528 A History of Judaism
the State of Israel has also absorbed since 1948 the Jews of Yemen and
a mass of Jews from the former Soviet Union, along with many smaller
groups with distinctive customs, from the Aramaic- speaking Jewish vil-
lagers of Kurdistan to the Bene Israel from the region around Bombay
and the Cochin Jews from the Malabar coast in the south of India and
Jews from Ethiopia, Iraq, Persia, Libya and elsewhere.
It is salutary to be reminded that the Yemenite Jews, who numbered
around 70,000 at the start of the twentieth century but had all migrated
to Israel by the 1950s, were hardly affected by any modernizing trends
in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries –
just as the messianic movements in Yemen of the nineteenth century
(such as that centred in 1862– 4 on a certain Judah b. Shalom, who was
followed also by some local Zaydi Muslims) had little effect on the Jew-
ish world outside. In the early twentieth century Yihye b. Solomon
Kafah, widely acknowledged as the pre- eminent authority within Yem-
enite Jewry, tried to introduce reforms into the education of the
community by setting up a school in 1910 in Sana to encourage Talmud
study and enlightenment on the model of the Haskalah in Europe over
a century earlier, but he provoked a storm of opposition, especially
when he questioned the authorship of the Zohar by Shimon bar Yohai.
The community, constituted mostly of poor pedlars and artisans at the
bottom of the social pyramid in Yemeni society, had few rights; as late
as the 1920s, the state required any Jewish child orphaned as a minor to
convert to Islam. About a third of the population emigrated to Israel
between 1919 and 1948, with a further 48,000 airlifted there between
June 1949 and September 1950. For most Yemenite Jews, their response
to the modern world was thus mixed up with a response to immigration
to a new society in Israel.^2
Many traditional rites of these oriental communities have survived
transplantation to Israel despite the erosion of their distinctive languages
as younger generations adopt Hebrew, and many oriental (mizrahi) Jews
in Israel maintain a religious lifestyle even if they do not think of them-
selves as religious. Of the Israelis who define themselves as shomrei
masoret (‘upholders of tradition’) rather than as secular or religious, the
majority are of oriental origin. Since between a quarter and a half of
Israelis assign themselves to this category, it constitutes a significant trend
in Israeli society. But within the haredi community the self- confident rhet-
oric of Ashkenazi yeshivah culture has tended to dominate even
communities of North African and Iraqi origin. Many Sephardi haredim
in Israel choose to study in Ashkenazi yeshivot. Even Ovadia Yosef, the