Israel's National Library gifted world’s largest collection of Yemenite manuscripts

The donation comes from the family of a butcher, who spent over six decades amassing the collection

Israel’s National Library (NLI) has received an extraordinary gift — the world’s largest collection of Yemenite Jewish manuscripts. The donation comes from the family of the man who collected the material, Yehuda Levi Nahum.

Yehuda Levi Nahum, known as Yuda, was born in Sana’a, Yemen, in 1915. He emigrated to Israel in 1929 aged just 14 and settled eventually in Tel Aviv where he made a living as a butcher.

That was just his day job. The rest of his time was spent amassing Yemenite manuscripts and fragments, a collection begun by manuscripts sent to him from Yemen by his parents, after he had expressed interest in learning about his heritage. Over six decades, from the early 1940s until his death in 1998, Nahum succeeded in amassing the world’s largest collection of Yemenite-Jewish manuscripts, comprising hundreds of complete works and thousands of fragments, some ancient and some modern.

After his parents arrived in Israel in 1949, Nahum continued to collect manuscripts by visiting Yemenite Jews in the ma’abarot (immigrant and refugee absorption camps), and then the towns where they eventually settled.

The collection was kept at Nahum’s home in Holon where scholars and Israeli presidents, such as Zalman Shazar and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, would come to view it. Assisted by scholar Professor Yosef Tobi of Haifa University and others, during his lifetime Nahum published some of the documents in several books which changed scholarly perceptions of Yemenite Jewry.

In addition to its size, the collection includes outstanding items such as Judeo-Yemenite copies of works by Maimonides (the Rambam), and Rabbi Yihya Saleh (the Maharitz), well as antique ketubot (marriage certificates), with more discoveries expected as it is explored.

The timing of the presentation of the collection by the Nahum family was chosen as the Hebrew date Shevat 9 (Thursday 18 January). That is the anniversary of the death of the great 17th century Yemenite poet and rabbi, Shalom Shabazi.