#yemenite jews

[estera-shirin]

Torah case, Yemen ca. 19th century

This Torah case is made of painted wood and brass, crafted in Yemen sometime in the 19th century.

[meshaamem-li]

when you're a millenial but also a yemenite jew:

מלאווח עם אבוקדו 😍😋

[bobemajses]

Jews in Raida, Yemen, 2000. By Doron Bacher.

[safije]

Yemenite Jewish women and girl's traditional headdress

[proudzionist]

[koenji]

A Jewish Yemeni boy pictured outside his home in Raydah, some 70 kilometers north of Sana'a on January 28, 2001.

The last remaining three Jewish families in Yemen were deported by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in 2021, leaving only one Jewish man in the country that once held a diverse and ancient Jewish community. Levi Marhabi, held captive by the Houthis since 2016.

[microwave-gremlin]

You know the drill, reblog for a bigger sample size!

(I'm making versions of this poll for different Jewish diasporas, and I might do a denomination version, too!)

#jupi gets jewish#jumblr#jews#jew#jewish#judaism#polls#tumblr polls#poll#jews of tumblr#mixed jews#mixed#mixed race

[dizajn]

A-WA - "Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman" (Official Video)

[still-searching-for-something]

For the record, Yemenite Jews did not 'migrate,' they were forcibly ethnically cleansed out of a land they had been living in since the 3rd century CE. This crime was perpetrated across the Middle East, in fact, as Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and almost the entirety of North Africa and the Middle East began to introduce new restrictions and anti-Jewish violence against Mizrahi Jews who had lived there for millennia.

Israel was the only place that took them in. If it did not exist, they would have all been murdered with as much barbaric cruelty as the Jews of Europe. Today, one of the last Jews left in Yemen is Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, who is a captive of the Houthis for smuggling out an 800 year old Torah scroll that was in danger of being destroyed by the antisemitic authorities.

Your father is correct @nafricana, Jews were common in Yemen during his childhood, but we did not simply 'migrate.' We were ethnically cleansed. Funny how that gets sanitized by non-Jews so often.

Photographs of the last remaining Jews of Yemen.

There were 55,000 Jews in Yemen in 1948. Today there are fewer than a hundred. The community existed for nearly three thousand years.

[estera-shirin]

A Jewish Yemenite Girl in a Gargush

[weaversweek]

4 "Im nin'alu" - Ofra Haza

writers Shabazy, Rabbi Shalom-Shabazi

When I first plotted out the #UncoolTwo50 bonuses, I was reasonably certain of four of them - the three yet to come, and "Like a prayer". The fifth spot was open. While testing the tunes, I found "Like a prayer" had lost magic, and "Buffalo stance" had more meaning. And that "Im nin'alu" was an under-rated classic that seems to have eluded other commentators.

ELF POINTS - 11 points

Part of the UncoolTwo50 project, marking the best singles from 1977-99.

Ofra Haza was born on 19 November 1957 in Tel Aviv's poor Hatikva Quarter. At the age of 12 she joined a local theatre group where she excelled at acting and singing; she was eventually signed by manager Bezalel Aloni. One of Israel's most popular singers, Ofra had a voice of flawless tone, able to move through many styles; she was regularly described as "The Madonna of the East".

Her second album, Yemenite Songs (later released as Fifty Gates of Wisdom), was a thank you to her family - it's an album of devotional poems and secular street songs passed down from her Yemeni ancestors. Wally Brill, a producer who would later work with Ofra, explained what the album meant: "There has always been a sort of chav culture in Israel. The notion of Ofra becoming this poster girl of world music was surreal. It's on a par with Cheryl Cole deciding that her next album will comprise of Northumbrian fishing shanties."

"Im nin'alu" began as a Hebrew poem written in the 17th-century by Rabbi Shalom Shabazi. The opening line, "Im nin'alu daltei n'divim daltei marom lo nin'alu" translates as "Even if the gates of the rich are closed, the gates of heaven will never be closed". Originally released in Israel on Fled Anita in January '85, the single started to pick up airplay in Europe towards the middle of 1987. Grant Goddard from the Israeli station Kol Hashalom (The Voice Of Peace) started writing letters of recommendation to DJs all over Europe. "I played it heavily in 1985;" says Goddard, "and I was convinced it could have wider appeal."

John Peel played Ofra's later single "Galbi", and delved into her catalogue. Slowly the rest of Europe started tuning into the Haza phenomenon. Several sections of Haza's music were sampled onto other popular house and hip-hop recordings, not least Eric B & Rakim's "Paid in full" and M|A|R|R|S's "Pump up the volume". "Im nin'alu" became the first song primarily in Yemenite to hit the top twenty here.

The combination of traditional Yemeni instruments and Western disco, topped with some very effective scratching, was highly innovative for any recording. Album Shaday has some spectacular reworkings of these traditional folk tunes, married with contemporary-for-1988 dance beats; it's also got some bland pop, so be prepared to skip.

Ofra Haza took part in the Eurovision Song Contest four times, finishing second in 1983. She'd voice Yocheved, the mother of Moses, in 1998 film The Prince of Egypt, and sung the film's big song "Deliver us". It would turn out to be her last big release; Ofra Haza dies of AIDS-related illnesses in February 2000.

The song is just so very different, it's a complete culture shock when it turns up on Top of the Pops, nestled between Debbie Gibson and Scritti Politti. For three minutes, we're taken out of our "May half-term starts tomorrow" reverie, and taken into a world of exotic promise, unfamiliar and somehow we know we'll be safe.

Also… "Im nin'alu" dates to the 17th century, so it's the second-oldest song on my list, younger than "Coisice a ruin" (qv). Debbie Gibson put "Electric youth" into the top 60, I just couldn't find space for this song, however much it defines my generation. Scritti Politti are like the white chocolate Green Gartside loves; fine in small doses, but I can't stand them for long. "Wood beez (pray like Aretha Franklin)" longlisted.

[bobemajses]

Jewish bride and groom after the marriage ceremony. Sana'a, Yemen, 1930s.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

Anti-Zionists are appropriators and con artists par excellence. While insisting that the Jews have no legitimate claim to Israel, they beg, borrow, and steal every vestige of Jewish identity they can in order to whitewash their anti-historical and anti-Jewish invective.

The most pathetic aspect of anti-Zionism is its falsification of Judaism, while simultaneously accusing Zionist Jews of misusing said faith. It's even more pathetic when they resort to citing extremist and fascist Jews like the Neturei Karta, a sect rejected by almost all other Jews. (The Neturei Karta laundered the Jew-hatred of Iran's Ayatollah, visiting him in spite of Iran holding a cartoon contest that mocked the Holocaust.)

The fact that the Jewish religion centres around the fulfillment of religious promises in the Land of Israel obviously decimates anti-Zionist canards, but that doesn't stop these posers from attempting feats of mental gymnastics that would astonish the KGB. Perhaps they just cross out any references to Israel in their prayer books.

Notice that anti-Zionists, including anti-Zionist Jews would never dare to appropriate any feast day from Islam and make it political. Despite the overwhelming number of crimes against humanity committed by extremist Muslims inside and outside of the Middle East, we never hear anti-Zionists inventing an Eid for the sole purpose of condemning Muslim nations.

Nor do they ever decide-- or would ever dare to decide-- that Arab nationalism is invalid on account of the violent history and continued violent and genocidal behaviour of Arab nations such as Syria. This despite the glaring fact that the number of people killed by extremist Arab nationalism and Islamic terrorism far outweighs the number of people killed by Israeli wars and Jewish extremists.

It is this last fact that leads me (and probably others) to believe the hysteria against Israel displayed by Arabs and by Westerners is a concerted effort to deflect attention away from Arab and Muslim terrorism. Because after considering all of Israel's wrongdoing, any objective review of the Middle East could only ever conclude that Islamic terrorism is by far the biggest threat to peace and civilisation. Yet the effort to defeat said terrorism is puerile, while the effort to destroy Israel is monumental.

I suggest that this is all deliberate, and anti-Zionists are the poltroons hired to provide intellectual-sounding justification for Arab and Islamic terror against the Jews. If all the upheaval in the Middle East can be blamed on the Jews for daring to have a homeland and defend it, then everyone can convince themselves that Islamic terrorism is just "cause and effect", rather than a uniquely evil phenomenon that threatens civilisation. Therefore, all one has to do is allow the terrorists to murder the Jews, and the problem all goes away.

To their consternation, millions of Jews have the temerity to refuse to be murdered, and, even more audaciously, to exact punishment upon anyone who does murder them. And whenever Jews are being harassed and abused, anti-Zionists are nowhere to be seen-- unless of course you're looking at a pro-Hamas mob celebrating the slaughter of Jews on October 7, 2023.

Remember that a key pillar of anti-Zionism is that the Jews were living comfortably in other countries, and so had no need to resurrect a Jewish state in British Mandate Palestine. In fact, many Jews in the late 19th century were indeed conflicted about the Zionist movement, with some feeling that resettlement would undermine the rights they had recently obtained in European nations; still others had religious conflicts with the largely secular and atheist advocates of Zionism.

But when almost all Jews in Yemen were expelled by the Houthi terrorist group (with one remaining Jew reportedly in prison), not a single anti-Zionist raised the alarm. Not a single anti-Zionist helped any of those Yemenite Jews, whose presence in Yemen is only around 1000 years younger than the Jewish presence in Israel. Where were they all, exactly?

The same for the persecution of Ethiopian Jews; it was Israel, id est Zionist Jews, that did the rescuing. The anti-Zionists-- who love claiming that they represent "real", or as one Substack user told me, "right-thinking" Jews-- did nothing.

The fact that numerous Yemenite Jews fled to Israel utterly destroys anti-Zionism, and is a point that I have yet to hear any anti-Zionist address.

This may because another pillar within the anti-Zionist movement is their hallucinatory belief that Zionism is a "white colonial settler project". The fact that the Mayor of Jerusalem, Youseff al-Khalidi, acknowledged in 1896 (so long before the British Mandate was established) that nobody could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine because it was 'your country', has to be ignored. The fact that leader of the Arab Revolt Emir Feisal acknowledged the Zionist movement as not only justified, but beneficial to Arab emancipation from colonialism, has to be ignored.

The fact that Jewish attempts to resettle Palestine date back to at least the 16th century also has to be ignored.

The fact that Jews in Europe reserved Hebrew as the language of liturgy, has to be ignored. Many Jews are of European descent, yes. But Hebrew is not a European language. It is a Semitic language, related to Arabic, thus proving that the Jews are Middle Eastern in origin.

Even more devastating to anti-Zionist canards is the fact that for a while, Jews and Syrians spoke the same language, Aramaic. There is a Syrian variety of Aramaic, which, if I am not mistaken, is still spoken today. Meanwhile, Jewish religious texts, including the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and the current Jewish prayer book, all contain portions in Aramaic. This similarity could only be possible if the Jewish connection to Israel exceeds around 2000 years.

Between 50-51% of Israelis today are descendants of immigrants and refugees from neighbouring Middle Eastern and North African nations. Israeli Hebrew favours the Sephardic pronunciation used by Jews in Spain, Portugal, and North Africa for centuries. Israel also favours many Yemenite Jewish traditions, as the Yemenite Jewish community has to be one of the oldest outside of the Jewish State.

Meanwhile, the Ashkenazi Jews that anti-Zionists pelt with racial slurs such as 'European coloniser' actually share up to 80% of their DNA with... Arabs. I remember one Ashkenazi Jew from Hungary telling me that when he looked into his family history, he noticed several of his ancestors were quite brown-skinned with thick, dark brown hair. Yet Hungarians are white-skinned. This obviously suggests the migration patterns of Jews from the Middle East and into Europe, where, though marriage and acclimatisation, they gained European ethnicity in addition to being Jewish.

However, you will notice that a large number of Arabs are also white-skinned, especially in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. (Also in Saudi Arabia. Islamic texts praise Islam's founder Muhammad for his white skin.) Many Egyptians also have European ancestors. I remember reading an article from an Egyptian who was refuting Netflix's suggestion that Cleopatra might have been black African, in which he noted (with disapproval) that Egyptians often express pride about having French ancestry.

Yet mysteriously, we never hear these Arabs being accused of being "white European colonisers" or conducting "settler colonial projects", despite their collaboration with the British Empire in order to topple the Ottoman Turk Empire. Anyone who bothers to read real history will find that the Arabs were actually keen on collaborating with colonial powers when it was beneficial; when the German Nazis occupied Iraq, they met with widespread support from the Arab Muslims.

But these facts hardly get a fair mention, if at all. Meanwhile, anti-Zionists love to carp on about the Zionist collaboration with the British Empire. Curiously, they also love pointing out and condemning terrorist attacks committed by Zionists.

Well, I think it's important for Zionists not to be afraid of acknowledging the negative aspects of the movement during the violent 1940s. The case for Israel stands firm; it is based on inalienable rights of national self-determination for the Jewish people, backed with piles of unchallengeable, and often unacknowledged, historical evidence. It is that the same rights be accorded to the Jewish people as are accorded to other nations. If we are now going by the standard that the wrongdoing of Zionists would render that right invalid, then it should be applied to any other national movement, including the 1917 Arab movement for a nation in Syria.

Since the anti-Zionists won't apply those same standards to the Arab movement for national independence (or any other national independence movement), then I don't take any of their ostensible moral outrage over Zionist wrongdoing seriously. Nor do I have any respect for their false conclusion that Israel's foundation is therefore immoral.

But notice that many of those terror attacks were committed against the British, which would mean they were "anti-colonial" in nature. In fact, the violence was undoubtedly triggered by the British White Paper of 1937, which arbitrarily banned Jewish home ownership beyond designated lines. This despite the provision of a Jewish Palestine in 1922, and the formal British approval of a Jewish homeland in 1917.

Be that as it may, I am not an anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian, which is why I do not excuse terrorist attacks. (Anti-Zionists conveniently fail to point out that the Haganah condemned the terror tactics used by the Irgun and Lehi. David Ben-Gurion acknowledged that it was both necessary to support the British during World War Two, while also opposing the British because of the White Paper.)

I just find it curious how the anti-Zionist loves to pick and choose a position without even bothering to check its consistency.

I also find it even more curious-- nay, morally repugnant-- how the supposed anti-Zionist condemnation of terrorism vanishes whenever confronted with the far more egregious and despicable terrorist attacks committed by the Arabs since before the reconstitution of Israel in 1948. As far as October 7, 2023 is concerned, the anti-Zionists have proved themselves to be morally bankrupt cowards and enablers of evil.

It's one standard for the Arabs, another for the Jews.

According to the anti-Zionist universe, the Arabs are brown-skinned, which automatically has to mean that they are downtrodden and axiomatically correct; the Jews are white-skinned, which automatically has to mean they are the oppressors and axiomatically wrong. This profound display of myopia is the shaky foundation upon which anti-Zionism builds its creed, including its pick-and-choose mentality about terrorism.

It is high time that more Zionists stood up to the campaign of distortion, falsification, and useful idiocy of the anti-Zionist movement. This is especially necessary when the anti-Zionists love trotting out Jewish friends and supporters, as if this proved that anti-Zionism were true. That people find this convincing only shows the ruinous effect of identity politics on people's reasoning skills.

There are Jews who say wrong things. There are Jews who have repugnant beliefs. Identity is not proof that one is correct. I laugh at the puerile cliché of "As a Jew..." that is always trotted out whenever it comes to defending the Palestinian "cause". As far as I am concerned, hiding behind one's identity to back an opinion only suggests the weakness of that opinion by itself. I would feel ridiculous if I always prefaced my support of Zionism by saying, "As a British Zionist..."

Defy the intimidation, mental gymnastics, mob mentality, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and speak up. Don't allow lies and fraud to go unchallenged. Anti-Zionism is just another department at the Faculty of Antisemitism. Don't be fooled by the pseudo-intellectual language.

antizionist jews stop making every jewish holy day about palestine and how evil you think other jews are for NOT making it about palestine when it has literally nothing to do with the holy day challenge

[torahapologetics]

Unveiling Jewish Diversity: Beyond the Talmud #talmud #torah #diversity #israel #shortvideo

PLEASE 🙏🥺 RE BLOG MY POSTS AND THANKS.

[koenji]

Rachel Nadav (1912-2003), likely 1940s.

"Israeli ballet dancer, born in Aden (Yemen). In 1933 Nadav joined the ballet company of the dancer and choreographer Rina Nikova, a pioneer classic ballet dancer in Eretz Israel. Nadav became leading dancer of Nikova's "Yemenite Ballet Company" and performed around the country and abroad. In the early 1940s she founded a ballet company and integrated classic dances with Yemenite dances, influenced by Nikova's school, and inspired by biblical texts." x

[newnitz]

It also erases non-Ashkenazi Jews.

My mother's family never spoke Yiddish, they spoke Ladino. And we Sephardim have it easier when it comes to Ashkenormativity than most other non-Ashkenazi Diasporas. They make a few footnotes to our existence while they talk over, appropriate and sometimes flat out ignore others, like the very existence of Judeo-Arabic, or Judeo-Yemenic, which is the closest dialect/language(dialanguage?) to classical Hebrew still in use today.

Has anyone else noticed the weird appropriation of Yiddish for specifically anti-zionist spaces? It makes me deeply uncomfortable.