Judah ben Shalom

[1] He announced to the Jews of Yemen in March 1868 that he was in fact the self-same messianic claimant known as Shukr Kuhayl I, who had been killed and decapitated by Arabs just three years prior, now resurrected by Elijah.

[2] Unlike Shukr Kuhayl I, who worked mainly in the capacity of itinerant preacher, Judah ben Shalom developed a significant organizational structure which may have included hundreds of functionaries.

Beyond Judah ben Shalom's exhortations to repentance (which were characteristic also of his predecessor Shukr Kuhayl I, and of other Yemenite messiahs), his correspondence is distinguished by its encouragement of the paying of a tithe (ma'aser) to his organization.

Many of them shut themselves up for days, and imagine that they are speaking to the angel Gabriel and other celestial beings...While Sassoon has the advantage of proximity to events—living almost contemporaneously with the messianic movement he is describing, one can question the fairness of some of these remarks, especially inasmuch as they are not paralleled in Saphir's accounts.

[5] Secondly, the tradition among Yemenite Jews of memorizing the entire Tanakh made it easy for a knowledgeable individual such as Kuhayl II to sound eminently "messianic" by artfully weaving into his writings (and no doubt into his speeches) verses from the Nevi'im and Ketuvim.

In regard to the present episode, Lenowitz considers it within the framework of the entire history of Yemenite messianic activity in the following way:[7] The leaders of the Yemenite Jewish community would continue to play the role in which they appear in the Letter [to Yemen]: they were indecisive; they were noncondemnatory; they were swayed by their own longings; they understood and sympathized with their people; and they could not but respect the messiahs for the conduct they preached, even while fearing the outcome of their claims and the threat their movements made to the peaceful, if lowly, life of the Jews of Yemen under Moslem despotism.

The local Jewish communities—San'a', in particular—would also play the part outlined for them in the Letter; the repression and the occasional instability in the society would recur; and Yemen, finally, comes to present a strikingly unified messiah history that spans a period of over 600 years.Eventually, it was Jacob Saphir's 1872 Igeret Taiman (consciously borrowing the title of Rambam's earlier Epistle), countering the messianic claims of Judah ben Shalom, and signed by the rabbis of Jerusalem, which led to a deterioration in Kuhayl's stature among the community leaders controlling his cash flow.