One of the miracles of the new State of Israel was “Operation Magic Carpet,” by which forty thousand Yemenite Jews were transported almost overnight by airplane from a primitive physical environment and a static medieval culture into a new world of bustling activity and progress. Unhappily, under the daily glare of reality, the miracle has begun to fade, and increasingly we hear of the “Yemenite problem.” The newcomers have become a center of controversy between the government and the religious bloc, and many observers are concerned also over the possibility of their becoming a permanently underprivileged caste in a society that has little knowledge of, or use for, their old traditions, and that can spare little time to appreciate their unique charm and vivacious humanity.
We present here two articles on the Yemenite Jews, aimed at giving a perspective on the “problem” and on the living human beings was not who are at the center of it. S. D. Gottein, professor in the School of Oriental Studies of the Hebrew University, describes the ancient culture which the Yemenites left behind them; CONSTANTINE POULOS discusses the difficulties involved in their reception and re-education in Israel.
Dr. Goitein, born in Bavaria in 1900 and educated at the universities of Frankfort and Berlin, emigrated to Palestine in 1923. He has published numerous essays and books on Moslem civilization and on problems of Jewish education; an article on “Cross-Currents in Arab National Feeling” appeared in COMMENTARY February 1949. Mr. Poulos has written widely for numerous magazines on subjects related to the Balkan countries, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East; the present article was written after a stay in Israel. Mr. Poulos was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1916.
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A succession of droughts and the growing exclusion of Jews from urban trades had something to do with the decision of the Yemenite Jews to leave a land where they and their forebears had lived for twenty centuries. Most of the Jews of Yemen were craftsmen and artisans, highly skilled as silversmiths and goldsmiths, but also engaged in carpet-making, weaving, embroidery, and shoemaking. The Jewish craftsmen would barter their wares with villagers and townspeople for food; the years of drought greatly reduced this trade and the Jews suffered much privation. Other factors in the decision were persecution and oppression. But the main reason was religious. When word reached their remote villages that Israel had been reborn, the Yemenite Jews were moved by a Messianic fervor to “return” to the land of the Bible.
Israel lay fifteen hundred miles to the north, and between it and the Yemen there are vast treacherous deserts and unfriendly Arab tribes. So they went south, down out of the hills to the tiny neighboring British Protectorate of Aden. It was not easy. The law still prohibited emigration. The Imam of Yemen was not too anxious to lose all his ablest artisans or to risk the displeasure of his fellow member states of the Arab League. But when he found that he could not combat the tremendous magnetic power that the existence of a Jewish state in Israel had on his Jewish minority, and that many of them were leaving illegally anyway, he relented. The Jews could leave, but they could not take anything with them, except, perhaps, a rug, a blanket, a straw mat, a battered oil lamp, a tin kettle, perhaps a shofar or an elegant water pipe.
For some of them the long trek to Aden, over camel caravan routes and donkey tracks, took a harrowing two months; for others, only two weeks. Many died on the way. As it happened, there were also various tribal sheikhs, rulers of desert principalities, along the way to Aden, who had to be paid a toll fee of about six dollars a head. Once in Aden, the emigrants were safe. Representatives of the American Joint Distribution Committee were waiting for them, and they were taken on buses to a special camp near the capital city of Aden. At the camp they were fed, given some clothes and a cursory medical examination. Then, after varying periods of waiting, they were put aboard airplanes.
These people, who had not been permitted to ride horses lest they meet a Moslem on foot, eagerly and expectancy climbed aboard the big planes. Few, if any, had seen aircraft before, but it is written that the exiles would return to Israel on the wings of eagles. Small and docile, 145 of them squatted quietly in a plane built to carry 56 passengers. And instead of two weeks or two months, it took, only nine hours to reach Israel’s Lydda airport. The story is told of one old man who wouldn’t get off the plane when it landed because he couldn’t believe that he had arrived in Israel.
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The operation of bringing the Yemenite Jews to Israel was colorfully and appropriately labeled “The Magic Carpet.” Both the first phase, which took place between December 1948 and March 1949, and the second and larger, which started in July of 1949 and was concluded in September 1950, were handled by the AJDC. It is estimated that the total cost was somewhere around five and a half million dollars. A charter line, the Near East Airlines, handled the extraordinary airlift with five Skymasters and one Tudor, making daily flights back and forth. Three babies were born on the “Magic Carpet” planes.
Leaving the planes, the Jews blinked in confusion, ecstasy, and anticipation. Many old men knelt and kissed the ground. Others kissed the hand of the first Israeli they met. Some feeble old people had to be carried off on the shoulders of their young sons. They huddled together under the protective wings of the planes and looked around at “their” land, the big, modern airport, the spreading plain, and, in the distance, the purple Judean hills.
A bus would take them to the end of their long pilgrimage—one of four camps for Yemenites operated by the Jewish Agency with the cooperation of the Israeli government. After the formalities of registration and medical examination they were assigned to living quarters: families in barracks and wooden huts, single men in tents, and the infants in nurseries.
At first they would keep to themselves, still a little frightened. They didn’t ask questions, and if one spoke to them they would keep their heads low and bodies bowed. On the second and third days they would lift their heads and then their eyes. They would point to the neatly laid out neighboring agricultural settlement and ask, “Is that Jewish?” Then to the distant hills,. “Is that Jewish?” Reassured again and again, they took on self-confidence. Day by day their high shrill voices became louder and “bolder.
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Yemenite Jews have small bodies, dark skin of various hues, long heads, coal-black hair. Their men tend to have scraggly beards and sharp faces, while the faces of the younger women are darkly attractive and warmly expressive. If, as some anthropologists believe, the Palestine of Biblical times was populated by a Jewish people indigenous to its Middle East environment, it is possible that the Yemenite Jews bear a closer resemblance to the ancient Jews than any other modern group.
For centuries the Yemenite Jews were forbidden to wear white or colored garments, except on the Sabbath, and were restricted on weekdays to black and dark blue. There is still a preponderance of drab dark colors in the camps, but here and there a woman has a bit of red or yellow wound around her hair or her neck. Another has a colorful cheap print dress, which she wears over Arab-type tight trousers. The men have their long nightgown dress, common in most Arab countries, or they wear jackets over skirts, but more and more are now wearing ragged ensembles of shorts or trousers and jackets.
Their “return” has brought many problems to hard-pressed Israel. The immediate problem is health. One in three of the newcomers has acute malaria, and one in four has tropical ulcers (deep, wide wounds extending down to the bone). At least 25 per cent require hospitalization. Their diseases include tropical fevers, skin diseases, trachoma, diseases of malnutrition, and a few cases of leprosy. The mortality rate was high but has been reduced by effective treatment.
The effects of chronic malnutrition are sadly visible in the nurseries, where one finds eighteen-month-old babies that weigh only nine pounds, have only two teeth, and legs hardly thicker than a man’s thumb. There are three-year-olds and five-year-olds that weigh as little as fourteen pounds.
Many of the children were found to have mysterious black spots on their bellies. The doctors were completely baffled until they learned that the spots were burns that had been lacquered over: in Yemen, sick children were taken to witch doctors who poked hot needles under the skin of the abdomen—one prick for one kind of sickness, two or three for others. Some of the children have as many as a dozen such burns on their bodies.
The children are now receiving excellent care at the hands of doctors and experienced nurses, but it took some time for the camp authorities to overcome the stubborn refusal of the mothers and fathers to entrust their children to the nurseries and clinics. Now the mothers come along to help the nurses, nurse the babies, if they can, and learn the fundamentals of baby hygiene and care.
The women are still reluctant, however, to take off their clothes in front of a male doctor, and not one expectant mother has been willing to have her baby delivered in a hospital. Consequently, the nurses must keep a check on the pregnant women and be prepared to help them when the time comes.
Actually, the camps are vast kindergartens for both young and old. At first, forks were issued to the new arrivals, but it was discovered that they didn’t know how to use them and a few even hurt themselves. Now only spoons are used for all meals. When bed sheets were issued, the Yemenites cut them up into prayer shawls and skirts. In the beginning, they slept under the beds and cots, for they didn’t understand the purpose of a bed. Only when members of the camp staff demonstrated by undressing, climbing on the beds, stretching out, and pretending to sleep, did the dark eyes gleam in understanding. Similarly, the use of toilets, showers, wash basins, chairs, and garbage cans had to be demonstrated. The shower baths were such a novelty that the immigrants would stand under them for hours at a time until the camp authorities established specific periods for their use. Though many of the Yemenite Jews can read the Bible, they are almost all, in practical terms, illiterate.
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With infinite patience, the camp staffs try to educate and explain, and to learn at the same time. The first immigrants to arrive were given all the bread they could eat, in big slices. But they didn’t touch it. In the big slices, apparently, bread lost its former value, and only when it was cut up in little pieces, and again became “dear,” would they eat it. After the experience of eating in the big camp dining halls wore off, most of the immigrants, like camp inmates everywhere, preferred to take their food to their own quarters. This practice aggravated the sanitation and health situation, forcing the camp staff to make periodic checks and to explain and demonstrate, over and over, why and how the living quarters and the dishes and spoons must be kept clean.
Efforts to put some of the abler men to work around the camps have been hampered by the inability of the immigrants to tell the time—indeed, by their total lack of any idea of time. An immigrant told to report at the camp office at seven in the morning shows up around noon, oblivious of the difference and indifferent to its meaning. They are in most ways very cooperative, however, and camp discipline is exceptional. They are extremely appreciative of kindness and can quickly perceive intent, even in a glance; but their appreciation often takes a servile form, to the extent of falling to the ground and kissing the boot of a staff member who has performed some perfunctory act of helpfulness.
The government’s aim is to assimilate and integrate these strange newcomers to the best that Israel has to offer—as soon as possible. But it is realized that this will be a difficult and drawn-out process. The differences in values and outlook may, in the long run, prove a more serious problem to the State of Israel than the immediate difficulties of providing housing, clothing, food, and medical care. Nor are the Yemenites, for all their eagerness to fit into the larger community, quite ready to yield up their ways of living entirely to the official, organized standards of modern Israel. A Yemenite butcher, for instance, refusing to accept the jurisdiction of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, hung out a sign saying: “Slaughterer—working under the supervision of the Almighty.” After all, he had studied Torah from the same books as the organized rabbis who now attempted to impose their authority over him, and he saw no reason why he had to have permission or pay a fee in order to perform a ritual slaughter. One may be permitted to hope that this butcher will continue to constitute a “problem” to the authorities.
There are plans for the gradual absorption of the Yemenite Jews into the country’s economy. Hard and willing workers, they will probably replace the departed Arabs as field workers. Thirty villages of one hundred families each, or three thousand families, will be established in olive-growing areas. In addition to tending the olive groves, most of which belonged to Arabs who abandoned them during the late war, the new settlers will have small auxiliary plots for mixed farming.
Seven hundred families have already been housed in “working villages” in Galilee and in the narrow corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The men are working on various public works projects of road construction, afforestation, and land clearance. Another eight hundred families are now being settled in similar working villages, and it is expected that three thousand families will be absorbed in three new towns that are to be established shortly.
Schools have been provided in the camps for the children, and in special youth camps for boys between thirteen and seventeen agricultural training is being given in addition to general education. For the men and women there are courses in vocational training and housekeeping. Even those who were craftsmen and artisans are to be taught modern techniques and new methods.
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All of these earnest plans and efforts of the government and the various institutions do not alter the unfortunate fact that the Yemenite Jews will have to live, for a long time, in a kind of vacuum. Eventually, no doubt, they will be absorbed into the larger society, but the process of absorption will be dependent, not only on the solution of the economic difficulties that affect all immigrants, but also on certain social and psychological factors that may in the long run prove more difficult to cope with.
The Westernized Jew stands aghast at the first sight of his primitive brothers and fellow citizens; and his next reaction is to put the disturbing sight out of his mind. When he hears that two Yemenite fathers in the Ein Shemer camp were caught selling their daughters into marriage for seventy dollars each—on the installment plan—he smiles good-naturedly: “They are adaptable,” he says patronizingly, and lets it go at that Or he smugly focuses his thinking on the children and writes off the immigrating generation as expendable. Later, he may pick up and repeat the various clinchés of prejudice: the Yemenite Jews are childish to the point of imbecility, shiftless, dirty, unwilling to work.
These attitudes are part of a guilt complex. There was a large Yemenite community (about thirty-five thousand people) in Palestine before Israel was established, and the Westernized Jews are painfully conscious of the fact that very little was done to bring this large group into the mainstream of the larger Jewish community. All sorts of special virtues were attributed to the “exotic” Yemenites, but they “didn’t fit,” and they were allowed to suffer from various class, cultural, and social discriminations. Unskilled, illiterate, and poor, they were Palestine’s social outcasts.
Many of the first Yemenite immigrants to Palestine went to work on the land, hoping to become independent small farmers and even employers of others. As this motivation was in conflict with the predominant collectivist and cooperative tendencies of Zionism, nearly all of the Yemenites soon withdrew from farming. A few managed to achieve white-collar status, and once they had good positions, with regular salaries, they moved away from their own community, anxious to disassociate themselves from their “inferior” origins; in this way, the community was deprived of its most capable members and left politically and intellectually stranded. The majority worked as unskilled laborers for pitiful daily wages. Education was expensive and few opportunities for better employment were afforded them. They naturally fell into the lowest job classifications: porters, janitors, street-sweepers, garbage collectors. After 1933, they were even squeezed out of these jobs, as the influx of immigrants from Europe provided “more acceptable” applicants for service work.
The boom days of the Second World War greatly stimulated the Yemenites’ desire to improve their economic status, and many of them, still shut out of respectable business, turned to black marketeering, to various shady dealings of a more or less minor character, and even to petty thuggery. One of the most extensive black markets in meat, broken up some time ago by the police, was centered in Kerem Ha-Temani, a slum section of Tel Aviv inhabited almost exclusively by Yemenites.
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The frustration of the Yemenites also expressed itself in more significant ways. It was from among the Yemenites that the underground terrorist organizations drew much of their support Terrorism gave the Yemenite a welcome opportunity to strike back at the society which degraded him. The terrorist organizations gave him a sense of belonging, and he carried out the orders of his Westernized leaders with exaggerated bravado and heroism, proving to himself and to the “other Jews” that he was someone to be reckoned with. Irgun Zvai Leumi, the largest of the terrorist groups, was particularly successful in attracting Yemenites, and in the ferment of underground comradeship even the social barrier was broken down and several Western Jews married Yemenites. Prime Minister Ben Gurion, who bitterly hated the IZL, recently said that the only real accomplishment of the terrorist organization was its success in socially integrating Western and Oriental Jews.
Too late did Ben Gurion and the Jewish Agency recall the existence of the Yemenite community in their midst It had had no wealthy community organization to support its members, as did the European communities, and the Jewish Agency was too preoccupied with other problems to pay much attention to people who lived uncomplainingly on the fringes and in the slums. None of the respectable political factions had seriously attempted to give the Yemenites an active role in political and social life, and belated attempts to draw the Yemenites away from the terrorist organizations failed. It was all too easy for the Yemenites to believe the demagogic charges of their leaders that the Jewish Agency was a pawn of the British Mandatory authorities.
After the establishment of the state, the Yemenites learned that their underground leaders were less concerned with them and their problems than with political rituals and political positions. The grandiose promises of the terrorist leaders were not fulfilled. Disappointment led to withdrawal from the terrorist ranks and to an increase of discontent. Today the old Yemenite community sees itself still isolated, still left out, and its members naturally resent the exceptional care and attention which the new Yemenite immigrants are receiving. And they have not forgotten the lesson of their underground experience: that violence and dissidence are social weapons. Despondent and destitute, they still cling to the idea of asserting themselves through revolutionary means.
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It remains to be seen how seriously the authorities have studied the problems of the old Yemenite community and how seriously they will apply their findings to the problems of the new. In the long run, the problem of the old Yemenites and the new is one problem, and successful integration of the new immigrants must eventually mean integration of the Yemenite community as a whole. And there are a few hopeful aspects to the new problem. The assimilation of the new immigration from Yemen will be handled entirely by Jewish authorities. From the very first day the direction will be provided by sympathetic advisers. Absorption will be carefully planned, and the distribution of new immigrants over the country will be carried out with the conscious intent of preventing segregation. Economic, educational, and cultural aid are all included in the plans.
But whether or not the new Yemenite Jews become a constructive force in the Jewish state depends on the degree of attention paid by the authorities to social as well as economic factors. If there is an attempt to dig out the old roots indiscriminately and to force the new immigrants speedily into the austere, tight compartments of uncompromising Zionist ideology, the result will be maladjustment, hardship, and desperation, and a serious setback to hopes for the eventual creation of a well-balanced society.
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