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Islamic Antisemitism” **** Both Christianity and Islam Were Birthed from the Womb of Judaism

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Islamic Antisemitism” **** Both Christianity and Islam Were Birthed from the Womb of Judaism First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon THE ORIGIN OF ANTISEMITISM V “Islamic Antisemitism” **** Both Christianity and Islam were birthed from the womb of Judaism. However, since Islam was not a break-away sect as was Christianity, its relationship to Judaism was less bitter and was originally more like a squabble among strangers than an internecine strife among siblings. Initially, Jews were treated kindly by the early Muslims of Medina where the Islamic calendar began in 622. Some historians believe that Mohammad expected the Jews to accept Islam and its teachings, and when most of them did not, the relationship soured. There was also a series of Muslim inter-tribal wars that erupted, culminating in 627 when the largest of the Jewish groups known as the Qurayza was decimated by Mohammad’s forces for having failed to come to his aid during an outside attack on Medina. Charged with having “sinned in their hearts” for having held back their support for Islam, Mohammad ordered the beheading of all adult Jewish males and the enslavement of their wives and children. Then their lands and other property were divided among Mohammad’s Muslim followers. It was the beginning of a pattern in which Jews were tolerated or rejected on condition of their loyalty and the tribute they were willing to pay. By 750, more than a century later, Muslims controlled much of the old Roman and Byzantine Empires as well as parts of the Persian Empire. With regard to people who worshipped other gods, Muslims continued to call for conversion or death, but they dealt differently with Jews and Christians with whom they shared a monotheistic faith. Members of all three religions accepted many of the same prophets, believed in life after death and judgment, and had similar ideas about the creation of the world. But Muslims did not consider Jews and Christians as equals but as dhimmi—people who belonged to a “tolerated” religion. Dhimmi were allowed certain rights and privileges, but were also given specific prohibitions that were spelled out in an agreement often referred to as the Pact of Umar. Phyllis Goldstein, in her book A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism, lists some of its conditions: (1) We shall keep our gates wide open for passersby and travelers; (2) We shall not shelter any spy in our places of worship or homes; (3) We shall provide three days food and lodging to any Muslims who pass our way; (4) We shall not build in our cities or in Muslim neighborhoods any new synagogues, churches, heritages, or monk’s cells; (5) We shall not restore, by night or day, any of them that have fallen into ruin or which are located in the Muslims’ quarters; (6) We shall not hold public religious ceremonies or read our holy books aloud in public; (7) We shall not seek to proselytize anyone nor shall we prevent any of our kind from embracing Islam if they so desire; (8) We shall show deference to the Muslims and shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down; (9) We shall not seek to resemble the Muslims in any way with regard to their dress; (9) We shall not display our crosses or our books anywhere in the Muslim’s thoroughfares or in their marketplaces; (10) We shall not build our homes higher than theirs. First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon The pact views non-Muslims as people who have ben given the opportunity to accept the truth but have willfully chosen to persist in erroneous beliefs. In accordance with this view, the authorities found ways not only to distinguish Muslims from nonbelievers but also to humiliate the dhimmi and constantly remind them of their inferiority. No matter how high they rose or how well they blended into society, they were never regarded as equals. Perhaps as a way to escape oppressive taxes and laws that labeled them as inferior, many Christians converted to Islam over the next 150 years. By the end of the eighth century, North Africa and southwest Asia, regions that had been predominantly Christian, had become Muslim. Jews were also deeply affected by these changes. Approximately 90 percent of the world’s Jews were by then living under Muslim rule. Some converted to Islam, but most did not. Many found that the laws of the dhimmi gave them some measure of protection. Yet those same laws, along with others imposed by various Muslim rulers, also reinforced their second-class status and publicly humiliated them. Like Christians, Jews were made to pay higher taxes on their land as well as a poll tax. This drove many Jewish farmers off their land and into town where they became tanners, gold- and silver-smiths, butchers, barbers, blacksmiths, dyers, and shoemakers. Some owned small shops, while others participated in the international trade. This was also the period when many Jews began moving beyond the Mediterranean Sea to places in Europe to escape discrimination and persecution, and also to take advantage of greater economic opportunities in the north. However, due to increased pressure from both medieval Christians and Muslims, Jews were gradually pushed out of most of the professions of Europe and were prohibited from engaging in the normal livelihoods open to others. This forced Jews into two of the only available fields open to them: money-lending and currency exchange, both of which were prohibited by the teachings of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and for which they then became stereotyped as “greedy, money-grabbing Jews.” It was during this period that the phrase, “Jew down” came into use as a reference to the process of negotiating more favorable prices for something. In the beginning, Mohammad had both hoped and expected the Jews to recognize him as the final and greatest prophet of Mosaic monotheism and when they did not he felt seriously threatened. One major factor that rendered Mohammad’s claims untenable to Jews was his apparent ignorance of the Bible. In Sura 28:38 of the Koran, for instance, he had Pharaoh (from Exodus) ask Haman (from the Book of Esther) to erect the Tower of Babel (which appears in the beginning of Genesis). In addition, some of his moral teachings did not seem to equal, let alone supersede, the prophetic teachings of Judaism and Christianity. In Sura 4:34, for example, he instructs men to beat disobedient wives, which must have rendered absurd the prophet’s claim that he was superseding the ethical imperatives of the Torah or the teachings of Jesus. For these and other reasons, Jews rejected Mohammad’s prophetic claims and refused to become Muslims, resulting in Mohammad turning against the Jews for basically the same reason that Christians had turned against them earlier: their refusal to recognize either Jesus or Mohammad as the human incarnation of God’s revealed truth. Mohammad and the Koran thus laid the basis for subsequent antisemitism among Muslims for basically the same reason as the New Testament and the early Church Fathers had for Christians: the First Congregational United Church of Christ – Eugene, Oregon insistence of Jews to remain Jews and everything Jewish. Jew-hatred by both Christianity and Islam was ultimately a hatred of all things Jewish since any Jew who converted to Christianity or to Islam was immediately accepted as an equal by the aforementioned group. Those who refused, while usually tolerated, were also subjected to all manner of indignities, inequities, sufferings, and sometimes death. The two guiding principles of Islam’s treatment of Jews and Christians were that Islam dominates and is not dominated, and that Jews and Christians are to be subservient and degraded. This “relationship” continued from the time of Mohammad’s death until the modern period. By the nineteenth century, the Jew’s situation under Islam went from degradation to being recurrent victims of violence. Edward Lane, in An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1833-35), the Jews “are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general . many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering disrespectful words against the Koran or the Prophet.” In 1840, some French Catholics introduced the blood libel into the Arab world, with rumors of Jews torturing and murdering Arabs in ritualistic-style. These blood libels quickly became popular among Muslims who attacked Jews as drinkers of Muslim blood in Aleppo, Syria, Damascus, Cairo and Alexandria. In nineteenth century Palestine, Jews had to walk past Muslims on their left, as the left is identified with Satan, and they had to yield the right-of-way to a Muslim, by “stepping into the street and letting him pass.” Synagogues had to be located in hidden, remote areas, a host of “protection taxes” had to be paid, and unsold Arab merchandise was frequently dumped on Jewish neighbors who were then billed for them (James Finn, Stirring Times, 1:118-119). It is the Jew’s refusal to accept an unequal, inferior status that lies at the heart of the Arab- Muslim hatred for the state of Israel today. As Yehoshafat Harkabi states: “The existence of the Jews was not a provocation to Islam . as long as Jews were subordinate or degraded. But a Jewish state is incompatible with the view of Jews as humiliated or wretched” (Arab Attitudes Toward Israel, p. 221). This hatred of Jewish nationalism is so intense that during World War II, most Arab leaders were pro- Nazi. The mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini was an ardent supporter of Hitler. On November 2, 1943, at a time when the Nazis were murdering thousands of Jews daily, the Mufti was quoted as saying: “The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals .
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