The pilot was convicted and sentenced to death for murder, but Mr. Nahari’s family, pressured into accepting blood money from the killer’s tribe to spare his life, left Yemen as soon as possible.

In the next few years, nearly all of Raida’s Jews followed. Among the exceptions were Abraham Jacob and eight other interrelated households, 55 people in all, most of them children, according to Suleiman Jacob, 45, Abraham’s eldest brother and the community’s unofficial rabbi and kosher butcher.

Like the men, most of the boys in the Jacob family wear earlocks, a proud sign of who they are in an otherwise Muslim society.

Now Suleiman keeps his earlocks thin and long enough so that when he goes out he can tuck them out of sight under an Arabic-style head scarf, which also covers the skullcaps (or kipas) that the men and boys all wear. “It’s a shame that we have to do that sometimes, but we do,” he said.

Abraham says he refuses to hide his earlocks: “I fear none but God.”

Yemeni Jews, like those in other Arab countries, have suffered wave after wave of persecution. Originally many of them lived in Saada Province in the north, which was predominantly Zaydi, members of an offshoot of Shiite Islam that historically were anti-Semitic. The Houthis, whose base is in Saada, embedded that attitude in their slogan, “Death to America, death to Israel, damnation to the Jews.”

The Houthis fought a succession of wars with the central government beginning in 2004, and in 2007, a Houthi representative in Saada gave Jews there an ultimatum: Leave in 10 days or face attack. Yemen’s president then, Mr. Saleh, though a Zaydi himself, became a champion of the Jews from Saada. At government expense, Mr. Saleh relocated them to a gated community in Sana next to the American Embassy.