Seventeenth-Century Yemen’s Expulsion of the Jews

In September 2026, Ansar Allah swept across Yemen’s Tihama coastal plain, captured the historic Red Sea port of Al-Makha, and seized Mayyun Island inside the Bab al-Mandab strait—the narrow chokepoint through which roughly 10 percent of world trade passes between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The echoes of that geography run deep in Yemeni history. Yemen’s Zaydi tradition—a branch of Shia Islam that traces its authority through a line of imams, or scholar-leaders, descended from the Prophet’s family and obligated to rule with both religious learning and martial capability—produced the Qasimid imamate that drove Ottoman forces from Yemen entirely by 1636. The founder’s son, Imam al-Mu’ayyad Muhammad, completed that expulsion. His successor, Imam al-Mutawakkil Ismail, who reigned from 1644 to 1676, then pushed the imamate to the greatest territorial extent it ever held across the Arabian peninsula. That achievement also left the dynasty wary of an Ottoman return.

The immediate spark arrived with news from the Ottoman world. Sabbatai Zevi, the Smyrna-born mystic proclaimed Messiah by Nathan of Gaza, won followers far beyond his home city in 1665—his movement reaching Amsterdam, London, and cities across North Africa. Ottoman officials imprisoned him when he reached Constantinople in 1666. In September of that year, threatened with torture by Sultan Mehmed IV, he converted from Judaism to Islam in Adrianople.

In Yemen, however, Sabbatean hope took a dangerous political form. Sulayman Jamal, a Sana’a kabbalist who believed he was personally destined to bring the messianic vision to earth, led a group to the Muslim governor on the first day of Passover 1666 and demanded that control of the city be transferred to him. Sana’a’s rabbinical court had opposed him throughout. The Zaydi imam of Yemen, al-Mutawakkil Ismail—the same ruler whose reign had seen the imamate reach its greatest territorial extent—ordered Jamal beheaded in the city market. But he treated the episode as more than the act of an isolated zealot. Drawing on the scholarly rulings of both Zaydi and Shafi’i religious jurists, al-Mutawakkil Ismail concluded that the agitation constituted a breach of dhimma, the protection arrangement that offered Jews security and communal life under Muslim rule in exchange for accepting Muslim political supremacy. That ruling ultimately set in motion the 1679 Mawza Exile, in which Yemen’s entire Jewish population was expelled to the arid coastal town of Mawza near Mocha.

The machinery of expulsion moved in stages. On September 29, 1677, according to Arabic sources, Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad—who had succeeded al-Mutawakkil Ismail on his death the previous year—ordered Sana’a’s newly appointed governor to drive out the Jews and demolish their synagogues. Between 1677 and 1679, authorities destroyed houses of worship, barred public prayer, and desecrated Torah scrolls. Shalom Shabazi, the 17th-century rabbi and poet whom Yemeni tradition venerates as the greatest Jewish voice the country ever produced, was himself exiled and preserved the devastation in his writings, where he pointed to desecrated scrolls, ruined synagogues, humiliated scholars, and an expulsion that reached from Sa’dah in the north to the Shara’b district in the south.

By early summer 1679, Jews faced a final ultimatum to convert or die. The community refused and held public fasts. The chiefs of Sabaean tribes who had long served as patrons to Jewish artisans and craftsmen petitioned the imam on their behalf, arguing their clients had been loyal subjects. Al-Mahdi Ahmad commuted the death penalty to banishment. The sources disagree over where the exiles were first meant to go: the imam’s August 1679 edict named Zeila—a port across the Red Sea on the African coast. Another Muslim account describes the intended destination as the Mughal empire in India. The tribes petitioned again as the columns of exiles moved south, and the king ultimately redirected everyone to Mawza.

On 10 August 1679, the Sana’a order took effect. Shabazi recorded the moment in his poem Wasalna Hatif al-Alhan—“Tidings have reached us” — naming the second day of Rajab as the day al-Mahdi decreed the community’s departure. Families in al-Sa’ilah, the Jewish quarter inside Sana’a’s walls, were told to sell their houses, fields, and vineyards; all property they could not sell passed automatically to the public treasury. The exiles walked south through Dhamar, Yarim, Ibb, and Taizz, joined along the way by Jewish families from surrounding villages. The community sent 15 letters to the imam at al-Ghiras asking to be forgiven and allowed to remain in their settlements. None received an answer.

After roughly 11 days on foot, the columns reached Mawza. They camped on barren ground beyond the town, where the conditions—poor water, hunger, disease, and relentless exposure—took a devastating toll on the Jewish exiles. Shabazi, who walked out alongside his community, described the place as “a land of monstrous beasts and every kind of lion.” Scholars estimate that as many as a fifth to two-thirds of the exiles did not survive, with accounts varying sharply on the exact death toll.

About a year into the exile, the policy began to relax, though not out of mercy, but out of economic necessity. Governors and Muslim communities across Yemen had come to depend on Jewish craftsmen for goods and services that no one else provided such as silversmiths, blacksmiths, potters, weavers, woodworkers, plasterers, merchants, and couriers. The imam allowed survivors to return, but return did not mean restoration of socio-economic standing. The returning Jews were barred from their former homes inside Sana’a’s walls and directed to build new dwellings outside the city on ground the Arabic sources call the “hyena’s field.” That settlement became Qa al-Yahud, meaning the Jewish Quarter, a name it carries in the historical record. The celebrated Synagogue of the Sages inside the old city was converted into a mosque and renamed Masjid al-Jala, meaning the Mosque of the Expulsion.

The Mawza exile failed to erase Yemeni Judaism, but it permanently weakened it. Many hundreds converted to Islam rather than face continued persecution. Survivors were scattered across Yemen’s districts and subject to stricter discriminatory rules than before. Rabbi Shelomo ben Saadia al-Manzeli, who had served as president of the rabbinical court in Sana’a before the exile, returned to that role and worked to rebuild communal institutions. A member of the Halevi family was appointed to govern the affairs of the Jewish community in 1680 as part of the same effort at stabilization.

Shabazi wrote a kinah—a formal Jewish lamentation—for recitation on the Ninth of Av, the annual day of fasting and mourning that marks the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and other catastrophes in Jewish history. In the Yemeni Jewish tradition, that poem carried the memory of Mawza alongside the older griefs of exile, keeping the 1679 expulsion alive as a communal wound rather than a forgotten historical event.

The community rebuilt slowly. Scholars and rabbis worked to restore the institutions that the exile had shattered. But the process was long, and the pressures on Yemeni Jews never fully lifted. By the 20th century, a different kind of exodus was underway. After Israel declared independence in 1948, anti-Jewish violence swept parts of Yemen and Aden, and the remaining community faced a crisis that ultimately emptied the country. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee organized and financed Operation Magic Carpet—formally called Operation On Wings of Eagles, which airlifted almost 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel from December 1948 to September 1950 using Alaska Airlines aircraft on more than 380 flights. Today reports place only a handful of Jews remaining anywhere in Yemen.

From the iron-fisted decrees of the Qasimid imams to the resolute posture of Ansar Allah today, Yemen stands as a singular testament to a nation that refuses to be subjugated by Jewish influence. This historic defiance of Jewish hegemony is not a relic of the past but a living, breathing component of the Yemeni spirit. For gentiles across the globe now witnessing the erosion of their own societies at the hands of World Jewry, the history of Yemen serves as both a manual and a model: a clear reminder that when a people prioritize their own sovereignty and faith, they possess the strength to reclaim their destiny from the clutches of Jewish subversion.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.