The term "Moors" refers primarily to the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages. The Moors initially were the indigenous Maghrebine Berbers. The name was later also applied to Arabs. Moors are not a distinct or self-defined people, and the 1911 Encyclopædia Encyclopædia Britannica observed that The term 'Moors' has no real ethnological value. Europeans of the Middle Ages and the early modern period variously applied the name to Arabs, North African Berbers, and Muslim Europeans..

In the Hebrew Bible, the Twelve Tribes of Israel or Tribes of Israel (Hebrew: שבטי ישראל‎) descended from the 12 sons of the patriarch Jacob and his two wives.