The Jewish communities of Khaybar

The Jews of Khaybar were the Jews of a rich oasis in the north of the Hijaz, the last independent Arab-Jewish force in the Prophet ﷺ's time. They came out of the war of Khaybar in 628 CE as farmers on a share, and were later expelled under Umar.

Refugees of Banu al-Nadir settled in Khaybar after their expulsion from Yathrib, and it became the centre of Arab-Jewish opposition ¹. Medina's army besieged it for weeks in the spring of 628 CE, and its forts fell one after another. The settlement stipulated that the farmers would remain on the land and keep half the crop, a precedent for the agricultural jizya ².

In Umar's caliphate they were expelled to Syria and Iraq under the "permission to expel them". Historians judge the event a shift from local settlement to regional policy ³.

Khaybar became a many-sided cultural symbol. In the Sunni tradition it is the last crown of the Prophetic conquests. In modern Arab memory it is the emblem of Palestinian resistance. In studies of early Jewish history it is another chapter in the end of Jewish independence in the peninsula ³.

Al-Raheeq al-Makhtum counts this tribe among the well-known Jewish tribes when Islam came: Khaybar, al-Nadir, al-Mustaliq, Qurayza and Qaynuqa'. It reports from al-Samhudi that the number of Jewish tribes exceeded twenty. Their settlement in the Hijaz began with the migration of Jews to Yathrib, Khaybar and Tayma' after the Romans took Palestine in 70 CE ^{4 5 6}. See Judaism in the Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish tribes of the Hijaz.