Reports emanating from Yemen as early as the 1920s indicated that local Jews were subjected to a unique statute, known in Jewish sources as the “Orphans' Decree.” This law obligated the Yemeni (Zaydi) state to take custody of dhimmi children who had been orphaned, usually of both parents, and to raise them as Muslims. The statute, anchored in 18th-century Zaydi legal interpretations and put into practice at the end of that century, has no parallel in other countries.1 S. D. Goitein suggests that the legal basis for this religious interpretation rested on the hadith: “Every person is born to the natural religion [Islam], and only his parents make a Jew or a Christian out of him” (Muhammad al-Bukhari 82, 3).2