Sources on Religious Practices in the Kingdom of ḤimyarħShortly before the end of the fourth century, between 380 and 384 CE, a religious change of considerable importance took place in the kingdom of Ḥimyar. I will then complete the discussion by examining to what extent the kingdom of Ḥimyar can be described as ‘Jewish’. As I already published all the available data on the nature of Ḥimyar’s Judaism in 2015, 3 I will recall only the most significant facts here. I will not attempt to answer the many questions that can be asked, but only to outline what is known today.
One could even say that they are of no assistance at all, since no assuredly Jewish monument has been identified to this day. The archaeological remains cannot compensate for the laconic aspect of epigraphic material.
Furthermore, documentation is scarce and consists essentially of monumental inscriptions that only make the vaguest of allusions to religion. These discoveries do not agree with the data from the Arab-Muslim tradition, which emphasizes pre-Islamic Arabia’s isolation, polytheism, anarchy, and intellectual and material poverty.ĥDealing with Ḥimyarite Judaism is no easy matter because religious identities are still fluid and difficult to distinguish in the fourth and fifth centuries CE.
In the religious field, the inscriptions illustrate in increasingly clear manner that Judaism was dominant in the kingdom of Ḥimyar from the fourth century CE until around 500–530 CE they then show that Christianity became predominant, remaining the official religion for some forty years (530–570 CE). 2ĤIn the political field, it appears that Ḥimyar was the leading power in Arabia between approximately 350 and 570 CE, imposing its rule on the entire Peninsula (or at least a large part of it), except during the crisis years of 523–552 CE. A comparison between Hermann von Wissmann’s seminal 1964 article and Iwona Gajda’s 2009 book illustrates this complete change of perspective, which has resumed at a fast pace in recent years despite the war in Yemen. Information is derived mainly from the inscriptions discovered following the opening of both Yemeni states to archaeological research at the beginning of the 1970s.
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