Mark S. Wagner has made an important and original contribution to the growing body of academic studies on Yemenite Jewish history and culture, and his new book, Jews and Islamic Law in Early Twentieth-Century Yemen actually offers much more than the title would suggest. Although the book's theme is how Jews negotiated life in a traditional Muslim society in which the Sharīʿa was theoretically the overarching governing framework, Wagner also offers fascinating insights into the complexities of daily social, economic, and political life in Yemen. Furthermore, the book goes beyond the time frame to encompass the late nineteenth century and the entire first half of the twentieth. Much of the book focuses on case studies directly or indirectly involving three Jews: Salīm Saʿīd al-Jamal (later in Israel, Shalom Gamliel), Ṣāliḥ al-Ẓāhirī (later Ẓadok Yiṣhari), and Salīm Manṣūra. Wagner makes use of their Hebrew memoirs published in Israel, along with those of others, including several Arabic memoirs by Muslims.  He also makes extensive use of the considerable scholarly literature on Yemen and Yemenite Jewry. Although he occasionally draws comparisons and contrasts to other parts of the Islamic world, it is regrettable that these are rather limited, for whereas the specialist on Islamicate Jewry would immediately recognize the parallels, the nonspecialist might think that some of the phenomena described are sui generis to Yemen.

The three principal protagonists of the book, who are indeed colorful characters, are classic middlemen, a Jewish type, well known from historical and anthropological literatures on both the Islamic and Christian worlds. They are merchants who have connections to the Muslim elite all the way up to the imam himself. They are not only learned in their own tradition, but know enough about Islamic jurisprudence and the judicial system to act as attorneys in practice if not in theory. In Yemen, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, Jews had recourse to the non-Jewish courts not only in disputes with gentiles or in criminal cases, but even in cases involving only fellow Jews when they thought it was more in their interest to do so rather than to go to the beit din.

Wagner is a literary scholar. His earlier monograph, Like Joseph in Beauty (Leiden: Brill, 2009), dealt with Yemenite Muslim and Jewish vernacular poetry. Jews and Islamic Law includes frequent recounting of piquant and telling anecdotes from the memoirs of his protagonists, which makes for engaging reading. Wagner shows due caution in his analyses and is well aware that sometimes the narrators present an image of themselves as major players in the events they describe who can outwit and overcome hostile Muslims. The stories from the memoirs are often neatly rounded out with folktales, proverbs, and even jokes that contextualize the themes of the personal narratives.

Chapter 1 (16–37) outlines the Islamic legal system and its relation to Jews in its Zaydī Yemenite variant. In chapter 2 (38–62), Wagner discusses the sumptuary laws, known in Arabic as ghiyār, or “differentiation,” which applied to non-Muslims living as dhimmīs, or protégés of the Islamic state. In Yemen, as in the Maghreb, Jews were the only dhimmīs remaining in postmedieval times, and the discriminatory laws for them were generally enforced with greater rigor and took on unique forms. (Wagner makes the insightful observation that Jews favored some of these sumptuary laws in order to maintain certain boundaries between themselves and the gentile majority, that is, to strengthen their own ideal of self-segregation.) There is a particularly interesting discussion of how Salīm Saʿīd al-Jamal campaigned to be allowed to ride newly introduced bicycles, arguing that they are outside the classical legal restriction on Jews riding noble mounts such as horses and fine mules or having to ride side-saddle on donkeys.

Jewish attempts to extricate themselves from the traditional restrictions of the Islamic legal and social system were far more modest than those in Muslim countries where European colonial powers and Western cultural missionaries such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle had established a foothold. There are scattered references to the reformist and anti-Kabbalist movement Dor Deʿah (generation of knowledge) in chapters 3 through 5, and Wagner seems inclined toward Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman's hypothesis that the founders of this group were influenced by notable Islamic reformers of the period such as Jamal al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh. This certainly may have been one source of influence, although their turning to European Jewish leaders and organizations in the 1890s for assistance in establishing a modern Jewish school in Sanʿa points to an awareness of the modernizing trends among their brethren in other Islamic countries that had been penetrated by Western influences.

Chapter 3, which bears the evocative title “Muslim Jews and Jewish Muslims” (63–95), touches on a wide variety of topics and undertakes to show how nonlegal codes were often operative in social relations. Here again, comparative observations with North Africa, and particularly with Morocco, would have been highly instructive. In both places and in marked contradistinction to much of the Levant, large numbers of Jews lived outside the major urban centers where normative Islamic law prevailed. In the countryside, tribal law and custom (called ṭāghūt in Yemen and ʿurf in Morocco) reigned and could be markedly at odds with the Sharīʿa. In rural villages and nomadic encampments commensality between Muslims and Jews was commonplace.

Chapter 4 (96–123) is dedicated to economic life and is particularly wide ranging, surveying Jewish occupations both legal and illegal. As in many parts of the Islamic world, Jews in Yemen dominated some skilled crafts, such as metalsmithing. Although permitted to produce alcoholic beverages for themselves, selling them to Muslims was against the law. However, as everywhere in the Muslim world, this was a lucrative business that sometimes led to trouble. As elsewhere in the Dār al-Islām, Jews, like other minorities, were sometimes assigned to pariah occupations. In Yemen in the late eighteenth century, the so-called Latrines Decree assigned Jews to the cleaning of cesspools and the collection of animal excrement. (Dried fecal matter was used in Yemen, which lacked adequate sources of wood, as fuel for cooking fires and to heat bathhouses.) The people engaged in this profession became a caste within the Jewish community. The chapter also discusses property rights, interfaith business partnerships, and documents. In this chapter, too, some comparative references would have been instructive. For example, the ability of Jewish silversmiths in Lower Yemen to enter the women's quarters of Muslim homes to make repairs has its parallel in parts of rural Libya, Algeria, and Morocco. Indeed the very notion of Jews occupying an intermediate space between male and female was widespread in tribal societies. Hence the importance of protection and patronage in regions outside of the control of the central government, a subject that Wagner takes up, inter alia, with colorful examples in chapter 5, entitled “Intercommunal Violence and the Sharīʿa” (124–150).

Chapter 5 includes interesting cases of Jewish violence against Muslims, which may seem paradoxical given Jews’ defined status as humble protégés, who, according to the Pact of ʿUmar, the traditional document governing the subordinate relation of dhimmīs to the dominant Muslim polity, cannot bear arms and must never strike a Muslim. In a particularly complicated incident, a Jew struck a qāḍī no less, and thanks to the wily al-Ẓāhirī, he got away with it, in part by manipulating sentiments of honor and shame.

While engagingly written, the book would have benefitted from a little tighter editing. A few phrases, descriptions, and definitions are repeated almost verbatim. But these are truly minor flaws.

Mark Wagner has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the complexities and the contradictions that characterized the lives of those whom S. D. Goitein famously dubbed “the most Jewish and the most Arab of all Jews.” Though I always found the phrase a tad romantic and hyperbolic, this book provides an element of corroboration for this bon mot.