Zionist-era writers depicted Yemenite Jews as collective types embodying outward misery and inner purity

Evidence

The Yemenite Jews in Palestine—the largest group of oriental Jews to come to Palestine with the first aliyot (waves of Zionist immigrations)—became closer to the Zionist Ashkenazim in the moshavot and were the subject of various representations in art, literature, and theater. Almost all writers of the first aliya and some of the second aliya described Yemenites. Usually they created some sort of typical collective image rather than any individualistic one. This image was based on the opposition between the miserable external appearance and the pure, just, and modest inner being. No matter what difficulties beset him the Yemenite is always portrayed as lively and optimistic. According to Berlovitz, the vision and myth of the Ingathering of the Exiles was one of the main motives of the writers of the first aliya in writing about oriental Jews and Yemenites in particular. Undoubtedly it underlay the popularity of their representations in Bezalel art. As the images do not involve any narrative or context and almost always concentrate on facial features, hair style, particular clothes and hats, it is pretty clear that the focus was on the variety of Jewish types “from the four corners of the earth.” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 613

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how colonizing cultures flattened colonized subjects into typological representations, and to Beard’s ideas about how decorative faces in art encode erasure.