Colonial discourse framed Yemenite honesty as a product of primitiveness rather than virtue.

Evidence

The honesty and loyalty of the Yemenite worker to his employer was a subject that Schatz discusses at length: unlike European workshops, there were no cases of theft in Bezalel. These virtues, Schatz concludes, had to do with the level of development of the Yemenites—their “distance from ‘civilization.’” Bezalel’s method of preventing theft in the silver department was simple: the first two workers who were admitted swore on an ancient Torah of the Bezalel museum to be loyal to the school. Subsequent employees were not recruited directly; whenever more people were required the Yemenite workers would have chosen them from their own community “and all are guarantors for each other.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 600

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘honest savage’ economic trope — how employers attribute worker reliability to backwardness while simultaneously institutionalizing communal self-policing as theft prevention.
• XREF: The ‘all are guarantors for each other’ mechanism is a live example of the reputation-based mutual monitoring described in Bernstein’s diamond trade work — cross-domain echo worth chasing.