemenite Jews comprise a community who were either born in Yemen (the south-western corner of the Arabian peninsula), or who are the progeny of emigrants from Yemen. Some highlights of Yemenite Jewish history will demonstrate that the Jews adjusted to life with their Muslim oppressors, even retaining their autonomy. In addition, ethnography, or community study, will convey some of the history, social life, activities, values, and ideals of a remarkable group whose contributions and particularities have made them highly visible. We will consider the role of ethnicity, behavior and sentiment based upon membership in ethnic categories and groups, and its importance to Yemenite integration in Israel. Diaspora should be a subject of history only, as all Jewish groups become integrated and united on the basis of equality, a true "mizug galuyot," or "fusion of the exiles," as Israel's leaders have called it. We will conclude with an examination of the way in which the Yemenites will need to adapt to a more modern existence, while still retaining a rich African and Asian heritage which sets them apart from their more European and American Jewish counterparts. Of all the Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world in 1948, those of Yemen and Habban were certainly among the most remote. They were isolated from all other Jewish communities, those of the Mediterranean, Iraq, and Iran as well as Europe. The Jews of Yemen lived in a country which, like Tibet and Ethiopia, was physically inaccessible, largely closed to outsiders by religious and physical barriers, and, for much of its history, off the main lines of international relations and commerce.
Prior to the 1949 and 1950 immigration of Yemenite Jews to Israel, the Jews lived in relative isolation from the predominant Muslim population. Because they existed in such an insulated pocket of Judaism, the Yemenite Jews, more than any other Jewish group, had preserved rabbi...