Aden עֲדֶן

Aden lies on the hinge of the sea route between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries the port's Jewish community was not a periphery but the pivot of the whole system. Some hundred and fifty Genizah documents were written in Aden, sent to Aden, or concern Aden; the corpus was assembled by S. D. Goitein over five decades and published posthumously with Mordechai Friedman as India Traders of the Middle Ages.

The rabbinical court of Aden acknowledged the jurisdiction of the Egyptian centre, and Aden together with some twenty Indian ports and Ceylon formed a single rabbinic district. The nagid of Aden sent halakhic questions with lavish gifts to the head of the Palestinian yeshiva resident in Fustat—which drew the displeasure of the pro-Baghdad party. Aden's merchants sent money to Maimonides, and his son Rabbi Abraham answered their queries.

Aden's second life begins in 1839, when the British took it: the city became both refuge and corridor. Its Jewish population: 250 of six hundred inhabitants in 1839, 1,500 by 1860, 4,500 by 1945. The Suez Canal of 1869 made Aden a boom port and pulled Yemenite Jews down from the highlands. Through Aden came books, news and—from 1881—aliyah.

The end was abrupt. The riots of December 1947, after the partition vote, killed 76–82 Jews (with them 33 Arabs, four Muslim Indians and one Somali), destroyed synagogues and shops, and shattered the Aden community's confidence in British protection. In 1949–50 almost the whole of Yemenite Jewry was carried out through Aden: the transit camp Ḥashed outside the city, renamed Geʾulah, "Redemption," was built for five hundred and at times held twelve or thirteen thousand.