Summary

Jewish Yemen was and remains one of the most conservative of Jewish cultures, denying women access to literacy and by extension access to the religious laws that control their lives. Yet individual women (and men) deliberately violated religious law and local custom, even under the onus of death and dying. The tale presented here illustrates some of the limitations of de jure control. Even when dying and possibly in fear of the next world, yet individuals will go their own way.

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Introduction

Jews have lived in Yemen, Aden and the Hadhramaut for more than 2500 years. Data from Aden include gravestones inscribed in Hebrew beginning from the third century BCE to the mid-twentieth CE (Klein-Franke 2005). Then as now Muslim as well as Jewish cemeteries’ locations must have been allocated by the local sheikhs who have controlled their tribal lands for thousands of years. Jewish gravesites were, for the most part, located near towns’ and villages’ Jewish quarters in the least fruitful soils, far from the Muslim cemeteries and far from Muslim residential neighborhoods. In Aden they often surrounded the local בתי כנסת synagogues (Michal 1990: 19).