Saudi Arabia’s ‘last Jew’ has died at the age of 82.
David Shuker, who sources on Wednesday confirmed had passed away, lived most of his life in Israel, but was born and raised in Najran in the south west of Saudi Arabia.
The city had a small, persecuted Jewish population and the vast majority fled to the Israel on its creation in 1948.
Shuker was part of this migration and moved to Israel some time between 1948 and 1951. He later became the mayor of Bnei Ayish, near Ashdod.
By 1951, his whole family had migrated. He told his story in 2022 in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. “After the State of Israel was established in 1948, the Jews were called by the king’s representatives to gather in the main square.
“A convoy of camels was waiting there for 260 people, mostly children like me. Our families’ belongings were loaded onto the camels, and before sunset we began walking toward the Yemeni border.”
Najran was not always Saudi – before the formation of the kingdom in 1934, it belonged to Yemen. Jews had been living in the city for hundreds of years.
In 2022, Shuker told Israel’s Channel 13: “Jews lived in Najran long before the Saudi rule. In fact, there is evidence that Jews lived there as early as 2,000 years ago.”
Growing up in Najran, Shuker saw no animosity between the Jews and the Muslim majority. “They even helped us keep Shabbat,’ he told Channel 13. It was the rulers who Shuker said treated the Jews like “second-class citizens”.
Despite the good community relationships, the Jews Shuker said, “were not equal to the Muslims.
“We were openly Jewish. The relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities were very close. They even helped us keep Shabbat,” he said. But “the rulers treated us like second-class citizens.”
Shuker always had fond memories of his childhood home and wanted to return one day. Despite Saudi Arabia working towards normalising relationships with the Jewish state, Israelis are still banned from entering the country.
Shuker appealed to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his father King Salman, asking to be allowed to visit the “city of [his] birth”.
He wrote that he wanted “to see where my grandparents are buried… while I am still standing on my feet.”
Shuker never got to visit.
In a post announcing his passing, the Yemenite Jewish and Israeli Communities Heritage Centre called Shuker “a multifaceted public character whose image is woven into the story of the Jews of Yemen in general and the Najran community in particular.
“His life story is that of the Yemenite Jews – tradition, faith, labour and preservation of identity from generation to generation.”
These days, some Jews do call Saudi Arabia home, but Shuker was believed to be the last member of the kingdom’s historic community.
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