Excerpt from the Introduction for A Vision of Yemen

ḤAYYIM ḤABSHŪSH AND THE EUROPEAN EXPLORERS

Toward the end of 1869, Joseph Halévy arrived in Yemen. To explain his presence, the pale, blond European claimed that he was a rabbi seeking alms for the Jews of Jerusalem. Although he bore impeccable letters of recommendation and demonstrated extreme erudition in Jewish wisdom, many local Jews wondered about his true purpose, on account of his near obsession with Yemen’s ancient, pre-Islamic inscriptions. Because these were commonly used in magic, some suspected him of being a magician, a treasure hunter, or perhaps even a searcher for the lost Israelite tribes.¹ The European soon attracted the attention of Ḥayyim Ḥabshūsh, a young Jewish coppersmith from the city of Ṣanʿāʾ. Interested in magic and already a collector of ancient inscriptions, Ḥabshūsh was eager to learn from an adept and succeeded in gaining employment as Halévy’s guide and assistant. For the better part of a year, the two journeyed across Yemen on a perilous quest to record the stone inscriptions of an ancient civilization. Their partnership kept them alive and ensured that their mission was a success, but their relationship soured and, by the time they returned to Ṣanʿāʾ in 1870, the two were estranged.

After Halévy returned to Europe, Ḥabshūsh attempted to contact him, still hoping to find in him a European friend whose influence could garner support for the Yemeni Jewish community. Halévy, however, did not respond. Ḥabshūsh also tried to contact other Europeans for the same reason and with as little success. Matters might have remained that way had Ḥabshūsh not met another strange traveler in Yemen many years later. Although Ḥabshūsh knew him as an enlightened Muslim jurist with a fascination for Yemen’s pre-Islamic inscriptions, he was in fact another disguised European Jewish orientalist by the name of Eduard Glaser. When Glaser found out that Ḥabshūsh had served as a native guide to Halévy, he became interested in his story and urged him to commit it to paper, even though more than twenty years had passed since the journey. Ḥabshūsh assented, but he had in mind a much grander project than the one suggested by Glaser. He did not want to merely document the course of a scientific inquiry into archaeological ruins; he also wanted to describe Halévy’s introduction to Yemen and its people. And it was not only the European’s physical and intellectual journey that he wanted to recount but also his own. Ḥabshūsh welcomed European involvement in Yemen, even courted it, but he feared that orientalists would depict Yemen in a disdainful way that would not engage European readers’ interest, let alone attract their support. He therefore endeavored to enchant them. He would take the orientalist’s itinerary and build on it, turning it into a real-life tale of derring-do and adventure so as to portray not just a foreigner’s discovery of Yemen but the journey of discovery and self-discovery of a native son. Thus was born Ḥabshūsh’s Vision of Yemen.

A Vision of Yemen is composed of two main features: the cultural landscapes of Yemen and the complex relationship between Ḥabshūsh and Halévy, who navigate those landscapes. Sometimes the cultural landscape is the focus, with the travelers merely serving as a narrative framing device. At other times, Yemen is the background that throws the characters of Ḥabshūsh and Halévy into sharp relief. Whereas students of Yemen, the Middle East, Judaism, and the Ottoman Empire will find much of interest in the work’s descriptions of history and culture, students of orientalism will find themselves drawn primarily to the Ḥabshūsh-Halévy relationship.

A Vision of Yemen is one of the earliest responses by a “native” to the phenomenon now known as orientalism, that is, the characterizations of the East produced by European artists, writers, and scholars.² These characterizations dominated first the European imagination of the foreign world and then, over time, came to greatly influence, if not overwhelm, Easterners’ own self-perceptions. They sometimes also helped to retroactively justify, or to lay the groundwork for, imperialist interference and domination around the world.³Ḥabshūsh perspicaciously understood the danger of imbuing Joseph Halévy, an affiliate of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and later of the Sorbonne, with the power to shape the portrayal of Yemen and Yemeni Jewry for European audiences. He wrote in the hope of rebutting what he anticipated would be Halévy’s negative descriptions of his land. In fact, although Halévy had apparently threatened to write such a description, his writings on contemporary Yemen were quite minimal. In them, he was indeed critical of practices that he viewed as superstitious or intolerant, but he also expressed gratitude to the Jewish community for its hospitality and singled out several individuals for praise.⁴Ḥabshūsh, however, had perceived in Halévy a scorn for the Yemenis and an indifference to their welfare, which he thinly masked with a façade of scholarly disinterestedness.

Ḥabshūsh did not object to foreign depictions of Yemen per se. Quite the contrary, he had a humanist’s faith that to learn about others was to come to love them, to desire to see them prosper, and to relieve their suffering. Ḥabshūsh’s own discovery of what were, in his eyes, the exotic inhabitants of the Yemeni hinterlands awakened in him a profound affection for them, a desire to help them, and, most of all, an urge to tell their stories. His anger at Halévy stemmed from his frustration at what he saw as a breakdown of this humanistic process. Halévy, he writes,

filled the hearts of the inhabitants [of Yemen] with hope when he came to us in 1870, when we were in dire straits and on the point of being annihilated. The people imagined that his arrival and research would bring them the relief from adversity enjoyed by the rest of their coreligionists. They thought that he would strive on their behalf by informing charitable people of their plight in his letters. They did not know that he had already denied them in his heart and that their hopes were in vain.⁵

Ḥabshūsh never claimed to speak for all Yemenis, let alone for all “orientals” subject to increasingly intrusive European scrutiny. A Vision of Yemen is the distinctive product of an unusual author. Ḥabshūsh was a relatively prosperous Jewish man from the populous city of Ṣanʿāʾ who, nonetheless, took an interest in the experiences of individuals outside his community and social group. His Vision of Yemen is a witness to this. In large part it is a social history and ethnography describing a broad cross-section of society, including women, nomads, Muslims from all walks of life, and Europeans. Ḥabshūsh was also a litterateur, interested in playing with genre, language, and narrative. He tells trickster tales, composes desert poetry, and imparts folklore. He puns in both Hebrew and Arabic and peppers his writing with biblical allusions and occasionally Qurʾānic references. In the first part of A Vision of Yemen he experiments with a florid and grandiose style of Hebrew, chockful of allusions; the second part captures the cadences of the spoken registers of Arabic, at a time when the memorialization of dialect was not always considered in good literary taste. Both parts are punctuated with sly humor.

A Vision of Yemen offers a sophisticated exploration and analysis of some of the most sensitive and pressing issues of the period. Ḥabshūsh describes Muslim-Jewish relations, both symbiosis and persecution. He discusses the decidedly mixed blessings brought by Islamic revivals and Ottoman reform initiatives. He addresses the haughty attitudes of “enlightened” European Jews toward Yemeni Jewish customs, particularly ones involving sexuality and superstition. Ḥabshūsh also has his own prejudices. He has no compunction about describing his feelings of revulsion, discomfort, or smugness when he visits foreign and impoverished regions, where he witnesses unhygienic living conditions, or when he meets people whom he regards as simple, boorish, or otherwise shocking. Ḥabshūsh, however, also shows himself to be aware of the moral ambiguity of many of his own and his companions’ actions, particularly where the fine line between self-serving and principled actions is difficult to discern. A Vision of Yemen is thus a thoughtful and self-reflective work that reveals the author’s personality and his attitudes toward the people and societies with whom he comes in contact. Readers will likely find some of these attitudes praiseworthy and others reprehensible.

One of the most dramatic examples of this moral ambiguity appears in a wrenching anecdote featuring a not-at-all theoretical debate about abortion, polygamy, and honor killing.⁶Ḥabshūsh tells of how he and Halévy met an unmarried Jewish girl (bunayyah) who was waiting to be killed by her family for becoming pregnant after a rape. Such killings were not practiced by Ṣanʿānī Jews, but this family lived in Wādī Najrān, now located in Saudi Arabia, where Jewish practices closely mirrored those of local tribes. Ḥabshūsh pitied the girl and offered to perform an abortion so that the family could cover up the rape and allow the girl to live, an offer for which she was immensely grateful. When Halévy learned of this, he accused Ḥabshūsh of wanting to destroy a life and to shed innocent blood. Ḥabshūsh was shocked, for he could not understand to whose life Halévy was referring. When Halévy explained, Ḥabshūsh answered that, as a result of his “Arab upbringing” (tarbiyatī al-ʿarabiyya), he had never learned that destroying a fetus was murder, and he added that abortion was occasionally practiced in his native Ṣanʿāʾ. Persuaded by Halévy’s argument, he did not perform the abortion but instead offered to marry the girl, whom he found very beautiful, and in this way save both her life and the life of her unborn child. At first, the family objects for fear that he will not truly marry her but will instead run off with her and then, when she has no family to protect her, abandon her among strangers. Ḥabshūsh, however, assures them that he intends to be a proper husband. This proposal is happily accepted by all except Halévy, whose anger only worsened.

“Do you not remember,” my teacher angrily retorted, “that you left your house to serve God through our work, and now you want to involve me in other matters. Even if you leave her in the Jawf or elsewhere so that we can finish our travels, what will your family, your brothers, your sons, and your first wife say when you return to your house in Ṣanʿāʾ with a rival wife? Will this affair not be shameful and distressing for them? Will you not be forced to separate, not only from your first wife but also from your children? Will you not embroil your wife and children in conflict because of her? Such grief on her account! And your family will say, ‘This is all the fault of the sage, Joseph Halévy.’ But, oh people of Yemen, if you do not reverse this deed which you think is good but which is evil, I will not curtail my description of your vile deeds, either in the company of honorable people or in my book. I know that there are people among you who marry many women without considering the sin and misfortunes which befall them and their children.”⁷

“How many humiliations and how much cursing I heard,” Ḥabshūsh writes, “until I made up my mind and felt ashamed of myself” and “wholly and utterly abandoned the matter.”⁸ The two travelers depart, and we hear no more about the girl and her fate.

Ḥabshūsh’s story of the girl captures the subtleties involved in the clashing of cultures, both in Yemen and beyond. The Najrānī Jewish family considers killing the girl a requirement of both Jewish and tribal law. Their position does not stem from hostility toward the girl; indeed, their concern for her can be seen in their fear that Ḥabshūsh means to take her and then abandon her without support among strangers. They support the killing because it seems lawful and natural to them, and they are shocked when they are told that Jewish law declares otherwise. How is it possible, they ask, for a good family to raise a bastard in their home? In contrast, the Jew from Ṣanʿāʾ and the Jew from Paris are shocked and horrified at the very notion of honor killing, a practice that they view as immoral, un-Jewish, and uncivilized. However, when an abortion or polygamous marriage is proposed to save the girl’s life, the Najrānī Jews and the Ṣanʿānī Jew rejoice, but the Parisian Jew is horrified at the barbarity and impiety of the proposal. Ḥabshūsh thus shows his readers how cultural clashes are not simply binary. Moreover, although they involve complex ideological issues, they are not immune to personal factors. The debate may have been about religious ethics but, independent of this, Halévy wants his scientific mission to succeed and Ḥabshūsh makes no secret of his attraction to the girl.

A Vision of Yemen is therefore not just about a journey in search of antiquities. It is about the living and breathing societies of Yemen—some Jewish, some Muslim, some urban, and some pastoral. The work abounds with vivid descriptions of daily life, religious customs, and folklore, also providing one of the nineteenth century’s subtlest analyses of Jewish-Muslim relations. Ḥabshūsh’s portrait of his land is executed with great pride but also with honesty. Part travelogue, part anthropological account, part picaresque tale, it has been beloved by audiences both in the Middle East and in the West and has been transliterated into Arabic and translated into French, Hebrew, and Italian.⁹ This translation is its first into English from the original Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic.

Ḥayyim ibn Yaḥyā Ḥabshūsh al-Futayḥī was born in 1839 in Ṣanʿāʾ to a respected family of Yemeni merchants and rabbis. Little is known about his life before his 1869 meeting with Joseph Halévy beyond that he was a coppersmith and was married with at least one child. However, his own narration in A Vision of Yemen gives us some insight into his personality. Ḥabshūsh tells us that, before Halévy’s arrival, he had already developed an interest in collecting pre-Islamic inscriptions, which he refers to as Sheban (Sabaean) or Himyaritic inscriptions. Like many Jews, Ḥabshūsh associated these inscriptions with the biblical kingdom of Sheba (Sabaʾ) and with tales of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Further, he believed them to have magical properties and supposed that Halévy’s interest in them was also connected with magic.¹⁰ When Halévy asked Ḥabshūsh to find and copy down all such inscriptions in Ṣanʿāʾ, Ḥabshūsh was able to do so quickly and with little difficulty because his prior personal interest had already made him familiar with their locations. Moreover, he was happy to copy them, even though this involved spending time in parts of the city where other Jews feared to tarry. When he was indeed confronted by Muslims about his presence there, he glibly improvised a cover story to justify his presence and safely copied the inscriptions.¹¹ Thus, according to his recollections, even before he met Halévy, Ḥabshūsh was a man given to the exploration of places beyond those affiliated with his own Jewish community. Soon after, when Halévy hired Ḥabshūsh to accompany him on a long and perilous trip through eastern Yemen, Ḥabshūsh readily agreed, drawn by both the prospect of being well paid and by “the opportunity to meet our brethren who dwell in the East.”¹² We thus see that he already held certain qualities in common with the European orientalist: an interest in ancient civilizations, few qualms about risking dangerous situations or scruples about bending the truth to get out of them, and a desire to meet the Jews of remote lands.

Despite these preexisting commonalities, Ḥabshūsh describes Halévy’s impact on him as a baptism into new modes of thought, the effects of which remained with him long after the two men parted. Ḥabshūsh would strive to keep up to date with intellectual developments in the European and Ottoman worlds by becoming a regular reader of their Hebrew newspapers. The only photograph of Ḥabshūsh that survives captures him carrying one of these newspapers, and their influence is evident in the European style of Hebrew in which he writes.¹³ Halévy also influenced Ḥabshūsh by persuading him to abandon his belief in astrology, magic, and mysticism and to embrace a rationalistic form of Judaism.¹⁴ As will be explained later, this dichotomy between rationalistic Judaism and its mystical forms had previously existed in the Yemeni Jewish community, but several Jews who had close contact with Halévy and Glaser would imbue this conflict with new meaning by spearheading an intellectual revolution among their coreligionists.

As a result of his encounter with Halévy, Ḥabshūsh’s interest in the magical properties of inscriptions was transformed into a historical interest for the light they shed on the civilizations of the ancient Sabaeans and their successors, the Himyarites. Later, he further broadened this historical interest in another work, Halikhot Tema (The Ways of Yemen), a short collection of writings about Yemeni Jewish history based on both oral sources and a wide assortment of written material. Through friendships with Muslim scholars, Ḥabshūsh gained access to Islamic chronicles housed in the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ that were unavailable to other Jews.¹⁵Halikhot Tema describes centuries of Yemeni Jewish history, including discussions of Jewish messianic activity, the Yemeni adoption of the Sephardic liturgy, and the infamous nineteenth-century anti-Jewish legislation known as the Latrines Edict. It also contains an essay on the plight of elderly Jews and a letter written by the author to a society of London missionaries who were active in Yemen, asking them to stop distributing Bibles to Yemenis and instead to establish vocational schools for them.¹⁶

Ḥayyim Ḥabshūsh. Hibshoosh Family Collection.

In A Vision of YemenḤabshūsh depicts his young self as irrepressible, impetuous, and just a bit self-serving, a necessary defense for a person in a community subject to disempowerment and exploitation. He readily admits that he hoped to be well paid for his assistance to Halévy, that he was offended by his employer’s miserliness and distrust, and that he was not averse to using trickery to gain what he believed he deserved. Although he depicts his older self as wiser and more sedate, the youthful themes resurface in some stories recounted about the older Ḥabshūsh. When, in the late 1880s, a special tax was imposed on the Jews to fund the renovation of the famous landmark gate of Ṣanʿāʾ, the Bāb al-Yaman, Ḥabshūsh was reportedly irritated that Jewish community leaders had not stood up to defend the Jews and negotiate to have the predatory tax lowered. Resolving that at least he would not be one of those to suffer financial loss, he approached the builders and persuaded them that such an important gate would require joints of polished copper. As a coppersmith, the work naturally went to him, and he was able to more than recoup what had been expropriated from him.¹⁷

A hint of Ḥabshūsh’s combination of panache, erudition, and social activism can be seen in an 1875 petition on behalf of Yemeni Jews addressed to the British Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. The petition, which was signed by a wide array of eminent Jews, caught the attention of the philanthropist because it included an unusual signature written in a strange alphabet. His curiosity roused, Montefiore consulted an expert in Semitic languages, who identified the alphabet as ancient Sabaean and deciphered the text: “Ḥayyim Ḥabshūsh, the one who rouses the sleepers of France and awakens the slumberers of Europe,”¹⁸ a phrase adapted from the liturgy of the Jewish morning prayers. By writing in Sabaean characters, Ḥabshūsh demonstrated his command of European turf by showing his comfort in a distinctly European cultural enterprise: the philology of dead languages, an impressive feat for anyone but especially for an “oriental.” By calling to mind a phrase from the morning prayers recited by Jews all over the world, Ḥabshūsh appealed to Montefiore not on European grounds but on the basis of their common Jewish identity, which transcended geographic and cultural boundaries. But his message was a call to a particular form of action: European Jewry must wake up and help out their Yemeni Jewish coreligionists. In the space of a few words, Ḥabshūsh thus effortlessly established himself as a member of the European, the Jewish, and the Yemeni cultural communities.

Ḥabshūsh died in 1899 during a period of great famine and social instability. Over the next half-century the Jewish culture he had devoted so much of his life to defending and chronicling disappeared from Yemen. After his death, battles between local Yemenis and the occupying Ottoman forces resulted in the 1905 Siege of Ṣanʿāʾ, which killed about half the city’s population.¹⁹ The rise of Zionism in Yemen placed further pressure on an already weakened Jewish population. In 1938 Ḥabshūsh’s 60-year-old son Yaḥyā was lynched, stoned to death in Ṣanʿāʾ by a mob inspired by public calls for the shedding of Jewish and Zionist blood.²⁰ Shortly after the establishment of Israel, almost the entire Jewish community of Yemen migrated there.²¹

One result of this dislocation was that Ḥabshūsh’s legacy was taken up decades later by his great-nephew, Yehiel Hibshoosh. Yehiel was born in Ṣanʿāʾ in 1913 and immigrated to Palestine in 1930. There he helped to found Ezrat Aḥim, an organization devoted to assisting the growing numbers of immigrant Yemeni Jews. Yehiel was aware that the culture in which he had been raised stood at risk of being forgotten. He therefore self-published more than twenty books on Yemeni Jews and Judaism, distributing them to libraries around the world. His books include an investigation of religious schisms among Yemeni Jews, a record of a trip he made to Yemen as an elderly man in the 1990s, and even a book of Yemeni Jewish jokes.²²

In his book on the history of his family, Yehiel includes several family stories about the exploits of his great uncle Ḥayyim, many of which are confirmed by other sources. Ḥayyim solves a murder,²³ battles false messiahs,²⁴ and prospects for gold.²⁵ An intrepid debunker of myths, he boldly pursues an alleged Lilith, the evil spirit of the night, to prove her to be a human.²⁶Ḥayyim was also an expert in Islamic and tribal history and was recognized as such by Muslims, with whom he developed close relationships. Supposedly among these was the future ruler of Yemen, Imām Yaḥyā, who remembered Ḥayyim for his great wisdom long after the latter’s death.²⁷Ḥayyim’s fierce independence and intellectual curiosity led some Jews to suspect him of heresy.²⁸Ḥayyim brought Islamic books to the synagogue, which he would quietly read during prayer services, much to the consternation of the congregation.²⁹ He would also sit near the synagogue’s bookshelf so he could easily retrieve fresh titles to stave off boredom. Ḥayyim nonetheless won many Jewish admirers, who eagerly sought out his opinions and sermons. Although Yehiel never met his great uncle and although his style tends toward the hagiographic, the book is colorful and engaging. Ḥayyim’s boundless curiosity, energy, and confidence, already familiar from A Vision of Yemen, shine forth from Yehiel’s book.³⁰

Notes

1. Ḥayyim Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman (Masʿot Ḥabshūsh), ed. S. D. Goitein (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1983), 81; and Joseph Halévy, “Voyage au Nedjran,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris 6 (1873), 249.

2. Few guides wrote about their experiences with orientalists. For some examples, see E. Mittwoch, Aus dem Jemen: Hermann Burchardts letzte Reise durch Südarabien (Leipzig: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1926); Harvey Goldberg, “The Oriental and the Orientalist: The Meeting of Mordecai HaCohen and Nahum Slouschz,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore 22 (2002), 145–57 (Hebrew); and Lucette Valensi, Mardochée Naggiar: Enquête sur un inconnu (Paris: Stock, 2008).

3. On the phenomenon of orientalism in general, see Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xvii–xxxiii.

4. See, for example, Halévy, “Voyage au Nedjran,” 19, 586–87.

5. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, i.

6. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 166–74.

7. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 177.

8. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 177.

9. The Arabic transliteration is Ruʾyat al-yaman bayna Ḥabshūsh wa-Halīfī, ed. S. Naïm Sanbar (Ṣanʿāʾ: Markaz al-buḥūth waʾl-dirāsāt al-yamanī, 1992). The French and Italian editions are Yémen, trans. Samia Naïm Sanbar (Paris: Actes Sud, 1995); and Immagine dello Yemen, trans. Gabriella Moscati Steindler (Naples: Istituto Orientale di Napoli, 1976).

10. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 5, 215. For an overview of these ancient Yemeni civilizations, see Christian Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” in Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 247–334. On the magical properties imputed to these inscriptions, see Esther van Praag, “Introduction to Jewish Silversmiths in Yemen Before Operation ‘On Eagles’ Wings,’” Tema 10 (2007), 97–126.

11. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 7–8.

12. Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 9.

13. S. D. Goitein, The Yemenites: History, Communal Organization, and Spiritual Life, ed. Menahem Ben-Sasson (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1983), 164 (Hebrew).

14. For example, Ḥabshūsh, Ruʾyā al-Yaman, 165–66. A short note, apparently by Ḥabshūsh, endorsing the efficacy of a medical treatment, appears in a composition on practical magic. There is no reason to suppose, however, that the work itself is by Ḥabshūsh, as is assumed in the National Library of Israel catalog; see Segulot ve-Kemeʿot (Nahariya: Menaḥem and Saʿidah Yaʿakov Collection), no. 240, 79b.

15. Ḥayyim Ḥabshūsh, “History of the Jews in Yemen,” ed. Y. Qāfiḥ, Sefunot 2 (1958), 246 (Hebrew). Because Jews were not allowed inside this mosque, it is not clear whether these manuscripts were brought outside for him to read or whether Muslims consulted the manuscripts in the mosque for him and then reported to him on their findings.

16. Yehiel Hibshoosh, The Ḥabshūsh Family (Tel Aviv: Self-published, 1985), 1: 54 (Hebrew); and Yosef Tobi, The Jews of Yemen (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 175.

17. Ḥabshūsh, “History of the Jews,” 247.

18. Meir Ben Isaac Auerbach, An Open Letter Addressed to Sir Moses Montefiore (London: Wertheimer, 1875), 136.

19. Yehuda Nini, The Jews of Yemen, 1800–1914 (New York: Harwood Academic, 1991), 87. Tobi estimates that 90 percent of the city’s Jewish population was killed in the siege; see Y. Tobi, “A Hebrew Chronicle on the Ṣanʿāʾ War Between the Turks and the Yemenis,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 32 (2002), 295.

20. “Yaḥyā Ḥayyim Ḥabshūsh [sic] Murdered in Ṣanʿāʾ,” Davar (April 13, 1938), 6 (Hebrew).

21. On Yemeni immigration to Israel, see Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of Yemen, 1900–1950 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); and Ari Ariel, Jewish-Muslim Relations and Migration from Yemen to Palestine in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

22. These three self-published books are Bidur (Jerusalem, 1998), Shene ha-Meʾorot (Tel Aviv, 1987), and She’erit ha-Peletah be-Teman (Tel Aviv, 1990), respectively.

23. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 33–35, 46–47. This story is confirmed in another source; see Amram Qoraḥ, Se ʿarat Teman (Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1954), 55–57.

24. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 35–36, 45–46, 86–87. Cf. Qoraḥ, Se ʿarat Teman, 53–54.

25. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 41.

26. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 47–48.

27. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 40–41, 48–49.

28. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 26.

29. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 51.

30. Hibshoosh, Ḥabshūsh Family, 1: 33–51.