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JewishHistoryעברית

Orphan's Decree in Yemen

Date
c. 1922 – 1929
Location
YemenYemen
Then part of
Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen
Perpetrators
  • Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din and Zaydi state officers (State)
Killed (estimate)
No reliable estimate
Category
Forced conversion, Persecution
Confidence
Medium

Summary

Under Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din the Zaydi state applied the Orphan's Decree (gezerat ha-yetomim), a Yemeni rule that dhimmi children left without parents were to be taken by the state and raised as Muslims. Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman traces the statute to eighteenth-century Zaydi legal interpretations and notes reports of its use from the 1920s. The Jewish Virtual Library dates a twentieth-century reintroduction to 1922. A letter printed in Doar Hayom and reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on 7 April 1929 said the imam issued an enforcement edict on 15 December 1928, that police searched for fatherless Jewish children, and that 27 orphans had been converted, including a brother and sister on 23 January.

Sources

  1. Jews in Islamic Countries: Yemen. Jewish Virtual Library
  2. Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman, The Forced Conversion of Jewish Orphans in Yemen. International Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge University Press) (2001)
  3. Edict in Yemen Forces Jewish Orphans to Embrace Moslem Faith. Jewish Telegraphic Agency (1929)

Jewish population (estimates)

  • Worldwide: 14,400,000[4]c. 1922DellaPergola's revised core-population figure for 1 January 1922.
  • Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen: 45,000 – 55,000[56]c. 1939AJYB 1946–47: Yemen 50,000 in 1939 and 45,000 in 1945. AJYB 1948–49: 45,000. JVL Arab table / Yemen page: 55,000 for Yemen in 1948 (Yemen/Aden combined rows elsewhere reach 63,000). No opened page gave a separate verified country total for 1922 (Orphan's Decree year); 1939 is the nearest Year Book snapshot for the Mutawakkilite kingdom.

Sources for population estimates

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