Shavei Israel: According to historians V. Minorsky, W.K. Frazier Tyler and M.C. Gillet, the name "Afghan" appears in a 982 CE book called Hudud-al-Alam, where a reference is made to:
Saul, a pleasant village on a mountain. In it lives Afghans.
The village of Saul probably was located some where near Gardez, which is just east of Ghazni in Afghanistan.
In 1080, Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra mentions 40,000 Jews paying tribute to Ghazni, and Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century counts 80,000 Jews.
More recently, in 1948, about 5,000 Jews in Afghanistan emigrated to Israel and, to a much smaller extent, to New York in the early 1950s
