What caused the exodus of Jews from Yemen?

In the early 1950s some 50,000 Jews - almost the entire community - left Yemen for Israel 'on the wings of eagles'. What made them decide to leave? The biggest single factor behind the exodus of Jews from Yemen was the forced conversion of orphans to Islam.

Such is the conclusion reached by the eminent scholar Professor SD Goitein, in his book Jews and Arabs (1955).

When a Jewish father died leaving young children - an extremely common occurrence because of the high mortality rate - the family or the community tried to avert disaster by transporting the children to another town where they passed as the children of relatives. Goitein recounts the case of a particularly wealthy and pious man in Lower Yemen who always had 18 children, and not always the same children. Their only common feature was that none was his own child!

According to Goitein,the efforts of family or friends to hide the children were not always successful. Sometimes they were denounced by their own people. The result was that many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them.

The practice of converting orphans was a religious obligation among the Yemenite Muslims in the centre of the country, sectarian Shi'ites. Jewish converts in the orphanages were often trained as professional soldiers, in the same way as forced converts from Christianity were a ready source of crack Janissary troops for the Ottoman Turks. A female convert was a particularly attractive bargain in marriage - especially if she was intelligent and pretty - as, thus severed from her relatives, she did not carry a ' bride price'.


Under Islam the Jews were subject to discriminatory laws, but Goitein maintains these were socio-religious, not economic in nature. A wider range of trades was open to Jews in Yemen than to Jews in Christian Europe. But the Sh'ites in Yemen were particularly legalistic. As in Iran, any dishes touched by non-Muslims become unclean; the travelling Jewish salesman would carry his own coffee cup.

As a result of persecution, the Jews lived in separate villages or quarters. They had been expelled in 1679 from San'a but were forced to resettle outside the city when recalled. The site of the ancient Jewish quarters inside San'a is still known because the architecture of Jewish town houses was different. The synagogue became a mosque and is still known as Masjid al-Jala (Mosque of the Expulsion).

It is untrue that Yemenite Jews were not allowed to own property, but as 'protected' people under Islamic law they had to forfeit it all if they left the country. This prohibition was not a response to Zionism but predated the Balfour Declaration by many years. The Jews were not the only ones wishing to leave Yemen. About three million Muslims were said to have emigrated by 1949.