The Epistle to Yemen: Maimonides answers Yemen

The head of Yemenite Jewry, Jacob ben Nethanel al-Fayyūmī, wrote to Maimonides in Fustat about three afflictions: a decree of forced conversion imposed by ʿAbd al-Nabī ibn Mahdī of the Mahdid dynasty of Zabīd; a Jewish apostate who had produced scriptural proofs that Muḥammad was foretold in the Torah; and a messianic claimant calling Jews to abandon their property. The answer is the Epistle to Yemen, in Arabic al-Risāla al-Yamaniyya, around 1172.

In the letter: a theology of persecution (Israel has two kinds of enemy, the sword and the argument, and Islam is the second); a rebuttal of the Muslim proofs with a refusal to treat gematria as probative; an attack on astrological and gematria-based calculation of the date—the date is unknowable, and the calculators do more harm than the persecutors; calm advice about the false messiah (he is deranged, not wicked; ask for a verifiable sign, and know that the state will kill him and blame the Jews); a family tradition from his father about the restoration of prophecy in 1216, offered explicitly as a tradition; and an instruction to copy the letter and read it publicly, but discreetly.

Four corrections. The persecutors were not the Almohads: the Almohads persecuted in the Maghreb and al-Andalus, while the Yemeni persecutor was ʿAbd al-Nabī ibn Mahdī; the error is universal. The Epistle to Yemen is not the Epistle on Forced Conversion: the ruling that one who pronounces the shahāda under duress is not an apostate belongs to the Almohads and has nothing to do with Yemen. Maimonides did not "persuade Saladin to conquer Yemen": Tūrānshāh took Yemen in 1174 as a straightforward Ayyubid expansion, ending Mahdid rule and incidentally the persecution; print the chronology, not the causation. And Maimonides' name in the Yemenite Kaddish is unverified: the claim was first printed without a citation in 1906; the practice of naming a living communal head in the Kaddish is documented for the period from the Genizah, but no known tiklāl carries such a formula.

And a fifth, about Yemen itself: it was not a theological backwater that merely received Maimonides. Jacob's father, Nethanel al-Fayyūmī, wrote around 1160 the Bustān al-ʿUqūl—a Jewish theology in Ismāʿīlī terms, teaching cyclical prophecy and accepting Muḥammad as a genuine prophet sent to the Arabs. Maimonides was writing into a live and many-voiced milieu, and the Epistle to Yemen is, among other things, an answer to that.