History of the Jews in Saudi Arabia
Aspect of history
The history of the Jews in Saudi Arabia begins in classical antiquity.
Jews and Judaism in pre-Islamic Arabia
By the 6th and 7th centuries there was a considerable Jewish population in Hejaz (largely around Medina) and in Yemen due to the embrace of Judaism by the Himyarite Kingdom in the fourth century. Jewish leadership in Yemen ended soon after Dhu Nuwas instigated a massacre of the Christian community of Najran.
According to Al-Masudi the northern part of Hejaz was a dependency of the Kingdom of Judah, and according to Butrus al-Bustani the Judahites in Hejaz established a sovereign state. The German orientalist Ferdinand Wüstenfeld believed that the Judahites established a state in northern Hejaz.
Jewish tribes
Tribes of Medina
There were three main Jewish tribes in Medina before the rise of Islam in Arabia: the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa, and the Banu Qurayza.
The Banu Nadir were hostile to Muhammad's new religion. They joined the Meccan army against the Islamic army and were defeated.
Other Jewish tribes lived relatively peacefully under Muslim rule: Banu Nadir, the Banu Qainuqa, and the Banu Qurayza lived in northern Arabia, at the oasis of Yathrib until the 7th century. The men were executed and the women and children were enslaved after they betrayed the pact they made with the Muslims following the Invasion of Banu Qurayza by Muslim armies led by Muhammad.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “History of the Jews in Saudi Arabia” is aspect of history. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through History, Jews and Saudi, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1295115. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of the Jews in Saudi Arabia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.