Zionists cast Yemenite Jews as living biblical relics whose pronunciation legitimated revived Hebrew.

Evidence

The perception of non-European Jewish communities and particularly the Yemenite as the “lost brothers” from a far distant biblical era, for whom time had stopped and in whom ancient traditions were preserved as they were, had also resonated in Palestine in the way the Yemenite Jews were regarded by Ashkenazi Jews. As Eliezer Ben-Yehuda remarked: “we still find among them the social condition of Israel as it was at the time of the mishna.” This view of oriental Jews, and the Yemenites in particular, was embedded in the Western perception of the Orient as inherently primitive where people “had not been subject to the ordinary processes of history.” The concept that oriental Jews preserved some kind of authentic characteristics of the ancient Hebrews had specific implications in the national movement, particularly in the “revival” of Hebrew as a spoken language and the acceptance of the oriental Sephardic pronunciation as the “correct” one. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 612

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the concept of oriental Jews as ‘lost brothers’ whose preserved ancientness was both romanticized and put to nationalist linguistic use.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism frame that the book itself engages, and to how authenticity claims get weaponized in nationalist movements generally.