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"Aden After the Riots:
Report on a Middle East Portent"
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Abstract –
The charred shells of the burnt-out buildings of the Jewish boys' school and girls' school along the main street of Crater (oldest part of the colony of Aden and in fact the crater of an extinct volcano) are a symbol of the destruction which last December befell one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. The “knife-rests” and the barbed wire entanglements, placed each evening at all the entrances to the Jewish quarter, mark the relapse into medieval ghetto insecurity of a community which for a hundred years has enjoyed British citizenship.
The British colony of Aden—located in southwest Arabia—is a hundred years old; but the Jewish community of Aden goes back to the earliest dispersion of the Children of Israel. In the Middle Ages, Benjamin of Tudela, that greatest of Jewish travelers, told how the Jews of Aden were not subject to the yoke of the Gentile. But today the Jewish community of four to five thousand lives almost entirely in the crater, in a section of six streets, of which two have names, and the others are known impersonally as A1, A2, A3, and A4.
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