Arie Amaya-Akkermans | 29 February
2012
It is said that the numbers of the
once prominent Jewish community in Yemen are dwindling fast, especially after
the revolution during which a number of Jews had to flee from hostility in the
northern province of Sa’ada. The number of Jews left in the country isn’t known
with precision, but government sources estimate it at 450 and Jewish organizations
in the United States estimate at slightly over a hundred.
Jewish history in Yemen however,
goes back to the year 1451 BC as reported by Arab historians from medieval
times and legends still circulate that they settled in the Arabian Peninsula around
the times of King Solomon. What was once a prosperous community, heirs to
unique cultural traditions, is today an impoverished and rather marginal group
among others in the complex map of Yemen’s multilayered cultural landscape.
From the cultural legacy of Yemeni
Jewry it seems that there is one part that stood the test of time, migrations
and revolutions: The craft of hand-made silver jewelry. Last year in December,
Yemeni silversmith Kamal Rubaih and retired American diplomat Marjorie Ransom
presented a selection of Yemeni jewelry at the Library of the Congress in
Washington, focusing on Jewish designs.
In his shop “World Friend” located
in the old silver market in Sana’a, Rubaih collects jewelry in both traditional
Jewish and Muslim designs. According to Rubaih, from the great variety of
traditional jewelry made in the country the most exquisite was done by the
Jewish silversmiths in the northern mountains and in the large cities,
alongside Muslim jewelry from Tihama, the Hadramaut and Mahra, where Indian
influence was felt strongly.
Yemeni brides always felt a strong
preference for the Jewish jewelry that is considered an icon of wealth and
beauty and it is said that until the 1960’s, it was a deep-seated tradition for
Muslims to give a dowry in Jewish jewelry. At the silver market in Sana’a both
Jewish and Muslim silversmiths worked alongside and their relations were always
cordial and peaceful. However, the ancient Jewish craft has declined
progressively as more and more Jews left the country or no longer practiced the
craft. On the Muslim side, only a few silversmiths remain but some of them are
working on the recreating the traditional Jewish practice.
Mrs. Ransom is a long-time
collector of Middle Eastern jewelry since she was a graduate student studying
Arabic in Damascus, and her collection now amounts to over a thousand pieces
collected from every corner of the Middle East in over forty years. A part of
her collection was showcased in 2003 in the exhibition “Silver Speaks: The
Traditional Silver Jewelry of the Middle East” at the Bead Museum in
Washington, D.C.
Over the years of traveling and
collecting, she has become an expert on the cultural traditions of the region
through studying the jewelry, interviewing people about the usage and reading
everything on the topic, learning that way the history and culture of the
region like very few, through the traditional crafts. Ransom and Rubaih have
collaborated on the book “The Demise of an Ancient Craft”, to be published this
year by the American University in Cairo Press. The book will deal with jewelry
from all of Yemen, with particular attention to the now forgotten topic of the
Jewish silversmith.
The traditional silversmith of the
Middle East – including Turkey and Iran – has been replaced by gold jewelry,
much of it imported and not handcrafted, thus, the efforts of Rubaih to keep
the ancient craft alive are certainly remarkable. The larger repertory of
styles and techniques in Middle Eastern silver jewelry – casting, chasing,
embossing, repousse, filigree and granulation among others – has been mostly
casted asides to the work of a few artisans and the constant unrest and
deteriorating economic situation have chased away most of the potential
customers in the Western world that were delighted to collect the pieces in
previous decades.
Among the regional styles,
however, some are distinctive and unmistakable, such as the Jewish silversmith
craft from Yemen, using highly skilled techniques – filigree, granulation and
geometric shapes applied to flat surfaces, producing rich layers of adornment.
Rubaih has performed an exceptional task in preserving alive in his shop,
traditional pieces recreating the ancient Jewish craft that is one among other
timeless and important features of the rich and diverse Yemeni heritage.
According to Rubaih, only very few
Jewish silversmiths remain in the country and are now in very old age, but that
hasn’t deterred Muslim artisans from learning the craft and reproducing
contemporary pieces in the traditional style. He says that now Yemeni women
prefer to wear gold than silver and thus, there are only very few working in
the trade that has mostly tourists as their customers, but with an entire year
of unrest and soaring unemployment, this hardly suffices to keep the craft
alive.
Unless there is an effort on the
part of the Yemeni government to support traditional silversmiths as well as
other artisans working with traditional crafts – weaving, embroidery, pottery
and the like, Rubaih insists that it is very likely that they will disappear
very soon and with them, an ancient heritage spanning sometimes into thousands
of years. Mrs. Ransom was able to travel through Yemen for an entire year and
met a small number of Yemenis working with traditional techniques and crafts.
It turns out that there are
younger artisans, offspring of the elderly silversmiths, who are trained in the
craft and said that they would like to take it up if it were possible for them
to make a living with it. She even found the son of an indigo dyer – a
technique that has been picked up recently in haute couture in Europe – who
also would like to take up the craft if an opportunity would arise for him.
In the 1960’s the legendary
cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote that “every era has to reinvent the project
of spirituality for itself and in the modern era, one of the most active
metaphors for the spiritual project is art”. Art always comes with a
Janus-face, looking always into the past – the great things that men made then
– and into the future – keeping whatever it is that is worth keeping, and is
hardly strangled by the demands of the hostile present.
In spite of unrest and an entire
year of an unfinished revolution, Yemenis are still clinging to the privilege
of the heritage and this isn’t only a matter of nostalgia – a sentiment always
reactionary and inimical to progress – but a vision of a better future safely
anchored in the scandalous strength of the past, or in the words of Virginia
Woolf: “The present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the
present when it presses so close that you feel nothing.”
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