Yehud Medinata (Aramaic for "the province of Judah") or simply Yehud, was an autonomous province of the Achaemenid (ancient Persia) empire, roughly equivalent to the older kingdom of Judah but covering a smaller area, within the satrapy of Eber-Nari. The region corresponded to the Babylonian province with the same name, formed after the fall of the kingdom of Judah to the Neo-Babylonian Empire (c.597 after its conquest of the Mediterranean east coast, and again in 585/6 BCE after suppressing an unsuccessful Judean revolt).

The name Yehud is known from coins unearthed in the region. Archaeological evidence is quite limited, and a history of the period is dependent almost entirely on biblical sources of often uncertain reliability.

There is not complete agreement on the chronology of the Babylonian and Persian periods: the following table is used in this article, but alternative dates for many events are plausible - this is especially true of the chronological sequence of Ezra and Nehemiah, with Ezra 7:6-8 stating that Ezra came to Jerusalem "in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the King," without specifying whether this was Artaxerxes I (465-424 BCE) or Artaxerxes II (404-359 BCE); the probable date for his mission is 458 BCE, but it is possible that it took place in 397 BCE.

Yehud (Hebrew: יְהוּד‎‎) is a city in the Center District in Israel that is part of the joint municipality of Yehud-Monosson. In 2007, Yehud's population was approximately 25,600 (not including Neve Monosson - see below).

Yehud is mentioned in the Bible in a list of towns in the area ("and Yehud and Bnei Brak and Gat Rimon" - Book of Joshua 19, 45). The Aramaic term Yehud refers to a province under the Persian empire (see Yehud Medinata), in the area of what was roughly the Kingdom of Judah which issued small silver coins inscribed with the three letters Yehud. The actual size of Yehud during this time remains debated by scholars (e.g., did it occupy the entirety of the previous kingdom, or was it much smaller). Yehud's constituency also remains debated (e.g., was it composed only of those Judeans who returned from Babylon, or did these intermix with "the people (already) in the land" - עם הארץ). In later centuries Yehud became the Arab town of Al-Yehudiya (in literal Arabic: "place of the Jews"), also called Al-'Abbasiyya, but the Arab population left in its entirety during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The town was repopulated in the early 1950s by Ladino-speaking Jews of Turkish extraction and subsequently also by Jews from Bialystok, Poland and other parts of the Diaspora. The town greatly expanded in later years, developed an industrial and hi-tech area with companies such as IAI and Mercury Interactive and attracted thousands of academics and professionals in new, highly-invested neighborhoods such as Givat Avia and Kiryat HaSavyonim.