National and Transnational Trade: Israel and the Jewish-Yemeni Diaspora at the Red Sea

Abstract

During the age of imperialism, hundreds of Yemeni Jews settled around the Red Sea, forming a Jewish-Yemeni trading diaspora. The study examines the fate of this diaspora after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the mass migrations thereto. While the first part of the article is dedicated to the inherent contradiction between the diaspora and the Zionist project, the second part argues for their symbiosis. As the Red Sea area assumed a strategic importance for Israel, the young Jewish state relied heavily on the established Jewish diaspora in the region to consolidate its power; the diaspora, for its part, was able to find in the Israeli enterprise a measure of compensation for its lost, pre-national trade. The alliance between the two, argues the article, allowed the diaspora to persist beyond the rupture of 1948.