Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

REALMS OF SILENCE 197
to believe in the old rahman god, and by maintaining theological ties to the
centers in Babylonia, the Himyarite Jewish community survived until the
twentieth century.
The existence of a Judaizing kingdom in the southern Arabian Peninsula
was already known in the nineteenth century. Heinrich Graetz devoted several
pages to it in his famous work, based on stories drawn from Arab historians
as well as Christian sources. He wrote accounts of Abu Karib Assad and Dhu
Nuwas laced with colorful anecdotes. 11 Simon Dubnow, too, wrote about this
kingdom, not at such length as Graetz but with more accurate dates. 12 Salo
Baron followed their example with several pages about "the ancestors of the
Jewry of the Yemen," and sought in various ways to justify their harsh treatment
of the Christians. 13
Later Zionist historiography paid less attention to the Himyarite kingdom.
Dinur's monumental compilation Israel in Exile opens with the "Jewish people
going into exile" in the seventh century CE, and so the earlier Jewish kingdom
in southern Arabia disappears. Some Israeli scholars questioned the Jewishness
of the Himyarites, which was probably not entirely rabbinical; others
simply passed over this troublesome historical chapter. 14 School textbooks
issued after the 1950s made no mention of the proselytized southern kingdom
that lay buried under the desert sand.
Only historians who specialized in the history of the Jews of the Arab
countries sometimes referred to the many Himyarite proselytes. Notable
among them was Israel Ben-Ze'ev, who first published his book Jews in Arabia
in the late 1920s in Egypt, edited it and translated it into Hebrew in 1931,
and expanded it considerably in 1957. The other scholar who discussed the
Jewish kingdom in depth was Haim Ze'ev Hirschberg, whose book Israel in
Arabia appeared in 1946. These two works provide a broad canvas depicting
the history of the Jews in the south of the Arabian Peninsula, and despite their
nationalist tone, their scholarship is of high quality. In recent years archaeology has
uncovered additional epigraphic material, and Ze'ev Rubin, a prominent
historian at Tel Aviv University, is one of the few who keep up the research
about the lost time of the Himyarites.
At the end of his fascinating description of the Judaized kingdom, Hirschberg,
perhaps the best-known historian of the Jews in the Arab world, asked the following
questions: "How many Jews lived in the Yemen? What was their racial origin—
11 Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 3, 61-7.
12 Dubnow, History of the World-People, vol. 3, 79-83
13 Baron, A Social and Religious History, vol. 3, 66-70.
14 See for example Yosef Tobi, The Jews of Yemen, Leiden: Brill, 1999, 3-4.