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Jewish-Muslim Relations in History

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Jewish-Muslim Relations in History APPENDIX I JEWISH-MUSLIM RELATIONS IN HISTORY JEWS PROSPERED IN THE ENORMOUS ARAB EMPIRE, participated in its “commer- cial revolution,” and were transformed by the “bourgeois revolution,” that socioeco- nomic transformation by which they ceased being what they always had been, a fundamentally rural people of farmers and craftsmen, and earned their livelihood as ur- banites in commerce and finance as well as crafts. The huge Geniza collection of docu- ments from 700 to 1100—found in Fustat, Old Cairo, Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century—shows that the mass of the Jewish population was involved in trade, the characteristic unit being small, the family firm or partnerships, and that they had plenty of competition from Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and others, that these very small commercial fry operated on a shoestring of capital but with much support by coreligionists in the Diaspora. Jews were also artisans. No less than 265 crafts have been identified as being practiced by Jews, which is a suggestive index of how extensive Jewish participation in crafts and industry was and how advanced and specialized indus- try was in the Islamic world; the Geniza material indicates an astonishing total of about 450 professions and callings among Jews. That material also dispels the long-dominant “idea that banking during the Middle Ages consisted mainly of money lending and that the Jews were the Rothschilds of the Islamic world.”1 This myth owed much to the French scholar Louis Massignon, who unfortunately followed Werner Sombart in con- cluding that “the prohibition of usury caused the trade in money to be monopolized in the Muslim world, first by Christians, then by the Jews.”2 In contrast to medieval Christianity, Islam was very accepting of commerce and the merchant; after all, Muhammad was a merchant. The heyday of the Jews in Islam was 800 to 1250, when a “near equality” prevailed in those spheres that were not specifically religious, notably economic activity, the area in which Jewish integration into host societies was always the most advanced. There followed many centuries of deterioration, economic decline, and military defeats, marked by the Mongols’ destruction of the great Arab Empire and the capture of the 266 ANTISEMITISM caliph who was unceremoniously hanged in Baghdad in 1258. (The Mongols were the first on the list of external factors blamed for Arab-Islamic weakness and failure: Turks, Western imperialists, Jews/Israel, Americans, and so on.) The successor states were far less tolerant of the Jews than the caliphs in what had been an expanding economy and dynamic society for several centuries. The exception to prolonged decline was the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the greatest Muslim state in history, in which Jews flourished so long as the empire flourished, to about 1700; the Ottomans were more tolerant from the start and Jews enjoyed greater acceptance there until today, as was observed in the 1992 commemoration of the 500-year presence of Jews since their expulsion from Spain in 1492. The highly centralized Ottoman government promoted economic growth in the form of mercantilist policies. The economy was an example of state capi- talism tempered by much local and provincial initiative on the part of governors and private entrepreneurs. In such an environment Jews could and did flourish. Some of them were great merchants, financiers, and government officials, but most were small traders and shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans. Jewish-Muslim relations are a complex story. While there is an antisemitic infra- structure extant in Islam, it is clear that Jews were much better off under Islam than in Christendom. There were polemics, intolerance, persecutions, and massacres, but far less than in Christendom. References to Jews in the Koran are mostly negative: “Wretchedness and baseness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah’s revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully”; “And for their taking usury which was prohibited for them, and because of their consuming people’s wealth under false pretense, We have prepared for the unbelievers among them a painful punishment.” The Koran requires their “abase- ment and poverty”; abasement took the form of the poll tax and the humiliating cere- mony in which it was paid; in his “wrath” God has “cursed” the Jews and will turn them into apes/monkeys and swine and idol worshippers because they are “infidels.”3 The Hadith (tradition, law, legend) is even more scathing in attacking the Jews: They are de- based, cursed, anathematized forever by God and so can never repent and be forgiven; they are cheats and traitors; defiant and stubborn; they killed the prophets; they are liars who falsify scripture and take bribes; as infidels they are ritually unclean, a foul odor emanating from them—such is the image of the Jew in classical Islam, degraded and malevolent. Yet, ordinarily, “the Jews” could not be said to have “killed” Muham- mad, who was neither a Jew nor a god. There is no accusation of deicide (in fact, Sura 4:157 of the Koran, referring to the Jews and Jesus, says “they killed him not”), no ap- propriation of the Jewish Bible as an Islamic sacred text, and “virtuous Hebrews” is not translated into “virtuous Muslims” in contrast to the “stiff-necked, criminal Jews.” Rather, Jews (and Christians) had the status of dhimmis (people of the covenant or pro- tected minority). Developed in the later eighth century, the dhimmi code was intended to degrade and humiliate individuals as well as the religious community. Its laws speci- fied that dhimmis had to pay heavier taxes; had to wear clothes and insignia distinguish- ing them from Muslims; were barred from holding public office, bearing arms, riding a horse or mule, intermarriage with Muslims; were disqualified as witnesses in litigation involving Muslims and had to swear a demeaning oath; could not erect new or repair old synagogues or proselytize. Later additions to the code included prohibitions on adopting Arab names, studying the Koran, selling alcoholic beverages, and so on. Thus Muslim antipathy for Jews has been a much more normal form of antagonism of one people, or one religion, for another than the Christian-Jewish encounter has been. The dhimmi system bestowed freedom of worship and protection of life and property in re- JEWISH-MUSLIM RELATIONS IN HISTORY 267 turn for taxes, particularly the poll tax, or jizya; it followed Muhammad’s formulation that infidels were to be fought “until they pay the jizya out of hand, and have been humbled.” Dhimmi discrimination was often merely theory, and de facto toleration usually prevailed. Nevertheless, this battery of legislation was a perpetual potential menace to the dhimmis—a danger that materialized whenever a revolutionary or pious reactionary came to power. “Dhimmitude” was invoked very often down to our times, as by Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat in 1972 before his journey to Jerusalem, when he urged the necessity of defeating Israel “so that they go back to be once again as our Book told us: ‘Humiliation is destined for them, and poverty.’”4 The dhimmi system and Jewish status in Islamic society have been subjected to very varied judgments, from the more traditional “golden age” school to revisionists’ “persecution and pogrom” interpretation. The traditional school follows the “pro-Is- lamic Jews,” who were pioneering and empathetic historians of Islam, especially of the Arab and Ottoman periods, among whom were the German Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1917), the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), and several others. In re- sponse to Christian persecutions, from the Crusades on, which victimized Jews and Muslims alike, these scholars propounded the myth of a golden age or several great ages—notably Muslim Spain—when Jews prospered in economic freedom and presum- ably enjoyed equality and acceptance virtually undisturbed by persecution or discrimi- nation; these pioneering scholars ignored the historical record of pervasive humiliation, discrimination, and periodic violence in a kind of solidarity with fellow “Semites” in the face of Christian hostility. The myth, says Bernard Lewis, was fashioned by Jews “as a reproach to Christians” and is now taken up by Muslims—invoking putative golden ages—“as a reproach to Jews.”5 According to Arab Muslim claims, frequently reiterated since 1948, Jews always enjoyed equality and social harmony under Islam: Muslims were “merciful brothers who regarded the Jews as fellow believers and did not allow re- ligious differences to affect their treatment or attitude toward them.” It was only with the twentieth century, in this view, that anti-Jewish feelings mounted in response to Zionism, ending the age-old idyllic pattern of fraternity and tolerance and prosperity. Such a romanticized interpretation serves as an Arab-Islamist weapon in what is pri- marily an ideological and political struggle against Israel. Fundamentalists also argue that under the yoke of the dhimmi system, Muslim-Jewish relations were good because Jews were held in check and Muslims were thus “protected” from them; the demise of the system under colonial rule and, worse, the coming of the state of Israel meant that Jews became “dangerous” to Muslims and Islam. Such idealization of the past ignores a catalog of lesser-known hatred and mas- sacres. Hostile attitudes manifested in the ninth century resulted in persecution and outbreaks of violence that took a heavy toll. Antisemitic propaganda of the tenth and eleventh centuries made Jews out to be untrustworthy, treacherous oppressors, and ex- ploiters of Muslims, which inspired outbreaks of violence and caused many casualties in Egypt. Maimonides lamented that “a more hating nation [than Ishmael] has never risen against Israel, nor one which has come to degrade us and decimate us and make hating us their chief desire.”6 In Muslim Spain there were violent outbreaks in Cordoba in 1011 and Granada in 1066, because (some) Jews were wealthy and others, as viziers and the like, exercised authority over Muslims—that is, they “oppressed” Muslims.
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