hint of vicarious arrogance. As in the case of the Central Asian ten tribes, the
Yemeni ten tribes story begins with an exorbitant demography—“ 100 , 000 in
Teima” and “ 300 , 000 in Tanai,” the main city in the region.^69 But what
concerns Benjamin most is the city of Kheibar (Khaybar), located not in
Yemen, but “sixteen days’ journey to the north” in the Hijaz:
People say that the men of Kheibar belong to the tribes of Reuben, Gad,
and Manasseh, whom Shalmaneser, king of Assyria led hither into
captivity. They have built strongly fortified cities, and make war upon all
other kingdoms. No man can readily reach their territory, because it is a
march of eighteen days’ journey through the desert, which is altogether
uninhabited, so that no one can enter the land. Kheibar is a very large city
with 50 , 000 Jews. In it are learned men, and great warriors, who wage
war with the men of Shinar and of the land of the north, as well as with
the bordering tribes of the land of El-Yemen near them, which latter
country is [in] the confines of India.^70
It is fascinating how persistent the story of the Hijazi ten tribes was. In
1665 , at the height of the messianic fervor around the pseudo-messiah Sabba-
tai Zvi, rumors spread in Europe and particularly in England that the governor
of Tunis had ordered the pilgrimage to Mecca be halted. According to the
rumors, an army of the lost tribes had showed up at the gates of Mecca.Annals
of the Universe, published in London in 1709 , some forty years after the episode,
summed it up thus: “the Jews reported at all places, that near 600 , 000 men
were arriv’d at Mecha, professing themselves to be of [the] ten tribes and a half
that had been lost for so many ages, but the story was false.”^71 As Scholem has
shown, though, many Christians in London in the 1660 s had been more than
ready to believe the rumors.^72
Behind thistoposof the Arabian ten tribes is the fact of Jewish tribes in
Arabia up to the time of Muhammad; in this regard, Benjamin’s “Kheibar” is
not wholly fictional. Khaybar was “the great Jewish centre in the north of the
Hajez” at the time of the Prophet Muhammad.^73 A rich oasis with a fortified
Jewish village, Khaybar provided economic and political sustenance to the rest
of the Jewish tribes in the Hijaz. A “hotbed of anti-Muslim intrigue,” it was
certainly a Jewish power with which Muhammad had to contend on his way to
control of the region and of Arabia.^74 The siege on Khaybar and Muhammad’s
triumph there ( 629 CE) is one of the most decisive and glorious moments in
the career of the Prophet and in Islamic history.^75 Classical Islamic historians
tended to glorify the fortified village so as to aggrandize Muhammad’s victory,
which probably gave rise to an exaggerated image of a powerful and fortified
Jewish Khaybar. As such, this image informs Benjamin’s description, which