Nissim Gamlieli was a Jew from a remote area of Yemen’s hinterlands where a lot of Jews lived in small isolated villages.  He became the librarian for Camp Hashid, a refugee camp jointly run by the British government in Aden and the Jewish Agency for the thousands of Jewish refugees who streamed into British Aden from the Yemeni interior in hopes of emigrating to Palestine.  In Israel he worked as a schoolteacher and published rich studies based on documents and interviews of Jews from his region, many of whom live in Ramla.

Gamlieli’s Love in Yemen: Yemenite Popular Songs—Women’s Songs, first published in 1974 and reprinted three more times, based upon the author’s interviews with women and men from his region, is a treasure trove of information on popular song and women’s experiences in rural Yemen.  Since Jewish women were largely excluded from the world of traditional Jewish learning, the book also tells us a lot about the lives of Muslim women, their private lives, relationships between the sexes, and other taboo topics.