Josephus recounts(1) that King Herod supplied 500 chosen men from his bodyguard - whom Strabo described as Jews (2) - to join this expedition to the Red Sea, where they rendered great service. It is possible that some of the soldiers remained behind after the force was withdrawn and that they formed the nucleus of a Jewish community, though the main immigration of Jews into western Arabia and the Yemen probably took place a hundred years later after the destruction of the Second Temple.(3) Alternatively, some scholars believe that Jews may have arrived 200 years before Herod at the time of the anti-Jewish persecutions in Egypt under the brutish Ptolemy IV Philopator. A tradition among the Jews of Yemen even claims that they are descendants of those who accompanied the Queen of Sheba on her return from her visit to King Solomon,(4) which is an interesting example of an Abyssinian legend crossing the Red Sea and being adapted to local conditions. It is doubtful whether there was any significant Jewish presence in this area before the first century AD though, as Professor Ullendorff has remarked, 'while none of the Biblical references reveals any intimate and detailed knowledge of Arabia, and South Arabia in particular, they nevertheless give an indication of Jewish contact with that country'.(5) On the other hand, once Jews arrived in the Yemen they remained in close contact with their coreligionists in Palestine and no doubt their numbers greatly increased since, S. D. Goitein says, they 'proselytized vigorously in their country of adoption'(6) - until, that is, the arrival of Islam put a stop to such practices by making apostasy a capital offence. One feels tempted to inquire how Professor Goitein reconciles this statement with his subsequent remark, in the same essay, that 'the Yemenites may be called the most Jewish of all Jews, so that it is rather unlikely that all or even most of them should be the offspring of Himyarites, for Judaism used to be essentially the religion of a people, not one adopted by conversion'. No doubt scholars will for long be discussing which influences were paramount in shaping the forerunner of the modern Abyssinian state. Hitherto, it has been considered that south Arabian culture was dominant. The contrary view, strongly held by Bruce in the face of general opposition, that civilisation had

(1) Antiquities of the Jews, 15, ch. 9.
(2) Book XVI, ch. 4, p. 23.
(3) Enc. Jud., vol. 16.
(4) S. Landshut, Jewish Communities in the Muslim Countries of the Middle East, p. 73.
(5) Ethiopia and the Bible, p. 17.
(6) In A.J. Arberry ( ed.), Religion in the Middle East, vol. 1, p. 227.