Aʿaleh be-Tamar: the Yemenite aliyah of 1881

The name is אעלה בתמר, "I will climb up into the palm tree," from Song of Songs 7:9, and it works as a chronogram: the letters of בתמר rearrange into תרמ"ב, that is 5642 = 1881/82, and tamar, "palm," chimes with Teiman. They left, in fact, still in 5641: the year of the sign began in the autumn, and they did not wait for it. Such a signature on a project itself explains what the departure meant to those departing.

They left after Shavuot 1881 from Sana'a and the surrounding settlements: some thirty families, about two hundred people. The route was overland to Aden and thence by sea—some via Egypt and Suez, some via India—to Jaffa, then Jerusalem. The first arrived from August 1881, that is months before the Biluim (July 1882), with whose arrival the First Aliyah is conventionally begun.

From 1884, on the eastern slope opposite the City of David, on land donated by the philanthropist Boaz ben Yonatan Mizraḥi, they founded Kefar ha-Shiloaḥ—Silwan, named for the Pool of Siloam. At its largest, about a hundred and fifty families. The final evacuation was August 1938, during the Arab Revolt: fifty-seven years, almost to the month, from the first arrival.

Yemenite migration then continued unbroken to 1914; in that period about a tenth of Yemenite Jewry left. Jerusalem: over 2,500 Yemenites by 1908; Jaffa about 350 in 1903; in Ereẓ Israel altogether about 4,500 by the end of the First World War, about 28,000 by 1939 and about 35,000 by 1947.

Three corrections. The Yemenite aliyah of 1881 preceded the East European First Aliyah—and is nevertheless systematically omitted from the story of the "First Aliyah," which begins with Bilu and the Ḥovevei Ẓion colonies. That is not a trifle but a distortion. The motive was messianic and religious, not Zionist: the year תרמ"ב was read as a sign, to which were added reports reaching Yemen of Montefiore's and the Rothschilds' activity in Palestine and of railway construction; Zionism as a movement did not exist in 1881. And "the aliyah of 1881" is not one event: waves continued to 1914, and its largest organised phase was the Yavne'eli mission of 1911–12, when Shmuel Yavne'eli, sent by the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization, travelled Yemen disguised as a Sephardi rabbi and recruited fifteen hundred to two thousand Yemenites explicitly as cheap agricultural labour for the moshavot. That chapter has its own well-documented record—of exploitation, and of housing discrimination at Kinneret, Reḥovot and Rishon le-Ẓion.

And one thing more that gives the last correction weight: Yemenite Jews were not peasants. They had been barred from owning land in the seventeenth century, and they were an artisan class—silversmiths, blacksmiths, jewellers, weavers, potters, saddlers. Their recruitment as agricultural labourers was therefore not a "return to the soil" but a forced change of occupation.