Today’s newsletter began with Yemen, so it seems appropriate to conclude with Yemen as well. In January, the National Library of Israel announced that it had acquired the world’s largest collection of Yemenite Judaica, comprising some 60,000 manuscripts and fragmentary texts. Asaf Elia Shalev tells the story behind this archive:

The massive collection was donated by the descendants of Yehuda Levi Nahum, a butcher who died in 1998 after spending more than 50 years meticulously acquiring and studying the material. It includes Judeo-Yemenite translations of works by the medieval intellectual giant Maimonides, and writings by Yihya Saleh, a leading 18th-century rabbinic-law scholar from Yemen, as well as ancient Jewish marriage contracts.

The unlikely story of this accumulation of Jewish literary riches begins a century ago in the town of Sana’a in Yemen when Nahum was an enterprising young teenager. Born to a family with limited means, he had saved up some money by selling candy and clothing. At age fourteen, he convinced his parents to allow him to leave the country and travel hundreds of miles to the Holy Land.

Earning a living as a butcher, he spent his free time collecting handwritten books. He started by writing to his parents in Yemen, requesting items; his parents didn’t arrive until 1949 with Operation Magic Carpet, which brought the bulk of Yemenite Jewry to Israel. Later, he visited the immigrant camps and acquired books from the new arrivals.

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.