Teimani

The Teimani, or Yemenite Jews, are the Jewish community of the south Arabian highlands, in 1337 settled in towns such as Sanaa, Dhamar and Thula under the Sunni Rasulid sultans. Jewish tradition and Himyarite inscriptions trace their origins to Roman times, when refugees from Judea joined traders on the incense route.

Under Islam the Jews paid the jizya poll tax as protected subjects and spoke Judeo-Arabic. In the 1160s the ruler Abd al-Nabi ibn Mahdi offered them conversion or death; the crisis drew Maimonides' Epistle to Yemen.

After the Zaydis drove out the Ottomans in 1630, imam al-Mahdi Ahmad expelled the whole community to Mawza in 1679, where as many as two-thirds perished. The survivors returned as silversmiths, and by the eighteenth century handled much of the coffee trade through Mokha.