A Jewish Kingdom in South Arabia

Himyar controlled the south-western corner of the Arabian peninsula from the late third century, and from about 380 its royal inscriptions stop naming the old south Arabian gods. In their place stands Rahmanan, the Merciful, lord of heaven, sometimes with the addition lord of the Jews. Whether the kingdom is best described as Jewish, as monotheist in a deliberately unspecific way, or as a court Judaism sitting above a mixed population, is argued about, and the inscriptions are terse enough to support more than one reading. What is not in doubt is that for roughly a hundred and fifty years before Dhu Nuwas the public religion of a substantial Arabian state was not polytheist, and that Jewish communities were established in the Yemeni highlands long before Islam.

Dhu Nuwas belongs at the end of that arc. Sabaic texts of his reign give his regnal name as Yusuf Asar Yathar, and the Arabic tradition knows him by a nickname referring to his hanging sidelocks. His accession around 522 came at a moment when Aksum, the Christian kingdom across the Red Sea in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, had already intervened in Himyari affairs and kept a presence in the country. The confrontation that followed was therefore not simply a matter of one man's belief. It was a contest between two states with two religious alignments over the corridor between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, fought at a moment when both Rome and Persia had an interest in the outcome.