Background
Before ascending the throne in 517 CE, he was converted to Judaism by rabbinical emissaries from Tiberias (with whom he remained in contact), yet there is no mention of him in ancient Jewish sources.
Before ascending the throne in 517 CE, he was converted to Judaism by rabbinical emissaries from Tiberias (with whom he remained in contact), yet there is no mention of him in ancient Jewish sources.
Christian works, however, notably the Syrian Book of the Himyarites and History of the Nestorians, give his name as Masruq. South Arabian inscriptions discovered in the early 1950s call him As’ar or Yath’ar; and in Arabic literature he was known as Dhu Nuwas. He presumably added Yusuf (Joseph) to his original name at the time of his conversion. The Himyarite kingdom, approximating in its boundaries to present-day Yemen, had an old, established Jewish community of merchants and farmers who dreaded the Byzantine Empire’s expansion into Sabea. Their fear of Christian intolerance was matched by native Himyarite suspicion of the Christian minority, which did in fact serve as a fifth column anticipating the arrival of Ethiopian invaders from the opposite shore of the Red Sea.
It was probably in response to the Jewish king’s enthronement that Christian rebels seized Zafar, the Himyarite capital, in 517. After mustering an army. Dhu Nuwas inflicted a costly defeat on the rebels, taking thousands of prisoners and destroying their church. When Ethiopian troops landed in the following year, Dhu Nuwas scored another major victory. Flushed with success, he now saw himself as the great champion of Arabian Jewry; and it has even been suggested that his ultimate purpose was the creation of a new Jewish empire stretching from Eretz Israel to Himyar, in the belief that an imminent war between Persia and Byzantium would make this plan feasible.
A renewed Christian revolt, in the northern Himyarite center of Najran (c. 523), led to many Jewish casualties. When the rebels spurned his peace terms, Dhu Nuwas swore vengeance, besieged the town, and executed several hundred of the vanquished traitors. . His repressive measures, together with an inflated account of the slain, provoked a stormy reaction throughout eastern Christendom.
With Byzantine supporet, a full-scale Ethiopian invasion of Himyar was launched in 525. This time, unfortunately, Dhui Nuwas could neither win foreign aid nor rely on all of his own troops, and had to take the field with a much smaller army. The decisive battle was fought near Zabid, close to the Red Sea, where the Himyarites were routed and their king almost certainly perished. An Arab tradition asserts, however, that Dhu Nuwas avoided such dishonor by riding his horse over a cliff and plunging to his death in the waves below. Legends woven around this heroic figure and his tragic end may have influenced later Jewish folklore about the Ten Lost Tribes.