ABSTRACT
The Jews of Yemen lived in a country which, like Tibet and Ethiopia, was physically inaccessible, largely closed to outsiders by religious and political barriers, and, for much of its history, off the main lines of international relations and commerce. Yemen is a rugged, sometimes spectacular country of craggy mountains and rocky valleys. Many of its great slopes are completely covered with extensive rock-girt terraces, while its towns and villages are often set on the tops of the mountains, their multistoried houses perched at the edge of cliffs. Although rainfall in Yemen is unpredictable and failure of the rains often caused famine, its soils are capable of growing a wide range of crops on the intensively terraced slopes. Yemen is an Arab and a Muslim country, and throughout most of the last thousand years, until the revolution in 1962, it was ruled by Zaydi Shi’a imams according to their interpretation of Muslim law.
