Muslim-Jewish Sexual Liaisons Remembered and Imagined in 20th-Century Yemen

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2021

Abstract

Despite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen’s Jews to Israel in 1949–50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community’s realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shari'a norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

International Journal of Middle East Studies

First Page

39

Last Page

55

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