Sana'a צַנְעָא

Sana'a stands at about 2,250 metres, and that fact once decided the community's fate: when in 1679 the Jews were driven to Mawzaʿ on the Tihāma coastal plain, they were marched eleven days downhill, out of a mountain climate into the heat—and in that, not in massacre, lay the chief cause of the mortality.

Fifteen kilometres to the south-east, at Bayt Ḥāḍir, the inscription DJE 23 was found: the list of the priestly courses, in Hebrew, of the fourth or fifth century. Jewish Sana'a is older than Islam.

After the return from Mawzaʿ in 1680 the Jews were not readmitted to the walled city and were told to build outside it: so arose Qāʿ al-Yahūd, later Qāʿ al-ʿUlufī, the Jewish quarter that stood until 1949–50. The great synagogue inside the walls, Kenisat al-ʿUlamāʾ, "the synagogue of the sages," was turned into a mosque and named Masjid al-Jalāʾ, "the mosque of the expulsion"—a name that itself preserves the memory of the event. The first synagogue of the new quarter was built by Rabbi Yiḥye Halevi Alsheikh, appointed nasi.

Nineteenth-century figures must be taken with their sources. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 reports that the Jews of Yemen "are said to have numbered thirty thousand," some ten thousand of them in Sana'a—and treats those numbers itself as hearsay. Another estimate of the same century gives Sana'a upwards of seven thousand with twenty-eight synagogues, and Raḍāʿ as the second town with nine. What is firm is Carl Rathjens' survey of 1927–31: 371 Jewish settlements in Yemen.

Sana'a housed the beit din from which the Maharitz and his son Rabbi Abraham Ṣāleḥ came; here in 1912 began the Dor Deʿah controversy that split the city's synagogues. In 1909, under Ottoman rule, a state Jewish school opened whose headmaster was Rabbi Yiḥye Qāfiḥ, and in it arithmetic, geography, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish were taught alongside Torah.