Note 60 — Chapter VI

The history of the Jewish settlement in the south of Arabia is very little known by the average student of the Acts, and yet it is a wonderful confirmation of its accuracy both here and in the account of the Ethiopian eunuch. This colony existed in Arabia long before the Christian era. They claimed, indeed, to have been a portion of the Jews of the Captivity. They established an independent kingdom in Southern Arabia, which bitterly persecuted the Christians about the year 500. A full account of this little-known persecution, and of the Homerite martyrs who suffered in it, will be found by those curious in such matters in that great monumental work the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, vols. x. and xii. for October, under the names of St. Arethas and St. Elesbaan. Large quantities of manuscripts about this Jewish colony were discovered some years ago in the mosques of Southern Arabia. A considerable number of Jews still find a place there. See, for an account of the Jewish kingdom in Arabia, an article on Elesbaan, in vol. ii. of the Dictionary of Christian Biography. Gibbon in his forty-second and fiftieth chapters has much about it.