MYSTIC BRUSH

An Artist Visualizes

Exotic Jewish Communities

of the Past

by

Kitty Yin Ling Miao

and

Robert W. Lebling

[For more information about the full manuscript, contact lebling@yahoo.com.]

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© Copyright 2009 by Kitty Yin Ling Miao and Robert W. Lebling

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Kitty Yin Ling Miao, Ph.D., is a scholar specialized in the study of ancient Chinese
bone and turtle script (sometimes called shell and bone script). She is also a poet and an
artist renowned for her unique style integrating Chinese calligraphic techniques and
pictorial painting to create vibrant living sketches of animal life. She studied at St.
Martin‟s College of Art and Greenwich University. Dr. Miao currently lives in San
Francisco, California. More paintings from Mystic Brush are displayed on her Web site:
www.artpalpitation.net.

Robert W. Lebling is a writer/editor and communications specialist. He studied politics

and anthropology at Princeton and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. His
latest book, Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar,
appears in 2010. He is author with Donna Pepperdine of Natural Remedies of Arabia
(2006). A Maryland native, he has lived and worked as a journalist in the Middle East, in
London, and in Washington, D.C. Some of his writings are posted online at
www.scribd.com/eyeclaud.
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CONTENTS

Introduction

East Asia:
Chinese Jews, 1800
South Asia:
Bene Israel, Bombay, 1900
Cochin, India
Central Asia:
Afghanistan, 1900
Bukhara, Central Asia, 1850
Persia, 1900
Jews of Kurdistan
Eurasia:
The Mountain Jews of Dagestan, 1890
Georgia, 1880
Krimchaks of the Crimea, 1850
Africa:
Judaeo-Berber, Atlas Mountains, 1900
Beta Israel, Ethiopia, 1940
Arabian Peninsula:
North Yemenite Children, 1900
Habbani of South Yemen, 1940

Sources
Notes
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PAINTINGS

1. Chinese Jews, 1800 „A,‟ Mandarin and Wife

2. Chinese Jews, „B,‟ Caravan
3. Chinese Jews, „C,‟ Landscape and Caravan in Blue
4. Bene Israel Family, Bombay
5. Cochin, India
6. Afghanistan 1900, „A‟
7. Afghanistan 1900, „B‟
8. Afghanistan 1900, „C‟
9. Wedding Portrait, Bukhara, Central Asia, 1850
10. Persian Wedding Couple
11. Jews of Kurdistan
12. Mountain Jews of Dagestan, 1890
13. Georgian Jews
14. Krimchaks of Crimea, 1850
15. Judaeo-Berber, Atlas Mountains, 1900
16. Beta Israel, A Woman‟s Hut, 1940
17. Ethiopian Jewish Couple
18. Northern Yemenite Children, 1900
19. Habbani of Southern Yemen, 1940
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INTRODUCTION

The Jewish people have settled in a remarkable variety of far-flung places

throughout the world. Many writers have traced their survival through the centuries,
exploring various aspects of Jewish culture, religion and folklore, and stressing the
homogeneity and diversity of Jewish life in different times and places. This book hopes
to be different, because it is primarily visual, capturing in a series of paintings some of
the most remote and most unusual of the world‟s Jewish communities. These
visualizations are also historical, in that they capture views that existed at various times
over the past two centuries. At the same time, these paintings have been a personal
journey for me as an artist, and they convey, in the mystical way of the brush, some of
my own soul.
As one previously unfamiliar with many aspects of Jewish culture and society, I
found the process of internalizing the intricacies of their customs and the aesthetic
aspects of their communities to be an immensely educational experience. It became for
me a profoundly enlightening artistic endeavor.
Most of my earlier work followed the great Chinese calligraphic tradition, and
over the years I brought my mastery of this discipline to a high level, using the brush in a
manner that distills the object to its very essence. The resulting simple form unmistakably
captures the character of the object, and imparts a poetic aura. My past works, however,
focused almost exclusively on animal life. For my study of remote Jewish communities, I
now had to make a significant break from my traditional calligraphic style – and to
master the art of portraiture as well.
This artistic adventure involves fourteen Jewish communities, from China to
Morocco. These communities are referred to in Hebrew as edot hamizrach – Eastern or
Oriental Jewish communities. These are little-known communities on the Jewish
periphery that are for the most part neither Ashkenazim nor Sephardim. Some estimate
that roughly one-quarter of the Jewish population in Israel is of Oriental or Mizrachi
origin.
I have carefully selected the details in these paintings by researching the‟
anthropology, geography and history of these Jewish communities, a course of intense
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personal study that included one-on-one dialogues with museum curators, librarians and
other knowledgeable specialists. I reviewed photographs and sketches in antique books
and other collected materials, and each of my paintings will make reference to a specific
book or books.
These Jews, although isolated in most of the places they lived, generally
maintained a peaceful attitude and approach to the outside world. In some of these edot,
the Jews were warriors, as in Dagestan in the northeastern Caucasus, and in Kurdistan,
but most others were gentle and peace-loving and did not engage in aggressive conflict.
The hostile environment of Dagestan and Kurdistan created a Jewish prototype in
stark contrast to the stereotypical Jew of the Eastern European shtetl or Jewish village.
Although the edot hamizrach deviated in many ways from the teachings of normative or
Talmudic Judaism in their great isolation from the Jewish centers of learning, my
drawings do not necessarily reflect aspects of biblical teachings. Instead, they depict
Jewish life in the context of the Moorish or other folkways and lifestyles of the dominant
culture in which they lived, making their communities unique in comparison to other
Jewish communities. For example, in all probability the Jews of Cochin, India, are the
only Jewish community in the world in which elephants have been employed as a means
of transportation, as shown in my painting of the Jews of that area.
In certain locales, Jews were channeled into specific trades. For example, where
metalwork was considered beneath the dignity of self-respecting Shiite Muslims, the
Jews had a virtual monopoly of that craft. In Imperial China, merchants were regarded by
the Han peoples as exploiters who made profits from other people‟s labors. This role was
often filled by foreigners, such as the Persians, Arabs, or Jews. In Chinese society, the
highest status achievable was given to the scholar. Bureaucrats, or Mandarins, were
viewed as transmitters of Chinese culture and were the personification of Chinese values.
Because Jews in China were never subjected to anti-Semitic legislation, many attended
institutes of higher learning and became qualified to sit for the Mandarin equivalent of
the doctoral examination. My initial painting of the Chinese Jews depicts a Sino-Judaic
Mandarin, at home in his own culture, as well as in the world of the Jewish scholar. Note
that in both cultures, the woman is in the background, as represented in this portrait.
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I have begun this visual journey in China, the wellspring of my personal heritage
and artistic training. From there, we travel west, across the vast reaches of Asia, the
fringes of Europe and northern Africa, looping back to the Arabian Peninsula as we
approach the Holy Land. We start at the greatest possible distance from Jerusalem, and
work our way back, in a kind of artistic aliyah.
The challenge I found in this project was whether or not it was possible to marry
historical ideas, expressed in words, with the clarity and beauty of art – whether I could,
using an artistic medium, present an accurate depiction of these remote communities and
capture something valuable and enduring of their essence. I leave it to the reader to
decide whether I have succeeded.
Artist and friend Stanley W. Galli provided continuous support and
encouragement during this journey into the unknown. This path led me to a whole new
world of creation. Mr. Galli sums up the Mystic Brush journey as follows: “All this
confirms my belief that long and hard effort builds a storehouse of visual skills and
aesthetic intellect, which makes it possible to do anything in the grand adventure that is
art.”
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1. Chinese Jews, 1800 „A,‟ Mandarin and Wife

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2. Chinese Jews, „B,‟ Caravan

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3. Chinese Jews, „C,‟ Landscape and Caravan in Blue

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CHINESE JEWS, 1800

The original painting Chinese Jews, 1800 ‘A,’ Mandarin and Wife, was the first
completed in the Mystic Brush series. It was created quite unexpectedly on a piece of
heavyweight construction paper, 18 x 12 inches (45.7 x 30.4 cm) in size. The original
sold in Hong Kong in 1995, and then was reproduced in 1997 in the form of two hundred
and fifty limited-edition offset lithographs and fifty artist‟s proofs.
As mentioned in the Introduction, my work before the Mystic Brush series follows
the great Chinese calligraphic tradition. The process of creating Chinese Jews led to
unanticipated emotions that influenced speed, texture, and style.
Originally, my plan was to create Chinese Jews in the traditional manner. Chinese
calligraphy plays the main role in the creation of a good Chinese painting, and may even
be called the backbone of the art. The history of Chinese calligraphy is believed to be as
old as China herself. It is a very personal faculty, achieved by continuous practice and
meditation, by a discipline that is spiritual rather than physical. The rice paper used in
Chinese calligraphy is normally made from bamboo or the stems of weeds, and the
texture is somewhat like blotting paper when ink is applied. The finest Chinese brushes –
the type used in the Mystic Brush series – are made of fox hair, tied together in small
bunches and fixed into a hollow reed on a very thin bamboo stem.
The ink is not made in liquid form, but rather consists of a kind of lampblack or
oil smoke which must be ground up. The soot of burnt pinewood, oil smoke, or
lampblack is collected and mixed with a kind of gum, then warmed and left to solidify. It
is then molded into small flat or round sticks, often decorated with carved designs or
Chinese characters. The solid ink is then ground and mixed on an ink stone, a flat stone
with a hollow scooped out of the middle. One end of the hollow is a bit deeper than the
other, to allow water to flow into it. Ink stones are generally made from a special rock
called redstone, which can be cut and highly polished.
It became apparent, as the ink was being ground for the Mystic Brush series, that
the drawing was already emerging in a non-traditional style. For one thing, the brush
landed not on a sheet of rice paper but on a piece of heavyweight sketching paper. My
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immediate, spontaneous response was to grasp a handful of Rembrandt soft pastels in the
left hand while still holding the Chinese brush in the right hand. The movements of my
two hands with the different colored chalks and inks allowed me to experience for the
first time a true understanding of the combined art of calligraphy and painting – an
understanding fundamentally mysterious and once thought achievable only after
practicing eight hours a day for eight years on the ancient and modern scripts of Chinese
calligraphy. It was not clear at first that the mystery would reveal itself in the harmonious
collaboration of two hands, described in terms of seven interrelated characteristics which
in their inseparability form a perfect whole:
 Asymmetry
 Simplicity
 Austere Sublimity
 Lofty Dryness
 Naturalness
 Subtle Profundity or Profound Subtlety
 Freedom from Attachment or Tranquility
Two types of movements are involved here, sometimes called “Activity in
Stillness” and “Activity in Action.” It is not always possible to distinguish between these
movements, because they tend to overlap, growing into and out of one another. The first
type of movement appears in the direction, shape, pattern, and grouping of the component
strokes of the human figures. One doesn‟t expect to find motion here, but after careful
analysis we can discern that the irregularity, asymmetry, and proportion appear to obey
some law of organic growth.
The second type of movement lies in the motion of the pastels or chalks as they
travel in stillness and speed. Chinese Jews, 1800 ‘A,’ Mandarin and Wife, was thus
created in less than half an hour, unlike the Chinese calligraphy of the single-line
paintings of animals I had done in the past.
The teacher for my earlier body of work once observed that in studying a piece of
calligraphy painting one‟s first consideration is that the object should be living. The next
is to discover where the life lies. To the calligrapher, every strike, after it has fallen from
the brush, must lie on the paper without correction – touching it up or changing it would
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destroy its life. The colors and the thickness of the ink enable calligraphers to detect
whether any retouching has been attempted.
Prior to Mystic Brush, executing a single stroke on an etching plate or on the
smooth, pristine surface of a lithographic limestone generated feelings of excitement,
frustration, and anxiety. This tension also creates a carelessness of gesture because of the
speed with which the hand usually moves for some two or three minutes over the chosen
surface, after which all movement stops with a flourish: The image is finished, complete,
realized, containing everything projected from the mind through the hand to the awaiting
plate, stone, or rice paper. It was always a challenge then. The experience of creating The
Chinese Jews was such an extreme and remarkable contrast to my previous work, it was
as if all the rules had been broken, all disciplines as a calligrapher and Chinese painter
disregarded, as if I were entering into a forbidden world of creation. But the outcome was
overwhelmingly rewarding.i
The principal historical sources for The Chinese Jews were Michael Pollak‟s
Mandarins, Jews and Missionaries: The Jewish Experience in the Chinese Empire (1980)
and The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews (1975). These works provided the history,
significance, and present whereabouts of the Sifrei Torah of the now defunct Jewish
community of Kaifeng. The Torah Scroll was written in the mid-seventeenth century at
the synagogue in Kaifeng, Hunan Province, China (as shown on the map). Later in the
research process, Mr. Pollak provided me with a copy of the Jewish Publication Society
of America‟s “The Revelation of a Jewish Presence in Seventeenth-Century China: Its
Impact on Western Thought” (1982), plus many other additional sources.
In addition, I interviewed other scholars and rabbis from a number of synagogues.
Countless articles and books printed in Chinese from several Chinese libraries in San
Francisco were consulted to research the lifestyles, residential environment, social
networks, grooming, and ethnic characteristics of the Chinese Jews. I delved into their
human interactions, cultural mores, social habits, way of life, and the texture and colors
of their costumes at the time of the painting‟s setting, the year 1800. Materials describing
the Chinese Jews‟ clothing and furniture were rare, apart from Chinese-language books
like Chinese Nationalities (1972) and The Silk Road on the Sea (1978). After studying the
colors, textures, and styles of that particular period, and examining some landscapes in
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old black-and-white illustrations from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I decided
to create a profile resembling a photograph taken by Oliver Bainbridge of a Kaifeng Jew
in the early twentieth century. This photograph was described in a 1906 issue of National
Geographic magazine and reproduced in The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews.
We can infer from historical sources that Jews have lived in China for at least a
thousand years, though it is not known when the Jews first set foot in the country.
According to the Chinese Jews‟ own records, their ancestors arrived as far back as the
period of the Zhou Dynasty, or sometime between 1056 and 256 B.C.E. Jews probably
migrated to China in several waves at various times, but historians assert with a
considerable degree of certainty that they have been continuously in China since the tenth
century C.E. At their peak during the Ming period from 1368 to 1644 C.E., their numbers
probably did not exceed about four thousand. It is remarkable that until about a hundred
and fifty years ago, they were able to withstand assimilation into the vastly larger Han
and Muslim populations. Numerous sources mention the existence of Jewish settlements
at Hangzhou, Ningpo, Canton, Beijing, and other places, but these communities
disappeared without leaving a trace.
The popular belief is that most of these communities eventually converted to
Islam. The only Jewish community with a remaining historical record was located in
Kaifeng, former capital of Hunan Province, on the Yellow River. It is important to note
that while surviving Torah texts from extinct Chinese communities do exhibit some
minor variations from the texts of the Torahs in common use today, these variations are
the result of scribal lapses and nothing more. The Pentateuch that the Chinese Jews knew
was exactly the same as the one used today. The proliferation of scribal errors in the
surviving Chinese scrolls becomes comprehensible when we realize that, at the time they
were written, the Jews in Kaifeng had already been cut off from all contact with Jewish
communities outside the country for at least a generation or two, and probably for several
generations. In their isolation it was inevitable that the Kaifeng Jews should gradually
become deficient in their knowledge of Hebrew. What is remarkable is that the thousand
or so Jews who lived in the city of Kaifeng in the middle of the seventeenth century
retained as much understanding of the language as they did.
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The Chinese term for the Jews of Kaifeng, T‟iao Chin Chiao, or “The Sect That
Plucks out the Sinews,” is a reference to the fact that, as stated in Genesis 32:33, “the
children of Israel eat not the sinews of the thigh-vein which is upon the hollow of the
thigh.” Sources that reveal something of the Kaifeng Jews include an original drawing
dated around 1722 by Father Jean Domenge, S.J., showing the interior of the synagogue
of Kaifeng, and a report by another Jesuit, Father P.J. Brucker, S.J. When the Kaifeng
scrolls were acquired by Westerners, some of the scholars who examined and described
them were not sufficiently qualified for the tasks they undertook. As a result, it is difficult
to determine the accuracy of the early reports on the scrolls.
The first synagogue of Kaifeng, or at least the first historically described
synagogue in that city, was established in 1163. The building was destroyed or severely
damaged several times, and was rebuilt or repaired as the need arose. In 1642, when
Kaifeng was besieged by a rebel army, the Yellow River was diverted from its normal
course as a military measure. In the flood that ensued, a hundred thousand or more
inhabitants of Kaifeng were drowned, among them an undetermined number of Jews. The
synagogue itself was completely destroyed by the onrushing waters. An engraved stone
ornament erected by the Kaifeng congregation in 1663, twenty-one years after the
inundation, tells us that the synagogue‟s thirteen Torah Scrolls were swept away by the
flood.
The Kaifeng Torahs are, of course, interesting as relics of an exotic but now
extinct Jewish community – relics that would merit attention even if they were no more
than museum pieces. Of much greater significance is the fact that a careful study of their
format and textual idiosyncrasies would seem to have considerable value in helping
scholars pinpoint the particular Jewish groups to which the Chinese Jews were
historically linked. There is currently no consensus on where these Chinese Jews came
from. Thus, identifying the city or cities whose Torahs were used as models by the
scribes of Kaifeng in preparing Torahs of their own could go a long way toward filling
the gaps in our knowledge of the history of the Jews in China.
There are reasons to suspect that many of the Kaifeng Jews, knowing little or
nothing about Christianity, were under the impression that the men to whom they were
transferring their sacred writings were of their own faith. In an excerpt from the
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Memorial Book of the Jews of Kaifeng, cited in The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews,ii
names of deceased Chinese Jews were written in both Hebrew and Chinese. This register
of the dead was acquired by the Protestant Delegates in 1851.
The most significant sources of information on the origin, history, and culture of
the Kaifeng community are the three stone tablets carved in Chinese characters that stood
outside the old pagoda synagogue in Kaifeng until the mid-nineteenth century. The three
inscriptions are dated 1489, 1512, and 1662, and offer three different dates for the arrival
of the Jews in China. The inscription of 1489 suggests that the ancestors of the Kaifeng
community settled in that city during the period of the Soong Dynasty, 960 to 1279 C.E.,
a period when power and momentum were restored to the Chinese Empire. Kaifeng was
made the capital at a time of commercial expansion, neo-Confucianism, and government
by scholar-officials. The Jewish religion is said to have come from Tien Chu, or the
Western Country, which scholars variously translate as India or Persia. It is written that
seventy arriving families brought the Chinese Emperor a tribute of precious cotton cloth,
and asked the Emperor‟s permission to settle in his land and practice their religion
unhindered.
What seems clear from the stone inscriptions is that the Jews did not arrive
directly from Palestine, but from other countries where they had settled. It is also
apparent that they did not enter China only once, in a single group, but must have arrived
both individually and in groups over a number of centuries. If they arrived for the most
part as traders or adventurers, then the men must have greatly outnumbered the women.
In that case, the Jewish men were able to retain their identity only because, although they
intermarried almost from the start, they were careful to pass on their Jewish identity to
their children. Jewish men preferred to marry the monotheistic Muslims rather than the
Buddhists and pagans, and converted their women to Judaism. Jewish women, on the
other hand, would be permanently lost to the Jewish people if they married outside the
faith, so they were forbidden to wed non-Jews.
Heinrich Gratz, the great nineteenth-century German historian, placed the first
migration of Persian Jews into China in the year 231 C.E., in a flight from Sassanian-
Zoroastrian repression of the Jewish faith. The Canadian Anglican bishop William
Charles White, who lived in Kaifeng for many years and authored a three-volume text on
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the Chinese Jews in the 1940‟s, noted that the writings of the Kaifeng community
contained Persian letters of the alphabet and many Persian words, suggesting a long
sojourn of the ancestral community in Persia.
The American Protestant minister Allen Godbey was also of the opinion that the
Chinese Jews came from Persia, because their synagogue resembled the Mikdash-style
interior found in Persian lands. Jesuit missionaries of the eighteenth century concluded
that the Chinese Jews‟ “Western Country” was Persia and that they must have come by
way of Khorasan and Bukhara. This view was corroborated by the nineteenth-century
Anglo-Jewish traveler Elkin Alder, who maintained that the Jews of Kaifeng were
originally from Khorasan. According to Alder, the rubrics in the Kaifeng library were in
the Bukhara-Persian dialect. Khorasan was historically the Gateway to China.
The Jews traveled through Merv, which commanded the great roads from Khiva
to Herat and Bukhara to Meshed, and was thus at the crossroads of the caravan routes to
Persia, Afghanistan, India, Turkistan, and China. (These caravan routes were of great
importance to China. For example, it is worth noting that silk dyeing was at one time a
craft confined almost entirely to Central Asia, its place of origin, and reached China
thanks to the caravans.) There is a tradition from Persia itself that the ancestors of the
Chinese Jews were expelled from Bukhara by Chagatai, Genghis Khan‟s successor. Some
of these refugees from Bukhara were said to have migrated to China and thereupon
ceased to communicate with their mother country.
For the painting Chinese Jews, 1800 ‘A,’ the figures of a Mandarin Jew and his
wife were chosen, depicted in their upper-class environment, the husband sitting in a very
comfortable chair and holding the Torah in his hand. Various synagogal and secular
records show that the careers of such Mandarins were exceptionally distinguished. As
noted earlier, Mandarins or bureaucrats were viewed as the transmitters of Chinese
culture and the personification of Chinese virtues. Because Jews in China were never
subjected to anti-Semitic decrees or legislation, many attended institutions of higher
learning and became qualified to sit for the Mandarin equivalent of the Ph.D.
examination. Further study of the currently available synagogal writings, aided by the
continuing interest of Hebraic specialists in comparing the scriptural and liturgical works
originating in old Jewish communities in countries other than China, should ultimately
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provide the solutions to some of the many mysteries surrounding the saga of Chinese
Jewry.
The painting depicts a Sino-Judaic Mandarin at home in both his own culture and
in the world of the Jewish scholar. He looks Chinese, he speaks Chinese, and the style of
his clothing is Chinese, but he is a Chinese Jew. He is a man of scholarship as well as a
public official. The colors and textures of the clothing of both husband wife are custom
made, with the finest silk patterns. The physical appearance of this couple reflects the fact
that, at that period in China, silk was imported from Persia and India. Therefore the
patterns, designs, and even the hairstyle and jewelry of the women were influenced by
those countries. The background of the painting was intentionally blended, in a mystical
sense, with the textures and their isolated yet harmonious environment.
The gold thread interwoven in their clothes suggests their lofty upper-class
position. High officials of nineteenth-century China wore blue robes to indicate their
status, as does the husband here. With regard to the woman in the painting, both the
Jewish and Chinese cultures would normally portray her in the background, as was done
here. These were Jews who celebrated the festival of Hanukah, even though they were
known as “The Muslims with the Blue Caps.” Many residents of Kaifeng had come to
believe that they were actually Muslims who for some reason chose to wear blue-colored
kippahs at worship services rather than the white-colored skullcaps worn at prayer by
normal Chinese Muslims.
My feeling for the subject matter of this painting was greatly enhanced by
Michael Pollak‟s imaginative 1980 reconstruction of the Kaifeng Jewish experience,
from the time of the first arrival of Jews in the city ca. 960-1126 C.E. He describes a
caravan of Jews setting out from Persia, traveling by camel and horse along the Silk Road
to China, wending its way through the Gobi Desert, fighting off hostile forces.
(Reflecting the Jewish caravan experience are two subsequent paintings in this series,
Chinese Jews ‘B,’ Caravan and Chinese Jews ‘C,’ Caravan and Landscape in Blue.iii)
The caravan finally arrived safely in Kaifeng, to be greeted by the Emperor and invited to
establish a permanent community there. The Jews built a synagogue and school. The
community survived and even prospered for centuries, despite its small size and isolation,
in the teeming midst of the world‟s greatest empire of the time.
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5. Cochin, India
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COCHIN, INDIA

According to ancient tradition, Jewish merchants first settled on the Malabar coast
in Southern India during the reign of King Solomon. By the year 100 C.E., they were
such well-established and loyal subjects that the Rajah of Cranganore, twenty miles from
Cochin, bestowed many rights and privileges upon the leader of the Jewish community,
including the title of Prince.
The painting Cochin, India, which represents the Jews of that city, very
intentionally shows a prince riding on an elephant, in a setting which will be described
later. With the silting up of the port of Cranganore, the Jewish community moved to
another port city, Cochin, where they were treated royally by the local rajahs. The Golden
Age of Malabaran Jewry came to an end in the sixteenth century with the invasion of the
Portuguese, although there were periodic revivals under the Dutch and British colonizers.
As in Bombay, a caste system evolved among the Jewish community of Cochin,
which caused internal strife and sometimes led to physical violence. The Jews of Cochin
were divided inter Paradesi or White Jews, and Malabari or Black Jews. The White Jews
were emigrants (also called Paradesis) who came from the Iberian Peninsula, the
Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East over the previous five hundred years. As their
name would imply, the Malabaris claimed to be the original Jewish settlers of the region.
These two endogamous groups were in turn subdivided into pure Jews and those
descended from the slaves of Jews.
The Whites regarded all the other groups as untouchables, and refused to have
social intercourse with them. The Blacks, in return, treated the Whites contemptuously as
Johnny-come-latelies. The problem of Jewish caste persisted until 1932, when one Jewish
untouchable, a disciple of Gandhi, threatened to starve himself to death in the White
Jews‟ synagogue. The White Jews were finally brought to their senses when many of
their sons joined Salem in his hunger strike.
Virtually the entire Malabari community of twenty-five hundred made aliyah, i.e.,
emigrated to Israel, in the late 1940‟s and early 1950‟s. There are fewer than twenty Jews
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left in Cochin today. The magnificent Paradesi synagogue has lacked a minyan or quorum
for many years, and has become a mere tourist attraction, albeit a major one.
The painting of the Jews of Cochin, India, is a forest scene showing a Prince
traveling from place to place, his royal costume coordinated with his elephant‟s most
elegant trappings and accessories. He is accompanied by a personal guard who rides with
him and shades him from the sun and heat with his personal umbrella. Another guard in
front protects his pathway with a spear, and a third guard stands beside the elephant,
making sure there is no danger from robbers or the fierce animals of the wilderness.
The guards or slaves are all wearing turbans and are naked from the waist up, with
only a primitive sort of towel wrapping the lower part of their bodies. They all wear
bangles, in fact very colorful bangles, some of ivory or other animal bones, on their
wrists or ankles.
The source for this painting was a black-and-white photograph from Raphael
Patai‟s book The Vanished Worlds of Jewry (1980). The photo of course does not provide
any details of colors or textures. If the image had been in color, it would no doubt have
featured the richest and most brilliant hues. An artist could also visualize chunks of
jewels bursting forth from the mysterious, misty forest.
The subject‟s wealth was represented as that of the nobility. The Prince, therefore,
had to be dressed in silk, and the royal elephant lumbers along, draped in a variety of
unique fabrics, handsomely embroidered with silk, coins, and jewelry.iv
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18. Northern Yemenite Children, 1900

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NORTH YEMENITE CHILDREN, 1900

The Yemenite Jews are considered one of the most ancient of Jewish tribes.
Scattered all over Yemen in about eight hundred shtetl-like towns and villages, many of
them housing only Jews, they were for centuries quite segregated from their Arab
compatriots. As a result the Jews of Yemen managed to preserve ancient and unique
traditions in a relatively unadulterated form up to the present day. Despite isolation from
the outside world for at least a thousand years, and cruel treatment at the hands of
fanatical Shiite clerics, these long-suffering but proud, dignified and God-fearing Jews
remained unswerving in their religious beliefs.
By virtue of their punctilious adherence to the Biblical commandments and great
emphasis on the mystical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism, they have been dubbed by
scholars as the “most Jewish” of all Jews. Still other traditions hold that the Jews of
Yemen are descended from those who fled Judea before the destruction of the First
Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E. Though cut off from the rest of world Jewry,
especially after the rise to power of the xenophobic Shiites of the tenth century, the
Yemenite Jews never entirely lost contact with the major centers of Jewish civilization,
such as Jerusalem, Baghdad and Cairo. They possessed not only the Talmud (ancient
rabbinic writings on Jewish law and tradition) but most of the major Biblical
commentaries and mystical writings as well.
Today‟s Republic of Yemen is situated in the southwest corner of the Arabian
Peninsula, surrounded by high mountains and bounded on the north by Saudi Arabia, on
the east by Oman, on the south by the Gulf of Aden, and on the west by the Red Sea. (See
map on page 29.) The Republic of Yemen was formed in May 1990 with the reunification
of the former Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) and the People‟s Democratic
Republic of Yemen (South Yemen). Yemen in the most fertile part of Arabia and also the
most populated, with a total population estimated at 12 million. It is about 1,600 miles
from Israel.v
Mystic Brush Page 25

Yemen is believed to be the birthplace of the Arab people. Sanaa, the capital, is
one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. According to Islamic tradition, Sanaa was
founded by the sons of Kahtan (or Joktan), a descendant of Shem, the oldest son of Noah.
The harbors of Sabaea or Sheba, in the Yemen of antiquity, were emporia for the
extensive trade that was carried on with Egypt and India. Sabaea was famous for its
cultivation and exportation of frankincense and myrrh. These aromatic gums were used
for healing, embalming, and personal grooming, and in palaces and temples as a sweet
smelling incense. The visit of the legendary Queen of Sheba to King Solomon is
described in the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures). According to
Jewish tradition, Solomon converted the Queen and her entourage to Judaism.
The traditions peculiar to Yemenite Jewry make up part of the background
information that informed the creation of North Yemenite Children, 1900. These
traditions also are background for the painting Habbani of South Yemen, 1940, discussed
in the next chapter. This approach of incorporating a historical perspective into the
creative process was employed for all of the paintings.
Some of these distinctive Yemenite traditions:
 Men traditionally wore skirted garments, and the women wore trousers.
 Marriage took place early, sometimes even before puberty. A daughter
was sometimes coerced by her parents into marrying an unknown man,
undesirable to her, often old enough to be her father or even her grandfather.
 Men practiced polygamy. Wealthy men had as many as eight or ten wives.
 Yemenites were among the very few Jewish communities (Moroccans
were another) that had a tradition of eating certain kosher varieties of locust.
These were a staple food, especially in times of drought. During the periodic
locust plagues, the Jews would rush out into the fields and scoop up the
insects with specially crafted nets. The insects were spitted and roasted like
shish kebab, fried, or cooked up in soups.
 To aid in attaining the exalted state of mystical experience, the
kabbalistically inclined Yemenites sometimes turned to qat, a mildly
hallucinogenic herb. The leaves of the qat plant were chewed during study
and social gatherings.
Mystic Brush Page 26

 As with Jews elsewhere in the Middle East, an elaborate henna ceremony

took place some days before a wedding, in which a reddish paste was rubbed
on the hands and feet of a Yemenite bride and groom, to ward off the evil eye.
 Like the Chassidim of Poland, the men wore long dangling earlocks
(payot). Some historians believe that the wearing of payot was not originally
for reasons of piety, but rather was imposed on the Jews by their dominant
Shiite neighbors as a mark of their inferior status.

The focus of the painting North Yemenite Children, 1900 is clearly the importance of
learning in this tribe. Great emphasis was placed on education and on derech eretz, i.e.,
moral guidance. There was a pervasive fear among the Yemenites that a father who
passed away without having provided his sons with instruction in the Torah would be
deprived of his share in the world to come. Fathers who were derelict in their
responsibilities to their boys were treated like outcasts by other Yemenite Jews. For
example, the shochet or ritual slaughterer would refuse to slaughter for them, so that the
family was deprived of meat. In the larger Jewish communities, such as Sanaa and Sadaa,
boys were sent to cheder (school) when they turned three.
Because it was so difficult in a poor country like Yemen to eke out a living from
one trade alone, many Jewish artisans mastered a number of different trades. The
prominent historian S.D. Goitein wrote about encountering a Yemenite Jew who was
proficient in some thirty crafts, one of which was the art of writing segulot, magical
Hebrew formulas, for sick cows. Following the example of Yochanan the sandal-maker
and other Talmudic sages, in Yemen even rabbis earned their daily bread by working
with their hands. Occupations were usually handed down from father to son.
In addition to ordinary domestic chores such as cooking, grinding grain, drawing
water from the well, painting walls, and repairing furniture, women also contributed to
the family coffers by weaving, embroidering, and making kitchen utensils and brooms.
To help cover their personal expenses, these items were often sold directly to Muslim
women.
Yemenite Jewry was never centrally organized. Each community had a headman
called an aqil in Arabic (nasi in Hebrew), and a mori or rabbi. The aqil was generally an
Mystic Brush Page 27

elder who had attained wealth and wisdom and had connections with the local Arab tribal
chieftain. It was his responsibility to collect taxes, mediate disputes, and look out for
Jewish interests with respect to the government. The headman was elected by the elders
of the patronymic groups and was paid for his services. The headman was responsible for
the community‟s internal affairs. He served as cheder melamid or teacher, shochet or
ritual slaughterer, mohel or circumciser, and gabai or treasurer of the synagogue,
performing all these functions in addition to earning a living with his hands. The highest
authority for Yemenite Jews was a tribunal of three chachamim or sages in Sanaa. During
the periods of Ottoman Turkish occupation (the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries), the
chacham bashi or chief rabbi of Sanaa was recognized by the authorities as the official
representative for Jewish communal affairs in Yemen.
While illiteracy was almost the norm among Yemenite Muslims, it was unusual to
find a Jewish male who could not read. In addition to pure Arabic, which they spoke on
the street, among themselves the Jews spoke a hybrid form of Arabic heavily laced with
Hebrew. Almost every Jewish man in Yemen exhibited complete mastery of Hebrew in
reading the Torah. Each man was expected to perform the customary rituals flawlessly,
without the need of a professional rabbi.
For this painting, centered on the vital importance of education, I chose a
background of a courtyard with brick walls and floors. It was hoped this would induce
viewers to visualize the setting as located near the corner of a formal garden. In order to
allow the group of children to concentrate on their studies, they are confined to a specific
space.
After receiving his first haircut, which left intact only the payot or curly earlocks,
a Yemenite boy was wrapped in his father‟s tallit or prayer shawl and carried off to the
cheder. After father and mori (teacher) exchanged blessings, the mori handed his new
charge a piece of candy. The child was seated in a circle of his peers on a dirt floor – like
the group of 14 children, aged three to seven, shown in the painting – usually in a room
or courtyard behind the synagogue (which, as described by one nineteenth-century
observer, might actually be quite dirty and poorly ventilated). The boy was taught by
mechanical repetition to memorize the Torah and traditional prayers. The mori can be
seen stand in the left-hand corner in the painting, holding a whip on a stick to indicate the
Mystic Brush Page 28

seriousness of his determination to teach his students in a highly disciplined manner, and
to focus the children‟s attention on learning the Torah and traditional prayers by heart.
Memorizing as much as possible was very important in impoverished Yemen, due
to the scarcity of holy books. The few books that were available for students in cheder
were placed in the center of the circle, so that six or eight children were obliged to read
from one book, as shown in the painting, where three books are being shared by fourteen
pupils. Yemenite Jewish children thereby developed an ability to read from both the right
and the left, as well as upside-down.
Children attended the cheder from early dawn to sunset on weekdays (Sunday
through Thursday) and until noon on Friday. Testing usually took place on Wednesdays,
and woe to the youngster who couldn‟t recite the prescribed text flawlessly. He was
considered possessed by demons who were distracting his attention from Torah studies.
For every mistake he would be beaten with a stick or with a strap like the one the painting
shows in the mori’s hand. Fathers literally pleaded with the mori to take whatever
punitive measures were needed to drive out the evil demon, so long as the teacher didn‟t
injure the child. Little wonder that by the time they were ready to leave the school, many
Yemenite boys could recite by heart the entire Torah, whole sections of the Talmudic
tract on the laws of shechita (ritual slaughtering), and Maimonides‟ Mishneh Torah or the
Code of Law. In Yemen it was not uncommon to find certified ritual slaughterers who
had not yet reached their teens.
It was also not uncommon to find children aged nine or ten serving as teachers,
after acting as teaching assistants at an even younger age. Many of those children were
orphans or runaways, who were prepared to travel to the more remote villages to teach
there. The mori was often someone who had never learned a trade or an elderly man who
had taken up teaching on retiring from work.
Because Yemenite Jewish families tended to be large and most were very poor,
boys were usually taken out of school at thirteen, twelve, or even earlier, and apprenticed
to their fathers or some other relative. Often this transition was strongly resisted by the
boy‟s mother. Although completely illiterate herself, the Yemenite Jewish mother
ardently believed that studying the Torah was the most meritorious activity to which a
man could aspire. Therefore, she often found her greatest fulfillment in life in raising a
Mystic Brush Page 29

son to be a Talmudic scholar. She would vigorously oppose her husband if he sought to
cut short her child‟s Jewish education. Nevertheless, many children, especially those
living in the smaller isolated villages, received almost no formal Jewish education at all.
The concept of childhood was almost nonexistent among the Jews of Yemen.
There was no rite of passage, such as the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, for a boy who reached
the age of thirteen, just as there was no fixed age for donning the tefillin or phylacteries
(small boxes with straps, worn on the head and arm, containing scriptural verses). Boys
began to wear tefillin when they were sufficiently mature, which in Yemen could be as
young as eight or nine.
According to one scholar, a father was not obligated to provide for his sons after
they had reached the age of six. Many youngsters who came of age were placed by their
fathers in what might be called a “work-study” program. As he sat side-by-side with his
son, teaching him the intricacies of his craft, the father would also involve him in
discussions of the Holy Texts. “By engaging him in Torah and work simultaneously,”
writes Goitein, “a Yemenite Jewish man realized the ancient Jewish ideal of embodying
in everyday life the combination of productive manual labor with a preoccupation with
the intellectual-sacred tradition.” As a rule, however, Yemenite Jews did not excel as
Talmudists, greater emphasis being placed on mastering the Mishnah (the first section of
the Talmud) only.
Much of the creative literature produced by Yemenite Jews focused on the holy
writings, and tended to be influenced by Maimonides and the mystical teachings of the
great kabbalists. Lurianic mysticismvi emanating from Sanaa reached other parts of
Yemen through shelichim (emissaries) who periodically came to Yemen to raise funds for
the maintenance of yeshivot (academies for advanced study of Jewish texts) and other
charitable projects. The spiritual prestige of the Holy Land was enhanced by the visitors
and as a consequence, some outstanding Yemenite sages were stirred to make aliyah
(immigration to Palestine, later Israel).
Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, who flourished in the seventeenth century, is universally
recognized as Yemenite Jewry‟s greatest poet/saint. Shabazi was born near Ta‟izz in
South Yemen around 1619 and is believed to have earned his living as an itinerant
weaver. He is said to have written thousands of hymns and poems, only 550 of which
Mystic Brush Page 30

survived the infamous Mawza Decree.vii The great preponderance of his poems – written
in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic – are spiritual in nature and deal primarily with the
themes of exile and redemption, eschatology, the Jewish circle of life, and ethics and
morality. The Encyclopedia Judaica estimates that about half the poems of the Yemenite
Diwan were composed by Shabazi. A diwan is a collection of poems and devotional
songs chanted or sung in the home during the Sabbath and for various celebrations. In
most mizrachi lands, such diwans are preserved in writing, but the music and dances that
accompany them are transmitted orally. According to musicologist Avner Bahat, the
Yemenite Diwan is the “richest and most valuable of all.”
Rabbi Shabazi is believed to have died in Ta‟izz in 1720, and came to be
remembered as a tzaddik (righteous man) and miracle worker. Arabs as well as Jews
made pilgrimages to his grave to receive his blessings.
Another distinctive aspect of Yemenite Jewish education was the pervasive belief
that should girls be taught to read, crime would proliferate and the world would be
deluged with torrid rainstorms. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Jewish women
in Yemen were completely illiterate. Only in rare cases, where the father had no sons,
could he give his daughter or daughters a formal Jewish education.
In Yemen, it was not unusual to find a twelve-year-old girl who was already a
mother. Customarily, girls were married between the ages of eight and ten. Boys married
between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. The divine instruction “Be fruitful and multiply”
being enjoined upon the Jews in the Bible, bachelors and old maids were extremely rare
in Yemen. The desire to have sons was especially great because Yemenite Jewish parents
wanted to have their male issue say kaddish (a funeral prayer) for them when they died.
In the more urbanized and more affluent communities, the parents generally decided who
was an appropriate match, but usually conferred with their sons before proceeding with
the negotiations.
In the painting North Yemenite Children, 1900, the clothing, caps, and so forth are
based on the historical traditions but delineated imaginatively, according to my personal
impressions of the period.viii It has been generally assumed that the Yemenite Jews let
their payot or earlocks grow long because, as a tradition-bound, pietistic people, they
were fulfilling the Biblical injunction, “Ye shall round the corners of your heads, neither
Mystic Brush Page 31

shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard” (Leviticus 19:27), lifnim meshurat hadin, or
beyond the letter of the law.
In fact, the wearing of the long, dangling payot was originally a source of great
shame for the Yemenite Jews. It was decreed by the Yemenite imams to distinguish the
Jews from the Muslims, ostensibly so the Jews would not be killed by mistake in times of
war. The Jews perceived their payot as two long, coiling snakes protruding from the
cheekbones, and referred to them as simanim or distinguishing marks of Jews. Later
generations of course imputed great religious significance to the payot by growing them
long and devoting time to grooming them. According to one unnamed Yemenite
chronicler, this was due to the marvelous ability of the Jews to adapt to their environment
and to transform curses into blessings. It should be noted that this painting places special
emphasis on the earlocks.
Mystic Brush Page 32

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Mystic Brush Page 36

ENDNOTES

i
The “Chinese Jews” thus played the most significant role for me in this whole
series of paintings. But I feel it is important and necessary for me to share the
development of each artwork in this series. I want to remind myself and all other artists
that creating something new and different is a path to the ultimate freedom of the
integration of mind, spirit, and body. Creation is our best teacher: If I get too involved
with myself, conditioned by the traditional mind – the “yes or no,” the “should or should
not,” and all such paradigms – the painting will always turn out to have exaggerations or
missing elements. I suppose that is the ultimate joy of art and life: that it is an eternal
mystery.

ii
Pollak, Michael. The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews. Dallas, 1975, p. 28.

iii
Painting „C,‟ with its two separate monochrome scenes of mountains in the Gobi
Desert and a camel caravan on the move, was an effort to demonstrate the highest
possible intensity of speed, texture, and technique of brush and ink. The Gobi mountain
Mystic Brush Page 37

scene was drawn on rice paper in less than two minutes, while the camels and people
took a bit longer.

iv
I recall that while creating this painting I actually felt the joy of the elephant
with his trunk swinging proudly up and down. In this vast land with its enormous trees, I
felt this elephant must be very special, definitely a chosen one. Ordinary work elephants
had to labor for long hours, carrying timber in their trunks. Artists who illustrate works
like this have an opportunity to drift into a totally different world of imagination, and to
become part of the painting instead of being its creator. That for me is the most exciting
and rewarding part of the creative process.

v
No other non-Ashkenazi group has influenced Israeli culture the way the
Yemenites have. Although constituting only five percent of the Israeli population before
the recent of masses of Russian and Ethiopian Jews, the Yemenites have always been
disproportionately represented in the arts, and their music and dance repertoires are
considered to be the most ancient and authentic form of Middle Eastern music. Many
traditional Israeli folk songs are based on Yemenite religious poetry and musical themes.
Popular Israeli dance has become synonymous with Yemenite folk dance. Much of the
craftwork which is accepted today as Israeli is of Yemenite origin. The Bejalel Institute is
a special school dedicated to studying Yemenite arts and crafts.

vi
Lurianic mysticism originated with a group of refugees from Spain who settled
in Safed in the Galilee and formed a community of kabbalistic mystics. One of the
leaders was Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), for whom the group was named. Lurianic
mysticism would be very influential in the later Hasidic movement.

vii
In 1679, the Zaidi Shiite government exiled part of the Jewish community of
central Yemen to Mawza, on the southern Red Sea coast. Many of the exiles died there
from disease and starvation. About a year later, the surviving Jews were taken back to
central Yemen for economic reasons: they made up a majority of the region‟s craftsmen
and artisans.
Mystic Brush Page 38

viii
Numerous sketches and photographs of Yemenite children were studied to
capture in the painting the expressions on their faces, their earlocks, and their intensity in
studying the Torah. The colors of their clothing were chosen more on the basis of artistic
preference, but the styles are similar to those of the time period depicted, around 1900.
Patterns and designs were also imaginative and intuitive.