Yemen’s Long History of Tension with the Jews

On March 28, 2026, the Houthis fired ballistic missiles at Israel and entered the war that the United States and Israel had opened against Iran a month earlier. The barrage set off sirens over Beersheba, near Israel’s main nuclear research center, and Israeli air defenses brought the missile down. Brigadier General Yahya Saree, the group’s military spokesman, said the strikes would continue “until the declared objectives are achieved, as stated in the previous statement by the armed forces, and until the aggression against all fronts of the resistance ceases.”

On June 8 the movement went further, declaring “a complete and total ban on maritime navigation on the Israeli enemy in the Red Sea.” Saree added, “We consider that all movements of the enemy to be a military target from the announcement of this statement.” The Houthis have pushed toward the water since. The Bab al Mandeb Strait separates Yemen from Djibouti and Eritrea, narrows to roughly 19 miles at its tightest point, and carries the trade that moves between Europe and Asia through the Suez Canal. About 12 percent of the world’s seaborne oil crossed it in 2023, some 9.3 million barrels a day, though Houthi attacks on shipping cut that flow to roughly 4.1 million by 2024.

The strait matters more now than it did then. Iran has effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz, and Saudi Arabia has re-routed some 70 percent of its energy exports through the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Bab al Mandeb is the way out, and Tehran knows it. Reuters reported on July 16 that Iran has asked the Houthis to stand ready to close the route should the United States strike Iranian power infrastructure, citing two senior Iranian sources and a regional source. One source close to the group told the agency that the Houthis have already massed missiles and drones near the strait and now await the order to fire.

Whatever leverage the strait affords, the movement wielding it is driven by something older than shipping lanes. As members of the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthi movement fights under a slogan coined in 2003 and painted across every wall it controls: “God is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse upon the Jews! Victory to Islam!”

Yemen did not always speak of Jews this way, and for a long stretch it could not have. The highlands of Yemen once belonged to the kingdom of Himyar, whose elites converted to some form of Judaism around 380, and whose last independent king, Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, took the throne around 522 by putting to the sword the Aksumite garrison that Christian Ethiopia had installed. Also known as Dhu Nuwas, Yusuf was a Himyarite king of Jewish confession who killed miaphysite Christians at Najran and Byzantine merchants elsewhere in his realm in 523 CE.

Aksum came back in 525. Christian-Aksumite king Kaleb had sent an expedition into Himyar years before and installed a client king, only to watch Yusuf take the throne back by putting the Aksumite garrison to the sword. This time the Byzantine emperor Justin urged Kaleb on, and the second campaign proved fatal to Jewish rule in the region. Yusuf died that year. The traditions divide on how, some holding that he fell in battle, others that he rode his horse into the Red Sea rather than surrender.

The victors kept the pattern. The Book of the Himyarites records that Kaleb, having won, put to death a great many Jews who refused baptism. He set a Himyarite convert on the throne as his viceroy, left a garrison, and sailed home, and his general Abraha soon seized the crown for himself. Persia took the country in 572, and Islam claimed it in 628. Jewish rule in the Arabian penninsula ended for good.

Under Islamic rule, Jews became dhimmis who paid a tax for protection. The arrangement held for centuries, and for a long while it held well. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s own account states plainly that life was “relatively peaceful for Yemenite Jews” before the Zaydis—a branch of Shia Islam that sits closest doctrinally to Sunnism of all other Shia sects—arrived, with freedom of religion in exchange for the tax and little persecution from the Sunni rulers then in power. The turn came with the Zaydi imams, whose rule stretched more than a thousand years and strengthened dhimmi law against the Jews.

Around 1165 the ruler Abd al Nabi ibn Mahdi decreed a forced renunciation of Judaism and offered the Jews conversion or martyrdom, with many choosing the former. A Jewish apostate worked to bring the rest across, and a false messiah rose promising the opposite. The community’s leader, Jacob ben Nethanel al Fayyumi, wrote to Cairo for help, and Maimonides answered in roughly 1172 with the Iggeret Teiman, the Epistle to Yemen, urging the Jews of Yemen to stay true to their faith. The persecution ended when Saladin’s brother Turan Shah took the country by 1174.

The worst came in 1679. Zaydi and Shafii scholars argued the question at length and ruled that Yemen’s Jews, by embracing the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zevi in 1666, had broken their dhimma agreement and forfeited protection.

That was the legal form. The politics underneath ran deeper. Jane Hathaway places the exile at the juncture of Zaydi and Ottoman messianism, and Bat Zion Eraqi Klorman has traced how Jewish and Muslim messianic expectation ran together in Yemen. Zaydi rulers already suspected their Jews of favoring an Ottoman return, which would have opened a road to Eretz Israel, and Sabbatian fervor threw up local pretenders who talked openly of a Jewish kingdom rising in Yemen again, as Himyar once had. The scholars supplied the ruling. The imams already had the motive.

Al Mutawakkil Ismail confirmed the ruling and ordered every Jew expelled, then died in 1676 without doing it. His nephew besieged a cousin to take the imamate, won it, and finished the job. Al Mahdi Ahmad ibn al Hasan carried it out. He destroyed the synagogues, banned public prayer, and when the Jews refused conversion, ordered them deported overseas. The ships never took them. They were left instead on the salty ground outside Mawza, a scorched coastal district near Mocha, and there they stayed more than a year. Many died on the road. The rest met disease and starvation, and as many as two thirds of the exiles did not survive. Their manuscripts, communal books, and archives went with them.

Mercy came from Muslim neighbors, and it came twice. In the summer of 1679 Imam al Mahdi Ahmad narrowed the choice to conversion or death. Arab tribesmen who held Jews under their protection, and who counted an attack on a tribesman’s Jew as an attack on his own honor, petitioned the imam to trade the death decree for something lighter. He agreed and settled on banishment across the sea to Zeila on the African coast. Then, with the columns already moving through Arab towns toward the water, chiefs of the Sabaean tribes petitioned a second time, asking that the Jews not be made to cross at all. Send them to Mawza on the Yemeni coast instead, they argued, because Jews who converted to save themselves could be recovered from there more easily than from Africa. The imam agreed again. Yemen’s far eastern communities escaped the decree altogether, since governors that far from Sanaa could ignore the order without much cost.

Even the kindness ran on arithmetic, and a year later the arithmetic reversed. Arab governors and tribes complained that goods only Jews knew how to make had gone missing from the markets, and the imam let the survivors return. They came home to occupied houses and seized land. They built again outside the walls of Sanaa, on ground the city then called the hyena’s field.

Survival remained conditional, and the conditions extended to future generations. Zaydi law held that a Jewish child whose father died belonged to the state. The Orphan’s Decree took such children, converted them, and raised them Muslim. Enforcement ran uneven for generations and the Ottomans largely ignored it, but Imam Yahya revived the law and pressed it hard, and it became a chief reason Jews began leaving for Palestine. Families married children off young to grant them adult status, hid them with other Jews, or moved them to the cities.

Three days after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, Aden erupted. Between December 2 and 4, 1947, rioters and the Aden Protectorate Levies, the Arab Muslim force British governor Reginald Champion sent to restore order, killed 82 Jews. Rioters looted 106 of Crater’s 170 Jewish shops and burned both Jewish schools. Sir Harry Trusted’s Colonial Office inquiry found of the Levies that “Some were sympathetic to looters and fire-raisers and did little to discourage them.” It called many trigger happy and tied them to the deaths of many of the 31 Jews shot in their homes, on rooftops, and in the street. The force sent to protect the Jews of Aden did much of the killing.

The community understood the verdict. Between 1949 and September 1950 the JDC planned, financed and ran Operation Magic Carpet, chartering close to 450 flights with Alaska Airlines and carrying more than 48,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel.

A few hundred remained, mostly in the north. The newly invigorated Houthis made sure to chase out the rest. In 2007 the movement drove the Jews of Al Salem out of Saada. In March 2021, 13 members of three families left Sanaa after the Houthis made their departure the price of freeing Levi Salem Marhabi, jailed since 2016 for helping smuggle a Torah scroll out of the country. “They gave us a choice between staying in the midst of harassment and keeping Salem a prisoner or leaving and having him released,” one told Asharq Al Awsat. “History will remember us as the last of Yemeni Jews who were still clinging to their homeland until the last moment. We had rejected many temptations time and time again, and refused to leave our homeland, but today we are forced.”

They left. The Houthis kept Marhabi anyway. A Houthi court had ordered his release in 2019 and they ignored it. This prompted a response from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who declared: “Mr. Marhabi is one member of an ever-shrinking community of Yemeni Jews, who have been an important part of Yemen’s diverse social fabric for thousands of years. We call on the Houthis to respect religious freedom, stop oppressing Yemen’s Jewish population, and immediately release Levi Salem Musa Marhabi.”

From its earliest recorded conflicts to the present day, Yemen’s relationship with its Jewish population has followed a single consistent arc: eventual expulsion or flight. The Houthis’ current actions are merely the latest expression of that ancient proclivity.