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In the early 1890s, the more enlightened elements of Yemeni Jewry began pleading with Jewish organizations and leaders abroad to help them open a modern Jewish school in Sanʿa. In 1908, encouraged by the Ottoman government, some of them enrolled their children in the state modern school ( maktab rushdiyya), but this soon came to an end because of Muslim protests against Jewish children attending school with Muslim children. In 1910, at the request of the Jewish community’s leaders, the Ottoman government opened a maktab for Jews alone, the only such school in the entire empire. The new sc…

Yemen is located on the southern extreme of the Arabian Peninsula. Its western border stretches along the Red Sea, its northern frontier is shared with Saudi Arabia, and its eastern border lies in the Rubʿ al-Khālī desert, which is also part of Saudi Arabia. The territory in the south is adjacent to the Gulf of Aden (part of the Indian Ocean). In the past, the southern border was delineated along the length of a country that was known from 1967 as South Yemen. Before then, that stretch of land w…

1. Messianic movements in the Medieval periodBy the advent of Islam in the early seventh century, the messianic idea was already firmly established as a central tenet of Judaism in its broadest (i.e., pan-sectarian) sense—as famously dogmatized and concisely expressed in Maimonides’s Thirteen Principles (or Fundamentals) ( thalātha ʿashrata qāʿida) of faith, the twelfth of which is “Believing and affirming the coming of [the Messiah], and not [thinking] that he is tardy—but rather, ‘should he tarry, you shall wait for him expectantly’ (Habbaku…