Jewish-Muslim
relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-Semitism
on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born of political,
rather than religious factors. When the Islamic caliphs ruled large
swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected
status their brethren in Christian Europe - victims of anti-Semitism -
never thought possible.
Today,
Muslim apologists have distorted this age of coexistence. They
appropriate an old Jewish myth about an "interfaith utopia" in the
Middle Ages and blame the Jews and Zionism for destroying the
traditional harmony between the two peoples.
In response, there is a new Jewish "counter-myth" that claims
that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins and that anti-Semitism
is endemic in the religion. This counter-myth has been propagated by
Jewish writers in the Diaspora especially since the 1970s. It parallels
a similar conviction among some Oriental Jews in Israel. Seeking to
find their place in a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by
centuries of Christian persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they
claim that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication,
they have a past of suffering like the Ashkenazim, including
dislocation from their ancient homelands, and are thus eligible for a
larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazic founding
fathers of Israel have granted them.
THE HISTORIC plight of Oriental Jewry falls somewhere between
these two extremes. To discover it, one must move past the layers of
propaganda and mutual recriminations that have obscured our view of
history.
First of all, however, let us not make the mistake of thinking
that Jews lived in the Middle Ages as the equals of Muslims. They were
second class citizens, at best. They were classed along with other
religious minorities as unbelievers who did not recognize the
prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the Koran. But this kind of
unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewish unbelief was to
Christians, for unbelief in Christianity means rejection of Jesus as
Messiah and as God, a greater affront to the dominant faith than Jewish
unbelief was to Islam because it challenged the theological basis of
the whole religion.
Moreover, restrictions on Jewish (and Christian) life - they
were not to build new houses of worship and were required to wear
distinctive garb, avoid Muslim honorific titles, and so forth - were
intended not so much to exclude them from society as they were meant to
reinforce the necessary hierarchical distinction between Muslims and
non-Muslims within a single social order.
Non-Muslims
were to remain "in their place," avoiding any act, particularly any
religious act, that might challenge the superior rank of Muslims or of
Islam. Non-Muslims, however, occupied a definite rank in Islamic
society - a low rank, but a rank nevertheless. They managed to co-exist
more or less harmoniously with the higher-ranking dominant Muslim group
because both sides recognized and accepted the place of the other -
whether superior or inferior - and this facilitated interaction with a
minimum of conflict.
THE FLIP SIDE of the discriminatory regulations imposed upon
Jews is that they (as well as Christians) were a "protected people," ahl al-dhimma or dhimmis
in Arabic, who enjoyed security of life and property, religious
freedom, freedom from forced conversion, communal autonomy, and
equality in the marketplace. For all its religious exclusivity and
hostility towards the Jews, expressed in the Koran and in other Islamic
literature, Islam contains a nucleus of pluralism that gave the Jews in
Muslim lands greater security than Jews had in Christian Europe. For
other important reasons, too, Jews in the Islamic orbit were spared the
damaging stigma of "otherness" and anti-Semitism suffered by Jews in
Europe. They were indigenous to the Near East - not immigrants, as in
many parts of the Christian West - and largely indistinguishable
physically from their Arab-Muslim neighbors.
Moreover, Jews were one of two and in some place three
non-Muslim minority religions, which also diffused the natural
hostility towards the "other." The contrast with the Christian West is
revealing. Although for a few centuries in the early Middle Ages (up to
the 11th century) Jews enjoyed a more or less secure place in the
natural hierarchical order of Christian society, as well as substantial
economic rights, a combination of factors led to the expulsion of most
of western Jewry by the end of the 15th century. These factors include
the loss of the pluralism that had marked the Germanic, "barbarian"
early Middle Ages; the spread of Christianity to the masses by the 11th
century; the commercial revolution that relegated Jews to a few,
despised economic activities like money lending; the erosion of the old
doctrine of St. Augustine that Jews must be allowed to live in
Christian society as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity; and,
finally, the gradual political unification of European countries,
especially England, France, and Spain, which left the Jew even more of
an outsider than in the past.
ISLAM AND Judaism had (and continue to have) much more in
common than Judaism has with Christianity. This mutual recognition of
religious similarities includes monotheism, which made Islam more
tolerant of Jews than of Christians, whose Trinity smacked of
polytheism, the greatest sin in Islam, and made Jews more tolerant of
Islam for much the same reason. Another well known commonality are laws
concerning animal ritual slaughter and other kashrut/halal practices.
Partly because of shared religious beliefs, Islamic polemics against
Judaism and the Jews in the Middle Ages were minimal and banal compared
to the large body of anti-Jewish polemics in the Christian world in the
13th century. This led to the burning of the Talmud in France - an act
of aggression against Judaism that had no parallel in the Muslim world
and which was accompanied by other violent excesses like the blood
libel that wrought the anti-Semitism whose tragic outcome in the 20th
century is all too well known.
