"In 1922, four years after the Zaydi dynasty known for its long legacy of anti-Jewish edicts resumed the throne, the government of Yemen reintroduced the medieval Islamic law requiring Jewish orphans under age 12 to be forcibly converted to Islam (gezeirat ha-yitomim) [known as the Yemenite Orphans Decree]. Haybi captures one such unfortunate child, earlocks shorn, surrounded by his Muslim guards. (Ironically, the traditional Jewish practice of wearing earlocks, or pe’ot, was forced upon Jewish men as an act of humiliation, because they were regarded as effeminate.)
In another, Jewish men are seen engaged in the demeaning task of disposing of animal carcasses outside the city walls. Vultures crowd the foreground of the picture frame, flapping their wings and kicking up the dust, adding to the sense of filth and abasement. In a kind of topographical palimpsest that may have been a tribute to the community’s tragic past, Haybi even photographed the dry Al-Sayileh riverbed where Sana’a’s Jews lived until their expulsion in 1679 [known as the Mawza exile]. Upon their return a year later they were confined to a swampy area of the city where they constructed the Jewish ghetto."
Excerpt from Available Light: Pictures from Yemen
Describing Scenes of Sana’a: Yihye Haybi’s Photographs from Yemen, 1930–44.
My partner's Saba (grandfather) was one of such children. After his father died his mother was forced to remarry to another Jew within less than a week, she would otherwise have been forcefully concerted to Islam and forced to marry a Muslim Arab. Also her children were to be converted. Converting a Muslim was punished by death but forcefully converting Jews was commonplace. Children who were fully orphaned were abducted and given to Muslim families and forcefully assimilated.
Shalom Shabazi, a famous Jewish poet in Yemen wrote in the 17th century about Muslim Arabs in Yemen abducting Jewish orphans:
"Thousands of orphaned souls, both boys and girls, were wrested from the arms of their parents, grandfather and grandmother, by force by the nations all the days of the many kings of Yemen."
Jewish orphaned children in Yemen were thus often quickly hidden away with other families to save them from this fate of cultural genocide.
No Jews are known to remain in Yemen today except for Levi Marhabi, who is held hostage by the Houthis since 2016. All the remainder were forced to flee or were forcefully deported. All were dispossessed.
The cultural loss of Jews of the Arab & Muslim world is immeasurable. Their disaster was never recognized, their histories denied. No refugee agency was created for them, no meetings were held on the world stage to discuss their ordeal.
The properties seized from them total around $ 250 billion USD. The land dispossessed from them totals to around 100,000 km² (about 10 million hectares) or around 4.5 times the size of the entire modern state of Israel.
We can never undo what was done but we need to acknowledge their tragedy.
