Saga of the Yemenites
The Magic Carpet.
by Shlomo Barer.
Harper. 243 pp. $3.50.

Shlomo Barer’s account of the fabulous transplantation by air of 50,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1949 and 1950—the now famous “Operation Magic Carpet”—has authority and dignity, and is excellently written. In time it may be supplanted as a primary historical source by later accounts of others officially closer to the emigration; but as a testament to the spirit and the wonder of the Yemenite saga, it has a classic quality that should insure its survival.

The Israeli radio sent Mr. Barer to Camp Hashed—the Aden reception center where the Joint Distribution Committee was presiding over the transportation of an entire people from the 12th century into the 20th century—to capture on tape the speech, music, and ritual of this antique, hermetically sealed “lost tribe” for broadcast by Kol Israel. Privately, Barer set himself to fathom the mysteries of the Yemenites’ survival during a millennium or more of isolation; their miraculous release from the grasp of Yemen’s tyrannical Imam; and their spontaneous, instinctive response when word trickled through to a hundred remote places in a land of darkness that the Promise had at last been fulfilled and Israel was summoning them “home.”

Barer’s jumbled, kaleidoscopic notes of on-the-spot inquiries and conversations grew more intelligible when he went on to read the chronicles of the rare Europeans who had penetrated portions of Yemen in previous times—notably Hugh Scott, who headed a British expedition in 1937 hunting Yemenite plants and insects, and Joseph Halévy, a French Orientalist, the record of whose search eighty years ago for relics of the kingdom of Sheba had been scratched in pencil on scraps of paper two decades later by his local Jewish guide, a copperplate engraver named Hayim Habashush, and unearthed shortly before World War II in the Vienna Museum. Later investigations in Israeli and London archives rounded off Barer’s research.

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An absurdly patronizing review in a leading newspaper literary supplement, which came to me before the book itself, had left me unprepared for the high level of Mr. Barer’s report. One may cavil mildly at the mixture of diary, direct reporting, and historical survey, but he has blended his original and secondary materials into a beautiful coat of many colors.

The now familiar story of the Yemenites’ bewilderment with the modern world, and of the problems of regulating their confusion, is expertly retold: how the men had to be taught “the technology of putting on a pair of pants”; how the women would shy away from the maternity ward until after the childbirth; how, even after months in Israel, a Yemenite swain still needed to be restrained from choosing and purchasing a twelve-year-old bride, having to “console himself with a girl of seventeen or eighteen, who also costs less.” If there is any flaw in Barer’s study, it is a tendency—faint, carefully qualified, but nevertheless visible—to be over-optimistic about the speed of Yemenite cultural absorption into the Israeli pattern. He draws too ideal a picture of a model immigrant, Saadya ben Abraham Hadadi, late of Dhamar in the medieval Yemen, tricked out in a green beret, white shirt, and brick-red cotton trousers from the Jewish Agency supply depot, happily manipulating a pneumatic drill on a rocky hillside above Jerusalem. Saadya—and his wife, though she has learned how to stand in line at the cooperative grocery, and even his children, who have pencils, erasers, and toys but not an adequate schoolroom—are going to take longer to understand the new magic around them than Barer suggests. And in the process of integration they—like the hundreds of thousands of newcomers from Bagdad, the Kurdish mountains, the North African mellah, or the Persian hinterland—will also be making their impact on Israel’s European civilization, a reverse cultural trend which Barer does not even contemplate but which is already harassing the slumbers of Israeli educators and sociologists.

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Against the values and tribulations of the dismal centuries from which they emerged, however, the Yemenites have truly heroic stature, and Barer gives them no more than deserved tribute. He traces their path from the mythology pre-dating the First Temple’s destruction to the earliest historical evidence of their separate identity in the 3rd Christian century as an independent tribe, artisans of gold, silver, and pottery, living in equality with pagan clans, superior to their neighbors in culture and their match in war. Some Arab notables even adopted Judaism; in the early 6th century a Yemenite ruler of Himyar, successor to the realm of Sheba, became a Jew, combated the invading Christian Abyssinians, and then chose a king’s death in defeat by leaping with his horse into the sea. There was a final martial burst when, according to legend, the Jews fought as allies of Mohammed, violating their Sabbath to continue the battle till victory, for which the grateful Prophet granted them perpetual immunity from persecution. (Even in 1950 there came to Hashed from Habban, in the wild Hadhramaut, taller and prouder in visage than the Yemenites, sporting daggers and brightly colored robes, a warlike Jewish sect which until two generations ago had served the sultans as a desert frontier force.) But in Yemen itself night fell over Jewry with the final triumph of Islam, and old debts and traditions of comradeship in arms were forgotten. Gradually the Jews descended to a status of fourth-class citizenship, ultimately legalized by Imam Yahya in 1906 by an infamous edict crushing them with taxes and all manner of degradations.

Yet, though despised and oppressed, Yemen’s Jews within their congested ghettos persevered magnificently in private cleanliness and inner serenity, cherishing their piety and their dreams of redemption. Throughout the ages, their golden spiritual links with the Holy Land gleamed sporadically but never faded. For three hundred and fifty years there were only four recorded cases of emigration; from 1880 onward, fitful treks toward Jerusalem gathered only a few thousand at a time; when the final omen of salvation came with Israel’s birth, the rest were ready. They journeyed forth in one great, convulsive but majestic sweep which nearly overwhelmed the meager facilities for their reception. Barer writes of all this with feeling and artistry. But nowhere do the agony and the hope of the “ingathering” find purer expression than in the mouths of the wanderers themselves, particularly of one participant whose Scriptural imagery and grandeur compel at least a few lines of quotation here to give some savor of the passionate faith:

“And upon a day,” this unnamed seer writes, “came a letter saying: ‘Arise brothers, and arouse yourselves. The proper hour has come. . . . Surmount the suffering of the way. . . . Dare to go up at once, and do not leave behind you the ancient culture in writing and garb. . . .’ We sold our houses . . . we left our synagogues . . . and we prepared ourselves for the way dry cakes and boiled butter and dried meat and spices and coffee. . . . And the boundary was closed to passage because of the multitude of people. . . . And the stress of hunger prevailed, and there was no bread for our mouth, and the heart sorrowed for the infants. . . . And many were seized with trembling of the body as though with fever, and yet they walked with us. . . . And there were women near to give birth, and they were on donkeys, and they gave birth while they were riding and we fulfilled the commandments as was proper, and the woman and child were on the donkey. . . . And companies came from all the ends of the Yemen. . . . And thus we came to Aden as long as there was breath in our nostrils, bruised and robbed, weary and bereft of everything. . . . And they gathered us into the great camp which was near the city, and it was on the sands of the desert . . . and we lay in large numbers under the bare sky, next to one another, each family together, and mighty sandstorms raged about us, and in our heart was a prayer for aliya, to fly on eagle’s wings to our country. And we went up.”

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Once in a great while, a book comes along which another writer feels he might have written—though perhaps not half as well—and he chides himself unhappily for not having tried. In the early summer of 1949, when the exodus from Yemen was still an Israeli military secret, this reviewer was spirited from Lydda Airport 1600 miles south to the British Crown colony of Aden for an open-mouthed look at “Operation Magic Carpet.” Publicity might have jolted certain delicate and bizarre arrangements with native sultans and the government of Arab Yemen—which, though ostensibly at war with Israel, was occultly thumbing its nose at the rest of the Arab League and allowing its 50,000 Jews to depart for “enemy” soil. Consequently I wrote nothing after returning with a Biblical planeload of 130 ecstatic Yemenites to the land where “a new king named David” reigned. Because of fidelity to a security pledge, the story stayed bottled even when I had left Israel and the Tel Aviv censorship behind. In time the bottle slipped to a back shelf inside of me and was forgotten. It was not until months later, in the late fall, that another American correspondent “leaked” the news—to the anguished mortification of Israeli authorities and press. Thereafter, of course, reporters could not be restrained from descending on Aden like locusts.

So my own story never got itself told. But Shlomo Barer has put it down better than any of us who might have written about it, or any who did.

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