The old Yemeni community of Silwan

There are a few things I would like to address in regard to the history of Silwan. Like anywhere, this urban neighborhood has a long and complex history, existing just to the south-east of the Old City of Jerusalem - a city we all know that has seen conquering after conquering by one people over another.

Today, the Jews that live in Silwan are religious Zionist settlers, that further fragment the predominantly Palestinian neighborhood. But in the past, Silwan had a small but vibrant Yemenite Jewish community, who first arrived in 1882. However, the Old Yeshuv - a term that refers to all of the Jews (who were religious and led a non-Zionist way of live) living in the land of Israel-Palestine before the first wave of Zionist immigration - did not recognize the Yemenite immigrants’ Jewishness, having shunned them for the color of their skin, different customs and poor economic status. The Yemenite Jews were subsequently forced to live in cave-type shelters in the mountains around the Old City, including in Silwan, which at the time was a recognized Arab village.

When the Old Yishuv found that missionary Christians, who viewed the Yemenite Jews as descended from the lost tribe of Gad, provided these immigrants with aid, there was a Jewish initiative to establish a Yemenite neighborhood through the organization “Ezrat Nidahim,” which built houses in Silwan for the Yemenite Jews who did not initially want to live there. As Jews, the Yemenites wanted to live among their own community, but they could not afford to buy homes in new Jewish neighborhoods and were not accepted in the Jewish Quarter, and so they were forced to settle in Silwan, in the neighborhood built for them called “Shiloah.”

Although a recognized village, Silwan was poor, and so the Arab residents and the Jewish Yemenites found a common ground and lived in good terms with one another for 45 years. When the Arab Riots of 1929 took place, Arab residents of Silwan sheltered and protected their Jewish neighbors and no Jewish resident of Silwan was killed. This was during the British Mandate of Palestine, whose forces moved the Yemenite Jews into the Old City when the rioting continued. Some returned to live in Silwan, but all Jews left the village following the 1936 Arab Revolt.

In fact, the Yemenite Jews sent a letter of gratitude to their Arab neighbors, writing (translated from Hebrew): “We, the undersigned, the residents of the Shiloah village, openly declare that we obliged our gratitude to the dear and pure-hearted man, the honorable Hat Muhammad Ghozlan, one of our respectable Arab brothers, residents of the Shiloah-Silwan village, and his kind friends, who showed exceptional compassion and benevolence to their neighbors, the Jewish resents of the village of Shiloah, during the days of the 1929 riots, and did not allow the bands of rioters to harm us . . .”

To be sure, there is no connection between the current Jewish settlements in Silwan and the Yemenite Jewish village of Shiloah in the 19th-20th century. A Palestinian resident of Silwan, Abed Shaludi, has said: “We do not conceal the fact that Yemenite Jews lived here; on the contrary, we accepted them while the other Jews rejected them.”

Again, there is not enough space here to go more deeply into the topic of the Yemenite Jewish community in Israel-Palestine, or regarding the 1936 Arab Revolt. G-d willing I can expand upon this topic surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem / Silwan in a post in the future. 

This post utilized information from emekshaveh.org as well as from first-hand testaments I have listened to in my experience working as an activist in Silwan. Photograph taken from the Jewish Women's Archive website.