‘Here's your dinner, Jews’: Yemenite-Jewish lamentation in Israel as a commemoration of shame

Abstract

A covert reason for the decline of ritual wailing among Yemenite-Jewish women in Israel is the community's memory of its stay in Yemen as a period of 'exile' manifested in dhimmi status. According to respondents' oral history, Jewish lamentation was exploited by members of the majority Muslim population to compel Jewsmostly mento wail in honor of Muslim dead. The article makes its main contribution by revealing this historical episode and analyzing the standing of women's lamentation in the context of religiopolitical tension. The respondents' narrative reveals that although the wailers mitigated the humiliating effects of this spectacle, the appropriation of their community custom impaired Jewish men's gender status and ability to perform religious differentiation. This, coupled with changes caused by their relocation to Israel, has made women's lament the commemoration of a practice that evokes shame among members of this community, abetting its decline in the past decade.

Civil melancholia: Yemenite Jews’ responses to the kidnapping of their children

“…The melancholic implication, that people who consider themselves exiled are decreed to experience the pain of exile, penetrated the Yemenite Jews’ religious faith. In their prayers, rituals, customs, and songs, they acknowledged that Yemen was not their country and that they would attain sociopolitical hegemony only in the Holy Land (Gamliel 2014b). The saying, however, permeated the core reality of Yemenite‐Jewish life in Israel and remains in use, indicating that Yemenite Jews analogize their past trauma, notably the Orphans’ Decree, with that of the present.…”