nical Judaism, that is, the laws and practices of Judaism as established by the rabbis in the post-Biblical era, especially in the centuries immediately before and after the opening of the Christian era.
In their purest state of isolation, the Yemenite Jews lived life according to the Jewish ritual cycle--six days of work, and the seventh, the sabbath ("shabbat"), was observed as the day of rest. The Yemenite Jews were able to read the Torah also. In a world without modern education, where most of their Muslim neighbors were illiterate, most Jewish men were literate in Hebrew. In fact, "if a man was not able to read the Torah and was not fully conversant with the book-bound Jewish prayer services, which must be recited word for word in Hebrew, it was a sign of extreme poverty and the inability of a father to educate his son, or of some other extraordinary problem . . . in effect, the men were walking books."
For men the center of the community was the synagogue, and here they spent much of their spare time, as well as their sabbaths, in prayer and study. The Jews in their communities had a degree of local independence in the running of their own affairs, "although they were subject to more powerful outside authorities, such as local sheikhs and tribal leaders, the imam's agents, Turkish officials during periods of Ottoman rule, and the "sada" (sayyids), much of the time they could take care of their own internal affairs with their own leadership."
The extent to which the Jews were left in peace is another question, however. "It is not possible to generalize about the circumstances and conditions of the Jews over a period of almost two thousand years, and throughout the whole country of Yemen." Even so, there were favorable periods of isolation, but many more unstable periods when Jews were attacked, robbed, deprived of property rights, and made to suffer in a variety of ways. Officially the imam was their protector...