At the age of thirty, a well-to-do German Jew named Hermann Burchardt set off for Damascus and began searching for exotic peoples he could learn about and photograph. This quest brought him, in 1901, to Sana’a in Yemen, as Chen Malul writes. (Includes photographs.)

On his wanderings around the hilly capital city, [Burchardt] was stunned by a group of people he encountered: members of the Sana’a Jewish community, whose ties to other Jewish communities worldwide had been almost completely severed for generations. Together with his large entourage, Burchardt spent nearly a year with the community. He got to know them personally, to study and document their customs, and listen to their unique life stories—transcribing almost every word in his diary.

And, for the first time in history, he photographed them. The article he published in the [German Jewish] journal Ost und West included the spectacularly beautiful, first-ever photographs of the Yemenite Jewish community.

The images were nothing short of a revelation for European Jewry. . . . It seemed as if the world’s most authentic Jews, who had lived completely isolated from any foreign influence, had finally been found—at least, this is what they believed in Europe. The article so excited the journal’s readership that the photographs were turned into postcards, which were sold and circulated by the thousands.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.