All events · The Medieval World

Expulsion and Killing of the Jewish Tribes of Medina

c. 624–627 · Middle East & North Africa

Displacement

Killed

400–900

direct killing

What happened

Between 624 and 627 the three principal Jewish tribes of Medina were removed from the settlement. The Banu Qaynuqa were besieged and expelled in 624, the Banu Nadir besieged and expelled in 625 with permission to take movable goods, and after the siege of Medina in 627 the Banu Qurayza surrendered and were judged by Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, who sentenced the adult males to death and the women and children to enslavement. Ibn Ishaq's account, the fullest, gives the executed as between 600 and 900. The episode rests entirely on the Muslim biographical tradition recorded well over a century later; W. N. Arafat argued in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1976 that the Qurayza massacre account is a late accretion of doubtful reliability, while M. J. Kister and most subsequent specialists have defended the tradition's substance while treating the numbers as conventional. There is no independent documentary or archaeological evidence either way.

Parties

The early Muslim community under Muhammad expelled the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir from Medina and, after the Battle of the Trench, executed the adult males of the Banu Qurayza and enslaved their women and children

Disputed

Whether the mass execution of the Banu Qurayza happened as described is disputed: Arafat (1976) argued the account is unreliable late tradition, while Kister and most later scholarship accept the core of the episode but not the precise figures.

The denominator

No enumeration exists for seventh-century Yathrib. The sira literature is the only source and gives orders of magnitude rather than counts: the Banu Qaynuqa are said to have been able to field some 700 fighters, the Banu Nadir a smaller number, and between 400 and 900 men of the Banu Qurayza are reported to have been executed in 627. Modern historians treat these figures as approximations from a tradition written down more than a century later.

Where the baseline comes from

Banu Qurayza — Wikipediaopen-edited
Jewish tribes of Arabia — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

The range brackets the figures given in the sira tradition for the Banu Qurayza executions — most often 600 to 900, occasionally as low as 400. Every figure derives from the same body of later Muslim biographical writing; there is no independent check, and Arafat's 1976 article disputes the episode's historicity altogether.

Documented forms of violence

Summary Execution

The executions of the Banu Qurayza men are documented in Ibn Ishaq's sira as transmitted by Ibn Hisham and in al-Tabari; their reliability is disputed.