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.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.