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