In the latest attack targeting Yemen's few remaining Jews, rebel Houthi militiamen destroyed several homes that had belonged to the now-absent Jewish community in the northwestern Saada province. "The Houthis destroyed part of my house and looted it," Rabbi Yehia Youssuf told the Reuters news agency. All 67 members of Saada's Jewish community had fled following threats from the Houthis, the rabbi said. Some locals say the Jews were threatened because they had been selling wine to Muslims – an accusation the Jews deny. A local said the Shiite rebels attacked the houses of other Jews after looting the rabbi's.
Around 400 Jews remain in the majority Sunni state, the remnant of an ancient, close-knit community that, while remaining connected to Jewish intellectual and legal developments outside Yemen, managed to insulate itself culturally until the 20th century. According to Dov Levitan, a scholar of Yemenite Jewry at Bar-Ilan University and the Academic College of Ashkelon, the Houthi clan targets Jews to embarrass the government internationally.
Apparently unrelated intertribal fighting in the Saadi province killed at least 15 people in recent days as the Houthi tribe continued its intermittent violence, begun in June 2004, against the central government and its allies. Since the early 1990s, the Yemeni government "has been very conscious of its international image," Levitan told the ‘Jerusalem Post’ newspaper, adding: "So important is the country's image to its government that the Jews have excellent government protection." The government's concern for its image, together with pressure from American Jewish groups and US legislators, led Yemen in the early 1990s to permit most of the remaining 2,000 Jews to leave the country.
