The Red Sea and its environs – the coast of East Africa and the western coast of the Arab peninsula – are part of one geographic zone, united but separate. One can discern climatic similarities, likeness of demographic features, political ties, and comparable cultural influences. Yemen and Ethiopia, two countries on opposite sides of the Red Sea, have historically had continuous relations, both agreeable and not.Footnote 1 One feature of these relations was the migration of people from one territory to the other. Political developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the increasing influence of European powers in the Red Sea region resulted in an increase in the flow of Jewish migrants from Jewish centres in the Arabian peninsula – Yemen and Aden – to Ethiopia, creating satellite Jewish communities there. The following discussion will examine the nature and causes of this Jewish migration. It will present the complex relations between Adeni Jews and Yemeni Jews and will argue that this resulted from the colonial situation and the role that each group played in the Italian colonial order. In addition, it will argue that while the two groups seemingly composed a single community, they did not develop a shared identity; each maintained a separate communal affinity that lasted even after the communities of origin were extinct, and until the community in Ethiopia was dissolved (Jewish immigrants called both Ethiopia and Eritrea: Ethiopia). This article's methodology is based on data that, for most part, have not been analyzed to date. It relies on oral history – personal interviews with Adeni Jews and Yemeni Jews now living in Israel – and on written sources such as memoirs, itinerary books, and newspaper articles.
Political Survey: the Intervention of World Powers
The importance of the Red Sea as a strategic waterway en route to Eastern Africa and the Far East has long been known and became even more important after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. By 1839 the British had captured the port town of Aden on the southern tip of the Arab peninsula, transforming it into an important base on the way to India.Footnote 2 The Ottoman Empire, fearful of the growing British presence in the area, conquered the coastal Yemeni Red Sea plain in the mid-nineteenth century, and took over central Yemen in 1872, to remain there until 1918.Footnote 3 In the 1880s, following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, Italy also became a major player in the region. In 1885 Italian forces landed in the Ethiopian port town of Massawa, and from there advanced inland. Italy's attempt to take over all of Ethiopia was blocked by Melenik II in 1896, in the famous Adwa battle, but in 1900 they completed their conquest of the Ethiopian Red Sea coast and established the colony of Eritrea. In 1935 Mussolini's Italy conquered all of Ethiopia. The country remained, like Eritrea, an Italian colony until 1941 when, in the course of World War II, the Italians were ousted by the British.Footnote 4 Following the British withdrawal, Emperor Hayla-Sellase ruled over a united Ethiopia but in 1952 Eritrea became an autonomous province of Ethiopia and in 1962 it was annexed to Ethiopia. The Emperor was overthrown in the 1974 revolution and in 1977 Mengistu Hayla-Maryam took over the country. He established a centralised-military government and held Marxist-Leninist ideas. In 1991, following a civil war, Eritrea became an independent state.
The world-powers' involvement in the Red Sea region, in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, brought about new activity in the area and strengthened relations between its two coasts. Foreign troops and administrators stationed in Aden, Yemen and Eritrea encouraged economic undertakings. Foreign merchants were joined by local merchants, Jews and non-Jews, and these were followed by labour migrants.
The Jews of Aden
The most conspicuous Jewish migration to Ethiopia, especially to Eritrea, came from Aden. When Aden came under British rule in 1839, the Adeni Jewish community numbered about two hundred and fifty, most originally from inland Yemen. Like their Yemeni brethren, Aden Jews were craftsmen mainly silversmiths. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Aden became an important mercantile centre, Jews joined in the commercial activities and deserted their traditional occupations almost entirely. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Adeni Jewish community was reinforced by additional Yemeni Jews and also by Jews from India, Britain, Persia, Egypt and Ottoman centres such as Iraq and Anatolia – all of whom came to Aden for business. These immigrants helped to create a cosmopolitan Jewish community that communicated in Arabic, English and Hebrew.Footnote 5 Since Adeni Jews (like many Yemeni Jews) adopted the Sephardic prayer tradition,Footnote 6 the newcomers, who were mainly Sephardic, were easily absorbed into local religious and communal life. They thus contributed to the creation of a new communal Sephardic-Adeni identity, which supported the Adeni claim to being different from the rest of the Jews of Yemen. This claim was also sustained by the fact that most Adeni Jews were British subjects.Footnote 7 Some Adeni Jews entered the Indian-British commercial network, and later expanded their commercial activities to the coast of East Africa.
Through almost the entire nineteenth century, the Adeni community depended on Yemen for spiritual guidance. The Aden court (bet din) accepted the legal authority of the Jewish court in Sanˋa' and Adeni ritual slaughterers received their authorisation from Yemeni rabbis.Footnote 8 During the twentieth century, with Aden's growing modernisation and its increasing importance as a British stronghold in the Middle East, and also as a base for Yemeni Jewish emigration to Palestine, its secular Jewish communal institutions were strengthened under the presidency of the Messa family (Menahem Messa was the founder of the dynasty and his son Benin was especially influential).Footnote 9 But in spite of the presence of a number of prominent rabbis, its religious institutions did not develop at the same pace. The Adeni Jewish community depended on learned Yemeni Jews who served in different religious capacities.Footnote 10
Adeni Jews Immigrating to Ethiopia
From the end of the nineteenth century and until the middle of the twentieth century, Ethiopian external trade was controlled by foreign traders, who also entered into internal trade.Footnote 11 During this time, Adeni Jews began to migrate to Ethiopia in significant numbers. Utilising business ties and family relations, these Jews in Ethiopia developed commercial ventures with Aden and with other Red Sea centres in Yemen, Sudan, Egypt and elsewhere. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Benin Messa opened a commercial branch of the family company in Addis Ababa (in addition to other African branches in Djibouti and Kenya),Footnote 12 and in about 1910 he constructed a building for offices and storage in Addis. This outpost developed into the Benin Sefer (compound) where other families settled and created a small Jewish community, which, at its height, numbered about seventy Adeni Jews.Footnote 13 The upper story of the building was used by the Benins as a vault to store silver coins, the Austrian Maria-Theresa thalers (circulated in Yemen and in other Red Sea regions). In the early 1920s, when Jews from Yemen joined the compound, it was transformed into a synagogue.Footnote 14 Gabriel Sion, an Ethiopian-born Adeni Jew, relates that Yemeni Jews who arrived in Addis tried their fortune in trade but most left after a short period of time. He recalls however, that Yefet, a Yemeni Jewish teacher, remained. In the 1950s he taught Jewish children Hebrew and religious studies.Footnote 15
It was Eritrea that attracted most of the Jewish emigration to Ethiopia. Adeni Jews are recorded as having founded commercial colonies in Eritrea as early as the 1890s and, in the port town of Massawa and in Asmara, formed thriving trading communities.Footnote 16 In Massawa, which for centuries was an important commercial centre, they encountered foreign merchants, among them Jews from Italy, Izmir and other Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire, who had arrived with the Italians in the 1880s. The ‘European section’ of Massawa numbered about two thousand five hundred inhabitants during the 1920s.Footnote 17 An earthquake in 1922 almost completely destroyed Massawa and drove many of its Jewish inhabitants to settle in the highland town of Asmara.Footnote 18 A few Adeni Jews made fortunes and acquired real estate in Eritrea: shops and houses both to conduct their own business in and to let.
The first known Jewish community leader was Nissim Behar, a Jew from Istanbul. In 1904 the Italian colonial authorities granted Behar, in his capacity as the head of the Jewish community, a piece of land on which the Jewish synagogue was erected in 1905.Footnote 19 Following him was Shoa Menahem Joseph, a most remarkable Adeni Jew, who headed the Eritrean Jewish community for about forty years (from circa 1927).Footnote 20 Born in Aden around 1880 (and died in Asmara in 1966), he arrived in Massawa in 1911. There he worked for Mansur, an Adeni Jew who owned a draper's shop. In 1922, when Mansur left Eritrea because of the earthquake, Shoa bought his firm, moved to Asmara and expanded the business which retained the name Mansur. His family owned almost two entire streets in the commercial centre of Asmara.Footnote 21 Other Adeni Jews were employed as shopkeepers, shop-assistants, clerks, bookkeepers, shoemakers, goldsmiths, and the like, and many worked for the Shoa Menahem Yosef enterprise.Footnote 22
Yemeni Jews Emigrating to Ethiopia
Adeni Jews were joined in Ethiopia by Jews from inland Yemen. Yemeni Jewry was one of the oldest communities in the Jewish world, dating back at least to the second century. Throughout the centuries Yemeni Jews retained ties with other Jewish centres and adopted some of the important developments in the Jewish world, such as Jewish law and its interpretation, poetry and Kabbala. Learning centres and Jewish courts prevailed in many settlements and in district towns, all recognising the moral authority and scholarly leadership of the High Court of Sanˋa'. In Yemen, the Jews made their living mainly as craftsmen, retail traders and pedlars.Footnote 23 Relative to conditions in Yemen, their economic situation was adequate. But in times of plagues and droughts – which were frequent in Yemen's history – they suffered like the rest of the population, and seemingly more, from economic hardships.
As nineteenth-century political and economic developments left their imprint on Yemen, the country was pulled into the world economy. Consequently, Yemen's inhabitants became aware of economic opportunities elsewhere. During the first half of the twentieth century, the industrial and commercial centre of Aden attracted cheap Yemeni labour, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Some Jews continued to Africa in pursuit of better economic prospects, travelling from Aden mainly to near-by Ethiopian centres and also to Djibouti and Somali. Aharon Aharon and some friends, for example, left the village of Tirba (in the Sadda district) for Aden. They intended to work there for a while, earn some money, and return home. While in Aden they heard that the Italians were hiring hands for a road they were building in Azab, the southern port of Eritrea. They crossed the Red Sea to Ethiopia and after finishing their job in Azab, some of them continued on to Asmara.Footnote 24 Other Jewish immigrants to Ethiopia crossed the Red Sea directly from settlements in Yemen. They joined existing Jewish settlements and worked there as artisans, pedlars, and religious functionaries.Footnote 25 The 1920s and mainly the 1930s and 1940s witnessed increasing numbers of Yemeni Jewish craftsmen travelling regularly to Ethiopia, working for several months and then returning home.Footnote 26 But some remained in Ethiopia, mainly in Eritrea. There were also Jews who reached Ethiopia in search of temporary asylum from troubles at home.Footnote 27 Others saw Ethiopia as an interim station on their way to Palestine. For example, Yosef Hubara of Sanˋa' intended to emigrate to Palestine in 1922. When he reached Aden he found that he would neither get an emigration certificate to Palestine nor a travel permit to Port Sa'id. He learnt, however, that the Italian consul was distributing passage certificates to Massawa from where it would be easy to reach Port Sa'id and continue on to Palestine. Hubara arrived in Eritrea in 1922, stayed for two years and continued to Palestine.Footnote 28 Such people stayed only for a short time and it seems that they (as well as the temporary labour migrants) were not always registered as members of the Jewish community.
In 1935 there were about two hundred and fifty Jews in Eritrea, most in Asmara. Sixty per cent of Asmara's Jews were Adeni, twenty percent were Yemeni and the rest were of Italian, Ottoman-Turkish and Spanish origin.Footnote 29 When the British entered Asmara in 1941, they registered four hundred Jews. At the end of the 1950s, Asmara's Jewish population had grown to about five hundred, even after many Jews had emigrated to Israel. This figure remained constant up to 1975 (when the total population of Asmara numbered more than twenty thousand).Footnote 30
Adeni-Yemeni Relations in Eritrea
On arriving in Eritrea, the Yemeni Jews encountered the more affluent and better-established Adeni Jews. In practice, the Adeni Jews acted as absorbing agents, but their treatment of the Yemenis was ambivalent: reservations and rejection on one hand and acceptance on the other. As in other instances of Jewish migration within Europe and to the USA, friction between the old-established Jewish community and the poorer newcomers was not uncommon. In nineteenth century Germany, for example, the local better-off modernised Jews looked down with disgust on poor ‘backward’ Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews) immigrants and maintained a distance from them.Footnote 31 Similar patterns of behaviour were discerned in the United States by the veteran German Jewish immigrants towards East European poor immigrants.Footnote 32 The relations between Adeni and Yemeni Jews in Eritrea were likewise shaped by the extent of modernisation and by class differences. Additionally, however, they were also affected by the fact that the Adenis relied on the same religious and cultural heritage as did Yemeni Jews, and more importantly they were moulded by social and political pressures that stemmed from Italian colonialism in Eritrea. Thus, the ambivalent Adeni attitude toward Yemeni Jews resulted from two conflicting factors: the Adeni concern that their position in the white colonising society might be jeopardised by their association with Yemeni Jews; and their dependence on Yemeni Jews to reinforce the Jewish community and contribute to its religious life.
As a result of Italian colonial regulations, associating with Yemeni Jews placed Adeni Jews in an uncomfortable situation. The Italians pursued a policy of segregation, based on their conviction that the colony would be controlled only by a separation of races and by cultivating European superiority.Footnote 33 Italian colonial law differentiated between Italians and those entitled to be equal to their legal status, including foreign citizens and persons assimilated into European culture; and colonial subjects, i.e., indigenous Africans and other persons who did not belong to the first group, among them all immigrants from Arab countries. Members of the colonial elite benefited from diverse social, economic and legal advantages and from civil rights of which all the rest were deprived. For example, civic and penal cases involving one or more ‘Italians’ were judged by the colonial judicial authority, while colonial subjects were judged by the traditional local legal system. The latter were also excluded from European neighbourhoods and confined to separate living quarters.Footnote 34 Thus, children of Italian fathers and African concubines were considered as Italians only if recognised by the father, otherwise they would be taken as colonial subjects.Footnote 35 Consequently, the Adenis, who were all British subjects, were regarded as members of the colonial group, while Yemeni Jews were defined as indigenous colonial subjects. The Jewish community's attempts during the first two decades of the twentieth century to equalise the legal status of all Jews were rejected by Italian authorities.Footnote 36
The Adenis strove to consolidate their position in the colonial society and propel their community upward, as close as possible to the Italian rulers. Accordingly, Samuel (Sammy) Cohen, a prominent member of the community and currently the last of the Jews of Asmara, presented the life of the Jewish community as always being interwoven with the lives of the Italians: “we grew up with the Italians, we lived with them and we had many Italian friends”.Footnote 37 The Adenis dressed in European fashion and sent their children to be educated in the Italian kindergartens and day schools operated by the church (though a few sent their children to the English school).Footnote 38 Poor Jews coming from Yemen in their traditional costume embarrassed the Adenis and threatened their position as part of the ‘Italian society’. Hubara, a native of Sanˋa', reports that when he first arrived in Asmara in 1922, a local Adeni Jew refused to walk beside him, since he did not wish to be seen to maintain friendly relations with an indigenous black person. Hubara continues that he soon learned that:
The Italians divide all people into two groups: whites and blacks. The Europeans were white and the Abyssinians and other Africans were black. As to the Jews – those who dressed in European fashion were considered white, but those dressed in oriental clothing would be despised and humiliated just like the blacks.Footnote 39
The Adenis, therefore, hastened to change the Jewish newcomers' appearance and to give them a ‘European’ look, to blur their coreligionists' identification with ‘the blacks’, which might taint them as well. They asked the Yemenis to conceal their head locks and provided them with western-style suits.Footnote 40 In addition, the Adenis helped the Yemeni immigrants to improve their economic conditions and to come closer, but not too close, to their own modern community. The newcomers were usually helped to set up a small-scale business, to establish themselves in the crafts (e.g., silversmiths, shoemakers and carpenters), or to work as helpers in Adeni stores and in services.Footnote 41 Usually, they did not perform ‘dirty’ manual jobs, “since for this there were the blacks”.Footnote 42 Yet, a few of the Yemenis obtained a parcel of land and farmed it much like the local population – an occupation that the Adenis avoided.Footnote 43 Some Yemeni women worked in low-income jobs such as washing, ironing and baking bread for sale in the Jewish community.Footnote 44 During the 1930s, with increased emigration from Yemen to Ethiopia, the Adenis were alarmed that the demographic balance between themselves and the Yemenis would be threatened. They encouraged and helped newly-arrived Yemeni Jews to travel to Aden, and to wait there for an opportunity to go to Palestine.Footnote 45
Though they patronised the Yemenis, the Adenis depended on them for human reinforcement of their small community and as an important contribution to religious life. Ovadia Hazi claims that “the Adenis needed the Yemenis for the synagogue only”, and according to Aharon Aharon, “the Adenis in Asmara were rich but they did not have a rabbi or a shohet (ritual slaughterer)”.Footnote 46 After increased Yemeni Jewish immigration in the 1920s, religious life was revitalised. The synagogue (built in 1905), which usually opened only on Saturdays, was opened for daily services.Footnote 47 Italian education served secular purposes well, but Adeni Jews, who were all religious, sought some religious education for their children that would help to sustain religious communal life. Since Aden traditionally looked to Yemen for religious guidance, and Yemeni teachers (moris) used to teach children in Aden,Footnote 48 Yemeni immigrants were welcomed as suitable religious teachers and providers of other religious services. Yemeni moris taught Adeni and Yemeni children according to Yemeni Jewish tradition. Studies were held in the Asmara synagogue in the afternoons and on Sundays, and while mainly children participated, adults did as well.Footnote 49 Yemeni immigrants were also in charge of conducting festive ceremonies. Yishaq Suberi, a native of Sanˋa', relates that during a wedding festival in 1928 in Asmara, attended by “the entire Jewish community, the rabbis, the leaders, the wealthy Adenis and the sons of the rich”, he found that the Adenis did not know the songs that should be sung on such an “honourable occasion”. Suberi became the expert in this area and later led the singing at circumcision parties and weddings.Footnote 50
Yemeni Jews held other religious functions. During the early 1920s, the Yemeni Mori Shalom (Salem) al-Qahlani, originally from Sanˋa', who grew up in Manakha in central Yemen, served as Chief Rabbi to the Asmara community.Footnote 51 After Rabbi Qahlani's death, spiritual leadership went to Adeni Jews: Sulayman Zecharia in 1925–1927 and Yehiel Banin in 1927–1940. The Chief Rabbi from 1943 until his death in the mid-1960s was the Yemeni Rabbi Rason Tobi.Footnote 52 In the late 1920s, Mori Sulayman Garama was the shohet of Asmara.Footnote 53 During the 1930s, the shohet was Mori David, a Yemeni from al-'Awd, who also served as the hazan (cantor).Footnote 54 It should be noted that although religious teachings were conducted in the Yemeni tradition, prayers were read in the Asmara synagogue according to Adeni Sephardic tradition and melodies.Footnote 55 Thus even in the synagogue Yemeni Jews were subordinated to the Adenis' social superiority.
Marriage ties as a social signifier
Adeni men living in Ethiopia continued to marry Adeni women, usually members of their extended families. When a suitable match could not be found, a bride or a groom would be brought in from Aden. Yet, a small number married other foreign Jews in Ethiopia.Footnote 56 As to the Yemeni men – most were married men who had left their families in Yemen. After making some money, some returned to Yemen for good, others went for a visit and came back. The minority brought their families to Ethiopia. The rest, in the course of time, married in Ethiopia. Among them were married men who deserted their wives in Yemen,Footnote 57 and, in accordance with Yemeni Jewish polygamist tradition, took a second wife in Ethiopia. Some men married local Yemeni Jewish women, but most married into the indigenous African Jewish and non-Jewish society. In Ethiopia there existed an old Jewish community: Beta Israel (Falasha). Jewish legal authorities doubted their being ‘real’ Jews, but a 1973 ordinance by Israel's Chief Rabbi clarified the issue accepting them as Jews.Footnote 58 There is no data available to assess the exact number of Yemeni men who married into local African society, but it seems that this was a common phenomenon. Thus, Aharon Aharon relates of his friend Meshumar Melihi, with whom he came to Ethiopia in 1937, who married a local Beta Israel (Falasha) woman from Gondar. Melihi remained in Gondar until he emigrated to Israel (his family currently lives in the town of Ramla).Footnote 59 Hazi, who knew Melihi, counts four more Yemeni men who married Falasha women in Gondar.Footnote 60 Also, visiting Gondar in 1952, Haim Shoshkes met a number of Yemeni Jews, “all married black Falasha women”. He writes that they all spoke Hebrew and were looking for the opportunity to emigrate from Ethiopia to Israel.Footnote 61 Aharon Aharon himself left his pregnant wife in Yemen, stayed in Asmara for five years and in Addis Ababa for seven years. In Addis he married Masraja, a Beta Israel woman, who bore him a son, Shelomo. He later deserted his second wife when she was pregnant, took his Ethiopian-born son to Aden and emigrated in 1950 to Israel.Footnote 62 Similarly, Yishaq Yishaq Ma'bari, a married man with a young son (whose family had migrated from Yemen to Aden when he was about 10) was invited to Ethiopia around 1915, before the high holidays, to work as a shohet in Diredawah [Dire Dawa]. He eventually married a gentile indigenous woman whom he converted to Judaism and had seven children. In 1971 he emigrated to Israel with his family.Footnote 63
Hence, marrying into the local Ethiopian population clearly classified Yemeni Jews as colonial subjects, while the inter-communal marriage ties of Adenis – British subjects – preserved their status as part of the colonial society.
Conclusion
Yemeni Jews and Adeni Jews lived side by side for many years. The majority shared a common Yemeni Jewish origin, they prayed in the same synagogue, and some of their children attended the same schools (the Catholic Italian school, which was open also to ‘assimilated’ colonial subjects,Footnote 64 in the mornings and the religious Yemeni-style school in the afternoons) – nevertheless they did not develop a common identity. The Adenis preserved a sense of separateness and superiority, derived mainly from their claim to be part of the colonising society and based on their higher economic status. Their sense of exclusivity was further strengthened by their inter-communal marriage customs, connecting them as members of one big extended family, from which Jewish colonial subjects were excluded. Hubara wrote: “They were careful not to become too close to the Yemenis and they kept to themselves in a separate circle”. Mockingly, Hubara, a man of Sanˋa', added: “The Adenis developed a strange custom to call themselves Sephardic, while they are, of course, none other than rural Yemeni Jews, most originated from Shar'ab [in south Yemen]”.Footnote 65
According to Homi K. Bhabha, ‘whiteness’ acts as a strategy of authority that takes for granted the demand for power and privilege.Footnote 66 Like the Italian colonialist who related this strategy to all colonial subjects, so did the Adenis. They implemented ‘whiteness’ towards ‘others’ – native Africans as well as their coreligionist Yemeni Jews. The Adenis were unable to conceal their cooperation and religious affinity with a lower class in the colonial order: the legally-defined ‘black’ native Yemeni Jews. However, similar to Fanon's observations, who pointed to the new stands taken by blacks in an attempt to integrate into the white colonial society, in order to ‘become’ white,Footnote 67 so the Adenis denied their own ‘blackness’ by means of social disengagement from Yemeni Jews, and assimilation into Italian society and culture. This conduct was designated to make them more ‘white’ and to preserve their position as belonging to the ‘European’ class. The colonial situation therefore created a flexible consciousness of one imagined Jewish community, and pushed the object of identification towards the colonial society. Thus ethnicity and religion clearly proved weaker than social and economic considerations.
Rejected by the Adenis, Yemeni Jews were motivated to cultivate their own unique identity. In response to their peripheral place in colonial society (their position as colonial subjects, their lower social and economic status, their exclusion from marrying Adenis), they developed a sense of superiority vis-à-vis the Adenis that relied on their awareness of possessing higher religious knowledge and better understanding of the ‘proper’ way to conduct communal life. This process was encouraged by the regular arrival of temporary migrant Jewish labourers from Yemen in Ethiopia, which strengthened the ties with their communities of origin and consolidated their awareness of the richness of their cultural heritage. Hence, even after living in Ethiopia for decades, or even having been born there, and having adopted many Adeni and Ethiopian cultural components, they remained Yemeni Jews, rather than Adeni or Ethiopian Jews. Therefore, after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, when the Jews of Yemen poured into Aden on their way to Israel, most Yemeni Jews in Ethiopia joined them, while most of Adeni Jews remained.Footnote 68
The Jewish community of foreign origin survived in Ethiopia until 1974 when political changes and the nationalisation projects of the Mengistu Hayla-Maryam regime (1974–1991) drove most of the foreigners out. A few Jews left Eritrea for Addis Ababa, but the great majority left Africa entirely.Footnote 69 Meanwhile, the British had left Aden in 1967 and its Jewish community became extinct. As Aden was no longer an option, most foreign Jews in Ethiopia, Adeni, Yemeni and other Sephardic Jews, emigrated to Israel.Footnote 70 Others migrated to Britain; some to Italy and other western countries. The existence of three peripheral Jewish communities – the prominent Yemeni community and its satellites in Aden and Ethiopia – eventually came to an end.Footnote 71 Yet it seems that for the time being even in their new locations its members still cherish their separate and unique identities.
