The Jews of Yemen By Mitchell Bard Yemen: Table of Contents |
Virtual History Tour | Jewish Foods In 1922, the government of
Yemen reintroduced an ancient Islamic law requiring that Jewish
orphans under age 12 be forcibly converted to Islam. In 1947,
after the partition vote, Muslim rioters, joined by the local
police force, engaged in a bloody pogrom in Aden that killed 82
Jews and destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes. Aden's Jewish
community was economically paralyzed, as most of the Jewish
stores and businesses were destroyed. Early in 1948, the false
accusation of the ritual murder of two girls led to looting.2
This increasingly perilous situation led to the emigration of
virtually the entire Yemenite Jewish community - almost 50,000 -
between June 1949 and September 1950 in Operation "Magic
Carpet." A smaller, continuous migration was allowed to continue
into 1962, when a civil war put an abrupt halt to any further
Jewish exodus. Until 1976, when an American diplomat came across
a small Jewish community in