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.
Read more on JTA: https://www.jta.org/2024/01/23/israel/major-judaica-collection-amassed-by-yemenite-jewish-butcher-donated-to-the-national-library-of-israel