Family Chronicle

At that time, this story [parashah] was written: a great event happened to the Jews, which caused downfall such as never had been in the world before and never would occur again. They came before the judges in the city of Uzal, which is called Sanaʽa in Arabic—which is in the country of Yemen—they came before them announcing news both from within this country and from outside of it and even from the land of Yemen, and letters came from the men of Safed [?], which is close to Jerusalem, that the messianic king had arisen for the Jews. [ . . . ]

Afterward, the Jews observed several fasts, for the redeemer and Messiah [had come] to them, and there was great weeping, and they yearned and believed with great faith. [ . . . ] These things were proclaimed by men of the sect of Samael, and they deceived them about matters [ . . . ] of the Torah that appear neither in the written Torah nor the oral Torah: They forbade meat, saying that the Jews should not eat roasted meat, and they forbade wine on the night of Passover, and they decreed that the women should shave their heads, and that men should not have relations with them, and that they should eat all their food tasteless, without salt, but with dust and ashes, and that they should not dress sinfully and that they should not sleep in their clothes and that they should not wear clothing of black wool, and that they should go forth and pray with their faces covered, and several other improper matters. Their words were heeded, and the judges and officers were unable to threaten them, but rather they listened to their words. Those men would say: on such-and-such a day you will be redeemed; on such-and-such a day you will flourish, and before you will know it you will be in your land, while the wicked will dwell in the wilderness of peoples [see Ezekiel 20:35] when their blood is Jewish, or perhaps they will float with the clouds of heaven (Daniel 7:13) or perhaps the time of the end will have come, and the Jews are faithful, the children of the faithful.

At this time they were under a Muslim ruler. When the imam [al-Mutawakkil Ismā‘īāl] heard from great men and nobles and from all the nations of the earth, he sent to the most important of the Jews in the city of Uzal and in the city of Hamdah, and to the leaders appointed over them, saying to them: what is this that you are doing? And they could not conceal the matter, because there were many witnesses to it. He subsequently settled them near him, in a place called Al-Suda‘ until he heard more about it. He was filled with rage against them and against all the Jews, and he wrote to the members of his religion and to all the people of his nation that they should appoint officials in every single city and every single state and every single district and every place where Jews were to be found, in order to torture them and to do whatever they wished to them. He sent against the Jews several armies of his own and of his relatives, with horses and cavalrymen, and they tortured the Jews with several forms of torture. He also decreed about their houses and fields and all their possessions that they would belong to him and his great-grandchildren after him until the end of time, and that the Jews should have no part or estate in his country.

He then decreed that all the Jews should remove their turbans from their heads and that they should never place a turban on their heads again. When the nations of the world heard this, they tormented the Jews and removed their turbans from their heads. And the Jews were mortified because they saw their friends bareheaded, and they placed their clothing on their head due to the shame. But the gentiles would find them and say to them: take the clothes off your head and walk bareheaded. And every single one of the gentiles would boast to his fellow: I did to so-and-so the Jew whatever I wanted; I beat him and insulted him, and I took the wrapping off his head. All of them would amuse themselves and do what they wanted to the Jews, great and small.

Next, the greatest of the Jews were imprisoned by the imam [al-Mutawakkil Ismā‘īāl], and he took them out and rushed them to the slaughterhouse and said: Expose them to the sun. They took them out and removed their clothes from them and exposed them to the sun at the king’s gate before all passersby. And they said to them: accept the protected religion; what good do you have from your religion? They remained silent; they had nothing to say, as they turned their hearts toward their Father in heaven, that He should save them. As for the rest, those who accompanied the important Jews, they put iron chains around their necks and led them naked and barefoot to dungeons, and imprisoned them in a place of darkness and the shadow of death [see Psalms 107:10]. They led out the leader of the city of Uzal in chains of iron, naked and barefoot, to a placed named Kamarān, and they imprisoned him alone in a spot where there was no Jew, and he accepted upon himself all sorts of tortures and took the torments and all the tribulations that God, blessed be He, decreed against him and all the Jews his people. He sat and groaned and wept with a bitter soul, and there was none to save him except God, blessed be He, in His glory.

There was another individual in the city of Uzal, and he was called Suleiman al-Akte. He was a rabbi and a great scholar in Torah and the Bible and Jewish law and legends and traditions and especially in the kabbalah. And a great thing was done for him when he went before the king in the city of Uzal on the intermediate days of Passover. No one in the world knew what he said before the king, but the king related that he said, “Examine me, Lord and try me me” (Psalms 26:2). And to this day we do not know what was in his heart, but they said that he wept greatly in the synagogue and said: Fortunate are you Jews, what is in store for you, and then he arose. A while after he had spoken before the king they imprisoned him and beat him and bound him in a place underneath the earth. They subsequently took him out and presented him to a second king, to whom they paid the tax, and they imprisoned him in a place of snakes and scorpions. They then wrote to the greatest king among them, whose name was Ishmael, and he decreed that they should slaughter him in the market house in the center of the city on Friday after their prayers. They slaughtered him, as he had commanded, after leading him through the markets of the city. After they slaughtered him, they bound him by the legs and decreed that the Jews must drag him around until they reached the gate of the province. They then hanged him on the wall by the gate, stripped and naked before every passerby for three days and they did not bury him until after the Jews had a paid a great deal of money for his burial. But a miracle was wrought for him, for when they buried him he did not stink, and the people were amazed that he did not stink and there was no stench and there were no maggots in him [see Exodus 16:24].

And afterward the great ones merited that God changed the heart of the king, so that he removed the great ones who were with him, after they had suffered and had to pay a substantial sum. There was a huge drought in the whole world, east, west, north, and south, from one end to the other. It even affected animals and beasts, and all creatures that crawl on the ground. Nearly five hundred or more Jews apostatized, and it was like a generation of persecution due to their initial state of poverty and because of the famine that came to the world. Thus, a keddah of wheat reached eight gold coins, and a keddah of maize seven gold coins, and a keddah of barley six, but they could not be found.

May God, blessed be He, see our plight and show us the face of our messiah, and we will ascend to our land, and we will see it with our own eyes, and our hearts will be joyous. Amen, so may it be His will.