HAARETZ – Before Islam – When Saudi Arabia Was a Jewish Kingdom
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.
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. Wikimedia Commons
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 Haley, 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.
I like the Yemen part. I wonder why Sodom Arabia is attacking them? …. …………………………………. “The Jews of our times fall into two main divisions: Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
The Sephardim are descendants of the Jews who since antiquity had lived in Spain (in Hebrew Sepharad) until they were expelled at the end of the fifteenth century and settled in the countries bordering the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. They spoke a Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino, and preserved their own traditions and religious rites. In the 1960s, the number of Sephardim was estimated at 500,000.
> The Ashkenazim, at the same period, numbered about eleven million. Thus, in common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew.” ( page 181).
> In Mr. Koestler’s own words, “The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”
> The history of the Ashkenazi Jews was widely known and appreciated in the former Soviet Union. Ashkenazi militants traced the area where the Turkic Khazars originated before their migration to Southern Russia to Birobidjan, an Eastern Siberian area as big as Switzerland bordered by the Amur river, by China and Mongolia. Around 1928 they started building settlements with the Soviet government’s help and in 1934 the Autonomous Republic (Okrug) of Birobidjan Yevrei came into being with official languages of Yiddish and Russian. It is still there as an Autonomous Republic to this day, offering the only historically legitimate settlement area for Ashkenazi Jews willing to exercise their “right to return”…
> Mr. Koestler was an Ashkenazi Jew and took pride in his Khazar ancestry. He was also a very talented and successful writer who published over 25 novels and essays. His most successful book, Darkness at Noon, was translated in thirty-three languages………………………………………… ……. For ISISrael to hire Turkey to destroy Syria is a type of nepotism, if the Khazarian Jews descended from Turkish Mongolians….BTW….. Funny that Koestler and his wife committed “Mosadian” suicide in 1983….
Koestler later indicated that he had in fact deceptively constructed the hoax that Ashkenazim were merely Gentiles who had converted to Judaism. Such a deception had been seen necessary by the Jews to pass off the guilt directed towards them for all the iniquitous acts generally associated with organized Jewry.
By saying that such criminals are in fact Gentiles who for some perverse reason like to dress up as Jews before attacking all the Gentiles in the world, the Judaic ‘religion’ could be absolved of all crimes, and continue to be accepted as a good religion in the world, allowing it’s continued meteoric rise to world domination in world politics, finance, media, education, medicine, and other fields.
Do you really think for one minute in all seriousness that Ashkenazim are not Jews? Think again.
The Jews are fighting hard for world domination, as a highly cohesive group of Jewish souls alone.
It is simply and utterly ludicrous for anyone to continue to spread the hasbara narrative that Jews ever adopted such a large and dominant group of non-Jews and assimilated them (to attack other Gentiles even).
Would such Gentiles be amenable to adopting views like; “Even the best of Gentiles should all be killed”? Don’t you think something does not quite add up there?
Jews have conned even some of the best writers into thoughtlessly accepting this ruse of Koestler’s, backed up by the pretentious pseudo-science of Elhaik and his grossly pretentious and incomprehensible babble about genetics.
Ashkenazim are merely diaspora Jews, nothing more, and such live in India, China, Japan, etc. etc., so they can easily also live as crypto-Jews elsewhere before openly declaring their true identity when they are present in such numbers as to be secure enough to openly come back into the fold.
Migrating Jews often appear to ‘convert’ to local religions to appear to genuinely assimilate into cultures of host countries, going deep cover to thoroughly infiltrate positions of power, all the while remaining closely knit together in the purpose of conspiring for world supremacy for Jews.
Read why Jews would never try to assimilate Gentiles, which would be total anathema to Jews, as sharing the seat of world power with Gentiles would be sharing with what they view as their own nemesis.
‘Why Is The US Honoring A Racist Rabbi’ CounterPunch, Alison Weir
It would be totally impossible in reality, as Gentile souls are viewed as eternally non-living and eternally irredeemable demons from three lower hellish planets, from Satan, so why would Jews amalgamate their own supposedly unique and superior eternally living souls that are held by them to be the only souls that come from God, with the supposedly inferior and demonic souls of Gentiles?
There would be no point at all their struggle for world domination. Where do you ever see Jews welcoming millions of Gentiles to join them today? You don’t, and you never will, nobody ever really has.
Jewish rabbis state clearly that Jews are eternally Jews, and Gentile are eternally Gentiles, even if for the purposes of deception they are allowed to appear to have been permitted to be able to join Judaism, to present a false impression of Judaism as being an open faith that admits people of all origins. Read ‘100,000 Radiations’ by Barry Chamish to see what happens to Jews of mixed race behind the scenes, when Jews tidy their little mistakes up when they think no one is looking. They kill or sterilize those mixed-race ‘mistakes’.
Black Ethiopian Jews are sterilized in Israel with Depo Provera without their knowledge or consent. 95% of all prison cells in Israel are filled with blacks, not usually for any crime, but to be deported. Now Netanyahu wishes to construct a fence all around Israel to ‘keep the wild beasts out’ as he puts it.
Read the genetic study of Jews by Dr Karl Skorecki, who clearly demonstrates that Ashkenazim are real Jews after all, as they quite obviously are.
The Cohanim – DNA Connection http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48936742.html
I don’t think we are saying different things here. I’m saying no Jew today is a biblical Israelte. They are different races and God’s promise to Abraham was to the race/lineage of Abraham. So they have all adopted Judaism. It doesn’t matter if the DNA of today’s Jews is the same as 600 AD Jews they are all impostors. Romes 7 year war against them in the 70s pretty much annihilated them. So they have no right of return and the certainly aren’t “chosen”.
@3 by Russ Merritt
But why would Gentiles consciously choose to mask up and attack their own? Would that be a cunning ploy to blacken the ‘good’ name of the Jews?
Surely, if a Gentile crime syndicate hell-bent on racial superiority of one particular group were to be initiated, they would choose affiliation with a previously existing religious group that had an excellent reputation, so as to move amongst the societies of the world unsuspected like wolves in sheep’s clothing, so that no-one would have the slightest idea of such a group being about to commit any criminal act in highly organized fashion, like some vast criminal tong, or mafia, sworn to secrecy and loyalty, but for criminals to choose a major already-recognized criminal group to identify themselves with would be absolutely crass, and a particularly perverse and ill-thought out move, something totally unlikely given the obvious sophistication required to impersonate the Jews in the first place before embarking on their criminal career, exactly the same as the criminal path outlined in the already-existing Jewish scriptures, to take over the world and enslave and then physically annihilate all Gentiles from the face of the Earth.
Considering that these supposedly pretend Jews are actually engaged in that very plot, with their Samson Option, with their fanatical attention to racial purity, and genetic testing for Jews wishing to enter Israel to dwell there, any proposition that Ashkenazim are fake Jews is entirely unrealistic and untenable.
Furthermore, there always have existed various groups of native Jews of various sects that have lived continually in the ‘holy land’, the area of the previous Israel, since the time of the Romans, as they were not all annihilated, and did not all leave during the time of the so-called diaspora, so the right of return law, or idea of a safe homeland for the Jews, would always be continued to be validated in any (Jewish dominated) court of law, and most likely any other, purely on the basis of that fact that at least some Jews have always lived there, continuously, and presumably, their genome exhibits sufficient parity with that of the other Jews, including the Ashkenazim, just as Dr Karl Skorecki has surely already clearly demonstrated, for them all to be recognized as Jews on a genetic basis.
Anyway, in the ultimate analysis, genetics aside for a moment, a Jew is a Jew by dint of reasoning that their souls alone come from God, and that the souls of no other race of men do, and they can still claim to be such Jews no matter what their bloodline might be claimed to be if they wish, as Jews consciously maintain the siddhi, or mystical ability to incarnate in whatever bodies they wish to, as suits them, for whatever purpose, and that is exactly the reasoning behind their saying that they have always been Jews, reincarnating as Jews life after life through conscious process of reincarnation, an ability which has been lost to most other men, besides some shamanistic peoples and those following the Indian religions for example.
But even when Jews racially intermix to some extent, a Jew can incarnate in mixed-race bodies, but as I mentioned before, they eventually put that ‘mistake’ right by simply sterilizing or exterminating such mixed-race bodily vehicles so that the Jewish souls can then transmigrate back to more suitable bodies containing what the Jews regard as racially superior DNA, as they regard that their DNA alone comes from God, and that all other DNA is merely a by-product of the creation process, lifeless excrement that does not permit the vision of the face of God, Jewish DNA alone being held by rabbinical opinion to be capable of possessing the multidimensional quality to allow perfect vision of the higher spiritual levels of existence, with that of others permitting only vision, or experience, of ‘being’ lifeless material energy, the lifeless ‘excrement’, as it is literally viewed by rabbinical thought, left over after the creation process.
But, as I said before, Dr Karl Skorecki proved clearly that Ashkenazim really are genuine descendants of diaspora Jew who left Israel many years. It all boils down to whether one simply wishes to ignore his research, and go along with Koestler’s scam, which is backed up by the ‘King’s New Clothes’ science of Elhaik.
And since when do Jews consciously seek to undermine the validity of their own right to return in Israel? Such a deception serves a more subtle purpose, and since the proponents of the fraud are surely mainly Ashkenazim Jews in the first instance, with many seeking to make only that point and no other all over the internet, that Ashkenazim are fakes, then we can see that such Jews, who still call themselves Jews, are clearly up to some deception when they say that the Ashkenazim are all fakes, whilst still calling themselves Jews. It is just being done to place blame for clear wrongdoing by the Jews onto some mythical ‘fake Jews’ who are being said to have usurped the identity of so called ‘real’ Jews. Rather, the truth is that all of them have always really been real Jews.
Why do the ‘real Jews’ amongst the 4,000 Jews who stayed away from work on 9/11, 2001 at the WTC in New York, continue to maintain exactly the same lies as their brethren, the Ashkenazim Jews do?
Why don’t the so-called genuine Jews call out the so-called fake Jews and expose the wrong-doing by them, that has resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 Americans and the genuine holocaust of over 7 million people in Middle Eastern wars? That such 4,000 Jews did stay away from work is thoroughly validated by the Jerusalem Post, which possesses the names and addresses of every single one of those 4,000 Jews.
No! Those Jews all work together as one criminal mafia, but tell us they don’t know each other, just like any other criminals do. Amongst themselves, all sects and types of Jews pat each other on the back and say Shalom to each other, but in front of us, they say, I do not know this man that you suspect of instigating the 9/11 terror attacks that are resulting in the physical annihilation of millions of people in the Middle East. “Surely”, they say,”this man is with you, he is a Gentile like you in reality is he not? He is certainly not one of ours, here is the proof by Elhaik”. Thus the Jews accuse Gentiles of murdering Gentiles, and absolve themselves from any wrong-doing.
Jewish belief is that as all Gentile souls come from Satan, ‘the murderer in the beginning’, that all Gentile souls are eternally and irredeemably guilty of all types of sin, so are guilty of all crimes, murder, lying, you name it, even before entering the womb, being evil eternally. They also believe that sin enters the world only with the Gentiles, so that (black magic) kapparot blood sacrifice to place sin back within the (supposedly demonic and Satanic) soul collective of the Gentiles can be performed to rid the Jews of any such pollution, held always to be from Gentile sources, so, if a Jew murders someone, it is a bad spirit from the Gentiles that possessed them, the Jew is really sinless, not guilty at all, and the Gentiles collectively are guilty instead, and the sin is taken from the Jew by blood ritual sacrifice, and the sin goes back where it supposedly came from, leaving the soul of the Jew eternally pure once again, as they believe it naturally is, as the Jews believe that their souls alone are like that of God Himself, eternally sinless and good, whilst we Gentiles of course, are held to be eternally sinful and evil, supposedly being part of Satan, and thus can never ever become sinless or good.
Of course, Gentiles would not go to so much trouble to maintain a criminal organization as to threaten to annihilate all other Gentile peoples on the face of the entire globe, especially those with the same genetics as their own, as Koestler and Elhaik and their fraudsters would maintain. Such a proposition would be entirely ludicrous. The very fact of the continued existence of the Samson Option threat, never withdrawn by the Israelis, is quite enough in any sane person’s mind to call for the thoroughly justified withdrawal of continued recognition of Israel as a legally recognized state, rather than it continuing to be allowed to remain an untouchable enclave maintained by savagely inhumane genocidal criminal terrorist methods.
The ‘real’ Jews including the Ashkenazim in Israel go right along with the existence of the Samson Option threat of nuclear annihilation of the entire planet if they feel like deploying it at any time. That alone is enough to stop allowing Israel to be recognized and protected by our insane crypto-Jewish traitorous agents posing as our governments in the West
Ask yourself; would the international criminal gang originating in Mexico known as MS-13 be allowed to maintain the Samson Option? Terrorists who call themselves politicians in league with those Israeli Jewish bastards control our Western governments right now, as Prime Ministers and Presidents are traitorously using our Western resources to defend, feed and nurture those parasites, even whilst criminal terrorist Israel maintains the Samson Option threat against all other countries of the world.
The simple-minded and cowardly electorates willfully vote these Israeli agents into power in their Western countries to continue to rob them blind, time after time, even as the Israelis maintain their threat to bomb us all to death. That is the height of insanity, and stupidity. What cure is there for that except courage to even do so much as simply choose a different breed of political representative, a non-Jewish one? They cannot even do that it seems, their minds are so numbed out with fluoride, bread and circuses, never sensing the agony of those peoples that are being brutally murdered by their own governments for Israel and the Jews worldwide.
We know that Afghanistan and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 for example, yet still the peoples vote the same mass-murdering political parties into power, which is utterly staggering, when such political parties should surely have been entirely dissolved and forbidden by law as a result of being guilty of authorizing such criminal acts resulting in the clearly criminally-caused deaths of millions. Collective cowardice and willful ignorance, deliberately choosing to totally ignore such criminally-caused inconceivable suffering in others, and failing to call it as it is is, that totalitarian criminal Jewish state power is ever-increasing in Western countries, are to blame.
All that people need to do to undermine the existence of Israel is to call it as it is, no debate on ‘right to return ‘ is needed at all. No more Samson Option.