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Jewish Quarter (Qa Al-Yahud) at Sana'a, Yemen

Description

History of Jews in San'a: The tradition of the Jews of Yemen refers to Sanʿa as resh galut (head of the exile) because it was one of the first places in Yemen in which they settled upon leaving Jerusalem forty years before the destruction of the First Temple (586 B.C.E.) in response to Jeremiah’s prophecies about the impending disaster.2 According to this tradition, they first settled in Barāsh, a fortified town at the top of Jabal Nuqūm 550 meters (1,640 feet) above the city, where Jewish inscriptions dated to 589 B.C.E., and vestiges of a synagogue, as well as two ritual baths have been found.3 The Jews moved down the mount to the qaṣr (citadel) of Sanʿa, the most ancient and higher part of the city, adjacent to the al-qaṭī‘ quarter.3 The citadel is known as qaṣr sām ibn nuḥ (Citadel of Shem son of Noah) because of a Jewish-Muslim tradition that it was built by that biblical figure. The Yemeni chronicler Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. ca. 1068), states that thirty-five of the 1,040 houses in Sanʿa in 991 were occupied by Jews.4

Synagogue: The spiritual center of the Sanʿanī Jewish community was the central synagogue, called the Scholars’ Synagogue, which moved with the Jews from one place to another.5 The old synagogue of Sanʿa was destroyed in 1457 under the rule of Aḥmad 'Amir, the founder of the Dāhirī dynasty, and that the one located in the Sā'ilah was destroyed in 1679.6 This synagogue was later restored as a mosque – Masjid al-Jalā' (the Mosque of the Expulsion).7 The destruction of the synagogue in Sa'ilah was part of the tragic event of Galut Mawza' in which nearly all the Jews of Yemen were expelled from their neighborhoods in cities, towns, and villages to an ancient small town in the west of Yemen, not far from the port town of Mokha, as a result of the Jewish messianic movement in 1667, when some Jews in Yemen, headed by a Slaymān Jamāl, tried to seize control of Sanʿa from the Muslim governor in the Qasr, and were aggressively punished, losing their right to live as dhimmis (a protected community) under the Zaydi imamate, and their explusion from Yemen was ordered by Imām al-Mutawakkil Ismā'īl.8 When the expulsion edict was canceled in 1681, the Jews of Sanʿa were not allowed to return to their neighborhoods and houses within the city walls and had to build themselves new houses outside the city, close to the Muslim garden neighborhood of Bīr al-'Azab.9 This new Jewish neighborhood was called Qā' al-Yahūd (the valley of the Jews), which for almost 140 years was completely exposed to assaults of the tribal warriors, until Qā' al-Yahūd was finally annexed to the city by a protective wall in 1818.10 

Qā' al-Yahūd (Valley of the Jews): The houses in Qā' al-Yahūd were small and poor, no more than two stories high in accordance with the humiliating anti-Jewish regulations, and the streets very narrow and unpleasant. During the years of chaos in the 19th century, most of the houses were abandoned by the Jews, who moved to the periphery.¹¹ But following the Turkish occupation in 1872, the Jewish neighborhood was populated and, in 1876, a new neighborhood, al-Qaryah al-Jadīda, was built south of the old one. During the 1930s and the 1940s, under the rule of Imām Yahyā (1904–1948), Qā 'al-Yahūd became very crowded, with at least 10,000 people, by the influx of Jews who left their places in towns and villages on their way to the Land of Israel or to make a better living.¹² But the in the years immediately following the establishment of Israel, the city was emptied of its Jews, as 49,000 Yemeni Jews, about two-thirds of the community, were airlifted to Israel between 1948 and 1951 in a secret British and American mission dubbed Operation Magic Carpet.¹³

Jews in Yemen Today: Since 2009, 151 Yemenite Jews have been brought to Israel.¹⁴  Today, there are fewer than 90 Jews living in Yemen, behind the walls of a government compound for expats near the U.S. embassy in San'a called Tourist City, cut off from the rest of society, and very little remains of the vibrant community that has lived in the city for so long.¹⁵

San'a, Yemen

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