Epistle to Yemen אִגֶּרֶת תֵּימָן

Written in Judaeo-Arabic around 1172; its Arabic title is al-Risāla al-Yamaniyya, its second title Petaḥ Tiqvah, "the Door of Hope." The date: 1172 per the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Encyclopedia; Wikipedia gives 1173–74. It should be printed as "c. 1172."

The occasion was three afflictions at once, reported to Maimonides by the head of the Yemenite community, Jacob ben Nethanel al-Fayyūmī. First, a decree of forced conversion imposed by ʿAbd al-Nabī ibn Mahdī of the Mahdid dynasty of Zabīd (ruling in Yemen from about 1159 to 1174): a movement of Shiʿi derivation whose coercion fell on Sunnis too. Second, a Jewish apostate who had produced scriptural proofs that Muḥammad was foretold in the Torah (the standard set: Genesis 17:20, bi-meʾod meʾod equalling "Muḥammad" by gematria, and Deuteronomy 33:2). Third, a messianic claimant who had arisen "a year ago" and was calling Jews to abandon their property; he was afterwards arrested and executed by the Muslim authorities.

What the letter says, in order. A theology of persecution: Israel has always faced two kinds of enemy, the sword and the argument, and Islam belongs to the second. A rebuttal of the Muslim scriptural proofs, with an explicit 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. Advice about the false messiah, strikingly calm: he is deranged, not wicked; ask him for a verifiable sign, and warn the community that the state will kill him and blame the Jews. Then a family tradition from his father: that prophecy would be restored in 1216—offered explicitly as a tradition, not a ruling. And finally an instruction: copy the letter and read it publicly, but discreetly, lest it fall into hostile hands.

Three corrections, all of them common. The persecutors were not the Almohads. The Almohads persecuted in the Maghreb and al-Andalus; they are why Maimonides' family fled Córdoba after 1148, and the subject of a different, earlier letter. The Yemeni persecutor was ʿAbd al-Nabī ibn Mahdī, a different movement in a different theatre. The Epistle to Yemen is constantly confused with the Epistle on Forced Conversion—the ruling that one who pronounces the shahāda under duress is not thereby an apostate. That belongs to the Almohads and has nothing to do with Yemen; every "Maimonides permitted the Yemenites to convert in appearance" is a misattribution. And Maimonides did not "persuade Saladin to conquer Yemen": Tūrānshāh, Saladin's brother, took Yemen in 1174 as a straightforward Ayyubid expansion, ending Mahdid rule and, incidentally, the persecution. Print the chronology; do not print the causation.

Separately, on Maimonides' name in the Kaddish. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 says the letter made such an impression that the Yemenites included Maimonides' name in the Kaddish—and gives no citation; every modern repetition descends from that sentence. The practice of naming a living communal head in the Kaddish—the exilarch, the gaon, the nagid—is documented for the period from the Genizah, so the mechanism exists and a formula naming Maimonides in or near his lifetime is entirely conceivable. But no known Yemenite tiklāl, manuscript or printed, carries such a formula; a survey of seven hundred-odd tikālīl did not turn one up. The distinctive feature of the Baladi Kaddish is something else entirely—"we-yaṣmaḥ purqaneh wi-qarev meshiḥeh," a Palestinian-eastern formula, not a Maimonidean one. Honestly put: a tradition first printed in 1906, liturgically possible for its period, and supported by nothing.

Three Hebrew translations circulated in the Middle Ages—by Samuel ibn Tibbon, Abraham ben Ḥasdai ha-Levi and Naḥum ha-Maʿaravī; every early printing descends from the Hebrew versions, not the Arabic original. The critical edition is Abraham Halkin's (the Arabic with all three Hebrew versions) with Boaz Cohen's English translation, New York, 1952.