GUEST POST: Forgotten Oppression

“According to a verse repeated twice in the Koran (2:58, 3:108) or at least according to its interpretation, God [Allah] has ordained that the Jews be poor. 
In Yemen and other Muslim countries, this is taken literally.
The Jews avoid any appearance of affluence.

In times of anarchy or in regions beyond the reach of the central government, Jewish property, even houses, were taken away from them under the pretext that they presented a picture of wealth incompatible with the state assigned to the Jews by God [Allah].”

SOURCE:Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages (chapter 5, page 75) by S. D. Goitein, 1955, 1964, 1970 by Schocken Books, New York, ISBN-10: 0805204644 ISBN-13: 978-0805204643, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-7968

 “A scourge even more terrible than the prohibition against [Jewish] emigration was the forced conversion of [Jewish] orphans practiced by the Shi’ites of Yemen.
Since [year] 1929 [CE], when I first began to study the language and life - it would be more correct to say the languages and lives - of the Jewish communities of Yemen, I have been collecting materiel on this sad chapter in Arab-Jewish symbiosis.

Its worst aspect perhaps was not so much its coercion in matters of conscience, terrible as that was, but the fact that children were torn away from their mothers and brothers from sisters.  To my mind, this law, which was enforced with new vigor about thirty years ago, more than anything else impelled the Yemenite Jews to quit this country to which they were very much attached.”

SOURCE:Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages (chapter 5, page 77) by S. D. Goitein, 1955, 1964, 1970 by Schocken Books, New York, ISBN-10: 0805204644 ISBN-13: 978-0805204643, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-7968