Yemen Was Once a Powerful Arabian Kingdom Run by Jews

Jacob Mikanowski in Tablet has a really interesting article on a Jewish kingdom in Yemen just before the rise of Islam: Yemen, the Crucible of al-Qaida, Was Once a Powerful Arabian Kingdom Run by Jews. The title of the article is dumb (al-Qaida isn't mentioned in the article, nor was Yemen in fact the crucible of Al-Qaida), but the contents are really worth reading if you want to know something about Jews in the Arabian peninsula.