THE JEWISH KINGS OF YEMEN
Most of Yemen is parched desert. But its congenial west coast and mountains were ideal for growing frankincense and myrrh that were as valuable as gold in the world of two thousand years ago. Yemen was a good place for Jews to live. Old time geographers called the area Arabia Felix (Happy Arabia), and happy it may have been were it not for the violent tribal squabbles. Each tribe warred for the other’s land and rule went to the ruthless.
During the early centuries of the Common Era, the Himyarite tribe became dominant in Yemen after defeating the Sabea, Raidan, Hadramut, and Yammat tribes. The Himyarites ruled over most of modern day Yemen and spread over most of the Arabian Peninsula at the zenith of their power. This empire would little concern us except that it was ruled by Jewish kings for many years, and, according to some historians, its population was comprised of converted Jews.
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A local Jewish tradition dates the settlement of Jews to the time of King Shlomo who sent Jewish ships to Yemen in search of gold and silver for the Bais
Hamikdosh, while other legends claim that Queen Sheba imported the first Jews.
Jews of Sana’a in north Yemen had a legend that forty-two years before the Churban, 75,000 Jews, including Kohanim and Levi’im moved to Yemen. Years later, it was said, Ezra visited the vicinity, bringing the joyous news that the Bais Hamikdosh was being rebuilt and urging them to trek back to Yerushalayim. But they refused to heed his call. This, according to legend, is why the name Ezra is never used among Yemenite Jews.
Yemenite Jews of Habban in the south of the country claimed to be descendants of Jews who moved there before the second Churban.Historians suspect they may be descendants of a brigade of soldiers Herod sent to help Roman legions in the area. The brigade never made it back toEretz Yisroel and perhaps settled in the area.
Historians presume that most Yemenite Jews emigrated there after the second Churban. The local pagans were accepting of the new arrivals. The Jews dwelled convivially in their midst, but kept themselves separate by the laws and customs of the Torah and their contact with the sages of Eretz Yisroel and Bavel.
The presence of Jews in the area eventually led to the creation of a Jewish Yemenite kingdom. How did this happen?
Hospitality Above All
In those days Arabia was constantly threatened by the Christian Byzantium Empire and the Zoroastrian Persia. Another enemy was Christian Ethiopia lying just over the narrow Persian Gulf. Keeping them out of Arabia was high on the Himyar’s shopping list. Nervous of Christian encroachment on his northern territories, the Himyar king, Tub’a Abu Kariba As’ad set out with an army and reached Yathrib, nowadays the Muslims’ city of Medina. Things seemed peaceful there, so leaving one of his sons behind in Yathrib the king forged on.
Some days later, the Yathrib citizens killed the king’s son. Furious, the king turned back, cut down the town’s palm trees that supplied a good part of their livelihood, and began a ruthless siege. The Yathrib pagans fought back, helped by their loyal Jewish neighbors. Legend makes much of the people of Yathrib’s hospitality, claiming that the town fought Kariba As’ad by day and served their royal besieger banquets at night. This went a long way towards quieting the king’s hostility.
Then the king fell ill. Two Jewish residents of the town, Kaab and Assad, went out and healed him, urging him to leave the town alone and warning that he might incur Divine wrath if he failed to leave.
“After six days,” Arab writers tell us, “the king and his army left Yathrib and set off to their birthplace in Yemen, the two Jewish sages accompanying him on his way. When the king returned to Yemen, he called upon all the citizens of the land to accept the Jewish religion. At first they refused, but in the end they agreed on condition that he took part in the ordeal of fire that was customary in Yemen.”
Although the story’s continuum sounds like something from the Arabian Nights, it vividly indicates the veneration some early Muslim historians had for the Torah.
“So his people (i.e., the Himyarites) went forth with their idols and with other sacred objects they were accustomed to utilize in their religion, while the two rabbis went forth with their sacred writings hanging round their necks until they halted in front of the fire by the place where it blazed forth,” the story continues. “The fire leapt out toward them, and when it neared them they withdrew from it in great fear. But those people present urged them onward and instructed them to stand firm.
“So they stood their ground until the fire covered them and consumed the idols and the sacred objects they had brought along, together with the men of Himyar who were bearing them. The two rabbis then went forth with their sacred writings round their necks, with their foreheads dripping with sweat but the fire did not harm them at all. At this, the Himyarites agreed to accept Tubba’s [Kariba As’ad’s] religion. From this time onward and because of this episode, was the origin of Judaism in Yemen.”
The king also permitted the two sages to destroy his country’s most popular idolatrous temple. Exactly what proportion of the population became Jewish is subject to speculation. Some historians maintain that it was mostly the ruling class that switched over to Judaism.
The Empire Sinks
Abu Kariba was succeeded by a corrupt leader unrelated to the king’s family who let the empire run to ruin. News of the Jewish kingdom had reached Christian countries and aroused fear and worry. Too much Jewish power in Yemen might interrupt the trade routes between Byzantium and India and in any case, they were not the greatest lovers of Jews. Ethiopian Christians encroached into Yemen, taking over major towns and turningshuls into churches. The Himyarite kingdom sank to a low point.
The next Jewish king to lead the dynasty was Abu Kariba’s son or grandson, Yussuf ‘As Ar Yath’ar Dhu-Nuwas (517-525 CE), the last Jewish ruler in Yemen. Dhu-Nuwas, according to some Arab historians, means Lord Sidelocks, signifying that the king grew prominent peyos. Others translate it as “Curly Head.”
Some sources claim that Dhu-Nuwas was a non-Jewish relative of Kariba As’ad and needed to be persuaded to convert. Arab legend relates that one pagan belief at the time was the service of fire, and particularly a certain fire claimed to be inextinguishable. Jews came to Dhu-Nuwas and said: “Our lord, the king! There is no reason you should worship the fire for it is worthless.” The king agreed to convert on condition the Jews extinguish the fire. The Jews began reading from a Torah scroll and did not cease until the fire shrank into nothing.
Dhu-Nuwas was a fierce warrior who loved nothing better than a good war. He began picking fights with Christian Byzantium, which drew in Ethiopia as well. Part of his campaign involved an attack against Najran, a hotbed of Christian agitation against the king, where Jews had been killed. Reports of the fall of Najran and the slaughter of some of its Christians shocked the Christian world and stirred up lust for revenge.
In 525 CE, the Christian allies struck and invaded from the Red Sea, capturing Dhu-Nuwas’s capital, its treasures, and his wife. According to legend, this last Jewish monarch of Yemen was last seen racing his steed from a jutting rock into the Red Sea. Although Jews and their allies eventually drove the Chris- tians from the interior, the monarchy had come to its end. Later, Himyar lost its independence and became a vassal state of Ethiopia. The Muslims seized the area in the 7th century, and within two centuries the Jews had plunged from being members of the ruling class, to becoming dhimmis (second class citizens) of the Muslim world.
Traces of the Past
Today, little remains of Yemen’s Jewish monarchy except a few inscriptions in Yemen bearing traditional Jewish names of Hashem. One inscription speaks of a building erected by a man named Yehudah and continues: “With help and charity of his G-d, the creator of his soul, the G-d of the living and the dead, the G-d of heaven and earth, who created everything; and with the support of His people, Israel, and by the authority of the King of Sheba, and by the authority of his tribal lord.”
There is also an Israeli connection to the old Jewish empire. During 1936-1937, archeologists digging in the ancient Beit Shearim cemetery near Chaifa found a four-roomed site with small burial niches. Pictures and inscriptions on the walls made it clear that this place was set aside for the burial of Himyar nobles. A Greek inscription over one of the burial niches described those interred there as “people of Himyar” and pottery and shards at the location date back to the second-half of the third century CE. Historians theorize that these Himyarites did not die during a tour of Eretz Yisroel, but were sent from Yemen to be buried there.
The most modern memorial to the Himyar Empire is found in downtown Yerushalayim. Branching off Yaffo Street, a street named Dhu Nuwas honors the memory of Yemen’s Jewish kings who burst into the arena of history 1,500 years ago and sank back into the sands of Yemen without a trace.
(Credit: Joseph Adler. The Jewish Kingdom of Himyar (Yemen): Its Rise and Fall. Gale, Cengage Learning, 2000.)
| Himyarite Kingdom | |||||
| مملكة حِمْيَر | |||||
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Ḥimyarite Kingdom (red) in the 3rd century CE.
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| Capital | Zafar Sana'a (poss. 500s) | ||||
| Languages | Ḥimyarite | ||||
| Religion | Semitic paganism and after 390 CE Judaism | ||||
| Government | Monarchy | ||||
| King | |||||
| • | 490s-500s | Abu Kariba Assad | |||
| • | 500s-510s | Dhū-Shanatir | |||
| • | 510s | Dhū-Shanatir | |||
| • | 510s-525 | Dhū Nuwās | |||
| Historical era | Antiquity | ||||
| • | Established | 110 BCE | |||
| • | Disestablished | 525 CE | |||
Before Islam: When Saudi Arabia Was a Jewish Kingdom
The discovery of the oldest-known pre-Islamic Arabic writing in Saudi Arabia, from ca. 470 CE, evidently caused some consternation, given its Christian and Jewish context.
Ariel David Mar 15, 2016 4:23 PM
The Najran Fort today, Saudi Arabia: Early Christians in the city of Najran were persecuted by the Himyarites, leading some to speculate that the Himyarites couldn't have been true Jews.
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In 2014, researchers from a French-Saudi expedition studying rock inscriptions in southern Saudi Arabia announced they had discovered what could be the oldest texts written in the Arabic alphabet. But they did so very quietly, perhaps because the context of the texts is something of an embarrassment to some.
The dozen or so engravings had been carved into the soft sandstone of the mountain passes around Bir Hima – a site about 100 kilometers north of the city of Najran, which over millennia has been plastered with thousands of inscriptions by passing travelers and officials. Conveniently, at least two of the early Arabic petroglyphs that were discovered cited dates in an ancient calendar, and expert epigraphists quickly calculated that the oldest one corresponded to the year 469 or 470 CE.
The discovery was sensational: the earliest ancient inscriptions using this pre-Islamic stage of Arabic script had been dated at least half a century later, and had all been found in Syria, which had suggested that the alphabet used to write the Koran had been developed far from the birthplace of Islam and its prophet.
Yet the announcement of the discovery was subdued. A few outlets in the French and Arab media tersely summarized the news, hailing the text as the “missing link” between Arabic and the earlier alphabets used previously in the region, such as Nabatean. Most of the articles were accompanied by stock photos of archaeological sites or other ancient inscriptions: it is almost impossible to find a picture of the inscription online or a reference to the actual content of the text.
Thawban son of Malik, the Christian
Only by delving into the 100-page-long report of that archaeological season published in December by France’s Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres – which supports the study – is it possible to see the find and learn more about it.
According to the report, the Arabic text, scrawled on a large rectangular stone, is simply of a name, “Thawban (son of) Malik,” followed by the date.
Underwhelming? Well, there is the matter of the large, unmistakably Christian cross that decorates the head of this inscription. The same cross systematically appears on the other similar stelae dating more or less to the same period.
Ancient engravings carved into the soft sandstone of the mountain passes around Bir HimaScreengrab from YouTube
Behind the low-key announcement of the find, one can almost sense the mixed feelings of Saudi officials faced with an important discovery for their heritage, which, however, seems to connect the origins of the alphabet used to pen their sacred book to a Christian context, some 150 years before the rise of Islam.
Further consternation may have arisen when realizing that these texts are not only the legacy of a once-numerous Christian community, but are also linked to the story of an ancient Jewish kingdom that once ruled over much of what is today Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Jews vs. Christians in the desert
While the Koran and later Muslim tradition make no bones about the presence of Jewish and Christian communities across the peninsula in Mohammed’s day, the general picture that is painted of pre-Islamic Arabia is one of chaos and anarchy. The region is described as being dominated by jahilliyah – ignorance – lawlessness, illiteracy and barbaric pagan cults.
The decades immediately before the start of the Islamic calendar (marked by Mohammed’s “hijra” – migration – from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE) were marked by a weakening of societies and centralized states in Europe and the Middle East, partly due to a plague pandemic and the incessant warfare between the Byzantine and Persian empires.
The bleak representation of pre-Islamic Arabia was less an accurate description, it seems, than a literary metaphor to emphasize the unifying and enlightening power of Mohammed’s message.
Reexamination of works by Muslim and Christian chroniclers in recent years, as well as finds like the one in Saudi Arabia, are producing a much more elaborate picture, leading scholars to rediscover the rich and complex history of the region before the rise of Islam.
One of the key, but often forgotten, players in Arabia at the time was the kingdom of Himyar.
Established around the 2nd century CE, by the 4th century it had become a regional power. Headquartered in what is today Yemen, Himyar had conquered neighboring states, including the ancient kingdom of Sheba (whose legendary queen features in a biblical meeting with Solomon).
Petroglyphs in Wadi Rum, JordanEtan J. Tal, Wikimedia Commons
In a recent article titled “What kind of Judaism in Arabia?” Christian Robin, a French epigraphist and historian who also leads the expedition at Bir Hima, says most scholars now agree that, around 380 CE, the elites of the kingdom of Himyar converted to some form of Judaism.
United in Judaism
The Himyarite rulers may have seen in Judaism a potential unifying force for their new, culturally diverse empire, and an identity to rally resistance against creeping encroachment by the Byzantine and Ethiopian Christians, as well as the Zoroastrian empire of Persia.
It is unclear how much of the population converted, but what is sure is that in the Himyarite capital of Zafar (south of Sana’a), references to pagan gods largely disappear from royal inscriptions and texts on public buildings, and are replaced by writings that refer to a single deity.
Using mostly the local Sabean language (and in some rare cases Hebrew), this god is alternatively described as Rahmanan – the Merciful – the “Lord of the Heavens and Earth,” the “God of Israel” and “Lord of the Jews.” Prayers invoke his blessings on the “people of Israel” and those invocations often end with shalom and amen.
For the next century and a half, the Himyarite kingdom expanded its influence into central Arabia, the Persian Gulf area and the Hijaz (the region of Mecca and Medina), as attested by royal inscriptions of its kings that have been found not only at Bir Hima, just north of Yemen, but also near what is today the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
Thawban the martyr
Returning to the early Arabic texts discovered at Bir Hima, the French-Saudi team notes that the name of Thawban son of Malik appears on eight inscriptions, along with the names of other Christians in what was probably a form of commemoration.
According to Christian chroniclers, around 470 (the date of the Thawban inscription), the Christians of the nearby city of Najran suffered a wave of persecution by the Himyarites. The French experts suspect that Thawban and his fellow Christians may have been martyred. The choice of the early Arabic script to commemorate them would have been, in itself, a powerful symbol of defiance.
This pre-Islamic alphabet is also called Nabatean Arabic, because it evolved from the script used by the Nabateans, the once-powerful nation that built Petra and dominated the trade routes in the southern Levant and northern Arabia before being annexed by the Romans in the early 2nd century. Used at the gates of Yemen, this northern alphabet would have stood in sharp contrast to the inscriptions left by Himyarite rulers in their native Sabaean.
“The adoption of a new writing signaled a distancing from Himyar and a reconciliation with the rest of the Arabs,” the French researchers write in their report. “The inscriptions of Hima reveal a strong movement of cultural unification of the Arabs, from the Euphrates to Najran, which manifested itself by the use of the same writing.”
Joseph the rebel
The growing outside pressures ultimately took their toll on Himyar. Sometime around the year 500, it fell to Christian invaders from the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum.
In a last bid for independence, in 522, a Jewish Himyarite leader, Yusuf As'ar Yath'ar, rebelled against the puppet ruler enthroned by the negus and put the Aksumite garrison to the sword. He then besieged Najran, which had refused to provide him with troops, and massacred part of its Christian population – a martyrdom that sparked outrage amongst Yusuf’s enemies and hastened retribution from Ethiopia.
In 2014, the French-Saudi expedition at Bir Hima discovered an inscription recording Yusuf’s passage there after the Najran massacre as he marched north with 12,000 men into the Arabian desert to reclaim the rest of his kingdom. After that, we lose track of him, but Christian chroniclers recorded that around 525 the Ethiopians caught up with the rebel leader and defeated him.
According to different traditions, the last Jewish king of Arabia was either killed in battle, or committed suicide by riding with his horse into the Red Sea.
For the next century, Himyar was a Christian kingdom that continued to dominate Arabia. In the middle of the sixth century, one of its rulers, Abraha, marched through Bir Hima, leaving on the stones a depiction of the African elephant that led his mighty army. A later inscription, dated 552 and found in central Arabia, records the many locations he conquered, including Yathrib, the desert oasis that just 70 years later would become known as Madinat al-Nabi (the City of the Prophet) – or, more simply, Medina.
Were they ‘real’ Jews?
One big question that remains about the Jews of Himyar is what kind of Judaism they practiced. Did they observe the Sabbath? Or the rules of kashrut?
Some scholars, like the 19th century Jewish-French orientalist Joseph Halevy, refused to believe that a Jewish king could persecute and massacre his Christian subjects, and dismissed the Himyarites as belonging to one of the many sects in which Christianity was divided in its early days.
Robin, the French epigraphist, writes in his article that the official religion of Himyar may be described as “Judeo-monotheism” – “a minimalist variety of Judaism” that followed some of the religion’s basic principles.
The fact is that the few inscriptions found so far, along with the writings of later chroniclers, who may have been biased against the Himyarites, do not allow scholars to form a clear picture of the kingdom’s spirituality.
But there is another way to look at the question.
Through Christian and Muslim rule, Jews continued to be a strong presence in the Arabian Peninsula. This is clear not only from Mohammed’s (often conflictual) dealings with them, but also from the influence that Judaism had on the new religion’s rituals and prohibitions (daily prayers, circumcision, ritual purity, pilgrimage, charity, ban on images and eating pork).
In Yemen, the heartland of the Himyarites, the Jewish community endured through centuries of persecution, until 1949-1950, when almost all its remaining members – around 50,000 – were airlifted to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet. And while they maintain some unique rituals and traditions, which set them apart from Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, no one would doubt that they are indeed, the last, very much Jewish descendants of the lost kingdom of Himyar.
Just one more note to say that little, if any, of this is new. Almost any general history of the Middle East tells of the Himyarites (successors to the Sabians or Shebans), at least their rulers, converting to Judaism and persecuting Christians until the Ethiopians intervened to stop this by invading and ruling Yemen for some decades.The Himyarite empire may even have extended into some areas now under the Saudi dynasty. On a lighter note, some of the Saudi family's enemies have claimed that the Saudis are of Jewish origin.That is absurd except that most of us likely have some ancestors who belonged to the Jewish faith. Someone calculated (although I suspect this is a bit exaggerated) that every human being alive today is descended from every human being who lived a few millenniums ago and did not die without leaving offspring,
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