Abdar, CarmellaPhD Among her main areas of expertise are folk art and material culture of Yemenite Jews, mainly rural communities. She has published several articles: “The dress code as an expression of ethno-religious status of the Jews”; “The Habbanic bride’s dress in 1950s in Israel—a bridge between past and present”; “The Yemenite jewelry and the myth of antiquity” She wrote the book Weaving a Story [Hebrew, 1999] about a village in Yemen and edited the book Maʾase Rokem: Dress and Jewelry in the Tradition…

Why an Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World?Until the middle of the twentieth century, over a million Jews lived in the Islamic world, some 800,000 of them in the Arab countries. Some of these Jewish communities were very ancient, as in Iraq and Iran, where there had been a Jewish presence since the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C.E. In most other Middle Eastern and North African countries, there had been Jews since Greco-Roman times, long before th…