In the southwestern part of Arabia, known in antiquity as Ḥimyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century AD, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. After that for just over a century its kings ruled, with one significant interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecution of its Christian population. The record has survived through many centuries in Arabic historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts of martyred Christians. For a long time incredulous historians had been inclined to see little more than a local monotheism overlaid with language and features that had been borrowed from Jews who had settled in the area. It was only toward the end of the last century that enough inscribed stones turned up to prove definitively the veracity of these surprising accounts. We can now say that an entire nation of ethnic Arabs in southwestern Arabia had converted to Judaism and imposed it as the state religion.
This bizarre but militant kingdom in Ḥimyar was eventually overthrown by an invasion of forces from Christian Ethiopia on the other side of the Red Sea. They set sail from East Africa, where they were joined by reinforcements from the Christian emperor in Constantinople. In the territory of Ḥimyar they engaged and destroyed the armies of the Jewish king and finally brought an end to what was arguably the most improbable, yet portentous upheaval in the history of Arabia before Islam. Few scholars, apart from specialists in ancient South Arabia or early Christian Ethiopia, have been aware of these events, but a vigorous and talented team led by Christian Julien Robin in Paris has recently pioneered research on this Yemenite Jewish kingdom.
No one can look at the kingdom of Jewish Arabia without constant reference to its neighbors—the Ethiopians at Axum in East Africa, the Byzantines in Constantinople, the Jews in Jerusalem, the Sassanian Persians in Mesopotamia, and the Arab sheikhs who controlled the great tribes of the desert. Soon after 523 all these powerful interests had to confront a savage pogrom that the Jewish king of the Arabs launched against the Christians in the city of Najrān. The king himself reported in excruciating detail to his Arab and Persian allies about the massacres he had inflicted on all Christians who refused to convert to Judaism. News of his infamous actions rapidly spread across the Middle East. A Christian who happened to be present at a meeting of an Arab sheikh at which the Jewish king reported on his persecution was horrified and immediately sent out letters to inform Christian communities elsewhere. When word of the pogrom reached Axum in Christian Ethiopia, the king who had his capital there seized the opportunity to rally his troops and cross the Red Sea in aid of the Arabian Christians.
Religion was undoubtedly the common denominator for what proved to be widespread international interference in Arabian affairs. But the Ethiopians used their Christian faith to carry out a mission that also favored imperialist designs of their own and, at the same time, supported the Byzantine emperor, for whom a desire to undermine the Persian empire had reinforced his Christian zeal in attacking the Arabian Jews. Both the converts and the Jewish settlers from an earlier era who had been living in Yathrib (the future Medina) profited from Persian sympathy, as did at least one large tribal confederation in the desert. The only losers in these diplomatic and military initiatives were the traditional Arab pagans who survived inside and outside Ḥimyar. They could be found all over, but conspicuously farther north in the peninsula, precisely where, a half-century later, the prophet Muhammad would be born. What became the Ka‘ba of Islamic Mecca was reported once to have been a shrine of the pagan deity Hubal.
The Jewish kingdom of Arabia came to an end in 525, when the Ethiopians replaced it with a Christian kingdom of their own, but the legacy of the Ḥimyarite persecution left its traces in the Arabic, Syriac, and Greek traditions. Persian sympathy for the Jews generally continued undiminished, particularly when they themselves managed to expel the Ethiopian overlords of Ḥimyar on the eve of Muhammad’s birth, allegedly in 570 or thereabouts. The Persians moved on to capture Jerusalem in 614, where they were welcomed as liberators by the Jewish population. But a little more than two decades later the armies of a new monotheistic faith had surged out of Arabia into Palestine and posed the greatest challenge to their monotheistic predecessors, the Jews and the Christians, that either had ever confronted in the past. In 638 Sophronius, the Christian patriarch of Jerusalem, turned over the city to the Arab caliph ‘Umar.
The extraordinary history of Judaism in Arabia in the Red Sea region provides an indispensable and much neglected background for the rise of Islam as well as the collapse of the Persian empire before the Byzantines. At the heart of this historical drama is a Greek text that was inscribed on a monument that had lain for at least several centuries on the soil of a port city in the territory of the modern state of Eritrea. A Christian merchant saw it in the sixth century and described it with care. It was in the shape of a throne, and because of its location at the town of Adulis it has become known as the Adulis Throne. Trying to understand this monument takes us directly into religious conflicts that occupied the nations on both sides of the Red Sea in late antiquity. These conflicts had deep and ancient roots going back many centuries earlier, as becomes clear from a second inscription that had been cut on a stone that lay alongside the throne. The throne no longer exists at Adulis, but it still offers the best way into the strange story of Jewish Arabia.