the compact, but allowed them to settle at Kufa on the Euphrates.  Although pilgrims pass annually up and down the caravan tracks to Mecca, the information respecting the old Jewish sites in the Harrah is most meagre.  Edrisi and Abulfeda throw no light on Benjamin’s account.  In the year 1904 an able work by Mr. D.G.  Hogarth appeared under the title of The Penetration of Arabia, being a record of the development of Western knowledge concerning the Arabian Peninsula.  He gives a full account of the European travellers who have described the country.  Niebuhr, who visited Yemen in 1762, repeated the statement made by the Italian traveller Varthema that there were still wild Jews in Kheibar.  The missionary Joseph Woolf visited Arabia in 1836, and he gives us an account of an interview he had with some of the Rechabites.  No weight, however, can be attached to his fantastic stories.  W.G.  Palgrave, who resided for some years in Syria as a Jesuit, where he called himself Father Michael (Cohen), was entrusted in 1862 with a mission to Arabia by Napoleon III in connexion with the projected Suez Canal; he was one of the few visitors to the Harrah, but he makes no special reference to the Jews.  Joseph Halevi made many valuable discoveries of inscriptions in South Arabia, which he traversed in 1869.  He visited the oppressed Jewish community at Sanaa in Yemen; he further discovered traces of the ancient Minaean kingdom, and found that the Jews in the Nejran were treated with singular tolerance and even favour; but he was not able to tell us anything respecting the Jews of the Harrah.

C.M.  Doughty was, however, more successful when visiting this district in 1875.  Of Kheibar he says “that it is now a poor village whose inhabitants are a terrible kindred, Moslems outwardly, but, in secret, cruel Jews that will suffer no stranger to enter among them.”  See C.M.  Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, vol.  II, p. 129.  “Teima is a Nejd colony of Shammar; their fathers came to settle there not above 200 years past.  Old Teima of the Jews, according to their tradition, had been (twice) destroyed by flood.  From those times there remain some great rude stone buildings.  It is now a prosperous open place” (vol.  I, p. 286).

The only writer that casts any doubt upon Benjamin’s record as to independent Jewish tribes in Arabia is R. Jacob Safir, who visited Yemen and other Arabian ports in the Red Sea in the year 1864.  See chaps. xv and xliii of Iben Safir, Lyck, 1866.  Dr. L. Gruenhut, in his introduction, Die Reisebeschreibungen des R. Benjamin von Tudela, Jerusalem, 1903, p. 16, refutes Safir’s statements.

In Hogarth’s work, p. 282, is shown a print of the Teima stone, with its Aramaic inscription, considered to belong to the fourth or fifth century B.C., and on p. 285 will be found Doughty’s interesting sketch of Kheibar.]

     [Footnote 147:  It is clear that, when speaking of the
     population of some of these places, the whole oasis or
     district is intended, and not a particular town.]