Judah Ben Shalom - Reasons For His Success

Reasons For His Success

The reasons for the profound success of messianic movements in Yemen in so recent a period as the late 1800s are varied, although in light of even more recent messianic activity—such as that occurring within Lubavitch Hasidism—it is perhaps no longer so difficult to comprehend. However, to a Wissenschaft-influenced writer like Sassoon, the only plausible explanation is the deficiency of Yemenite intellectual culture:

In all ages there have been pretenders and false messiahs amongst Jews, but in Yemen they have been very numerous, no doubt because the Yemen Jew is credulous and lacks erudition. His studies are principally confined to the Zohar and books on קבלה "Cabbala," סגולות "cabbalistic practices," רפואות "cures," גורלות "casting of lots," and קמיעות "talismans." Many of them shut themselves up for days, and imagine that they are speaking to the angel Gabriel and other celestial beings...

— Sassoon (1907)

While Sassoon has the advantage of proximity to events—living almost contemporaneously with the messianic movement he is describing, one can question the fairness of some of these remarks, especially inasmuch as they are not paralleled in Saphir's accounts (Lenowitz 1998). It does seem the case that the Yemenite Jews were indeed given to a certain fascination with messianic paraphernalia, including calculations of redemption, apocalyptic visions, the Lost Tribes, etc. (Lenowitz 1998, p. 226), but this alone does not account for their susceptibility to messianic pretense.

An additional ingredient was the manner in which the Yemenite messiahs took advantage of two unique features of Yemenite Judaism. Firstly, the Yemenite Jewish culture placed great importance on individual and communal repentance (along with the dire consequences of inadequate repentance), and the messiahs took advantage of this by incorporating into their messages pious and emotionally powerful calls for communal repentance in the face of impending dangers. As a result of the hyper-piety of the messiahs' messages, communal leaders found it very difficult to reject the messenger (Lenowitz 1998). Secondly, the tradition among Yemenite Jews of memorizing the entire Tanach made it easy for a knowledgeable individual such as Kuhayl II to sound eminently "messianic" by artfully weaving into his writings (and no doubt into his speeches) verses from the Nevi'im and Ketuvim. His Yemenite readers would immediately recognize these verses and their prophetic origins, which no doubt lent tremendous authority to the messiah's message, and again made the messenger difficult to reject (Lenowitz 2000).

All in all, what seems likely is that the suppuration of messianic activity in Yemen was made possible by weak Jewish leadership in the face of a dismal and chaotic political situation (Klorman 1993) within a community that was largely isolated from the rest of Jewish culture, circumstances which were little changed from those which prompted Maimonides to write his famous Letter to Yemen (Igeret Taiman) in the 12th century, in which he expressed his concern about the lax response of Yemenite leadership to an anonymous pseudo-messiah of that earlier period. In regard to the present episode, Lenowitz (1998, p. 229) considers it within the framework of the entire history of Yemenite messianic activity in the following way:

The leaders of the Yemenite Jewish community would continue to play the role in which they appear in the Letter : they were indecisive; they were noncondemnatory; they were swayed by their own longings; they understood and sympathized with their people; and they could not but respect the messiahs for the conduct they preached, even while fearing the outcome of their claims and the threat their movements made to the peaceful, if lowly, life of the Jews of Yemen under Moslem despotism. The local Jewish communities—San'a', in particular—would also play the part outlined for them in the Letter; the repression and the occasional instability in the society would recur; and Yemen, finally, comes to present a strikingly unified messiah history that spans a period of over 600 years.