Description
How do this week’s readings affirm or challenge the idea that the Arab-Israeli conflict is an “ancient religious” conflict? (Be sure to include at least two citations from the readings.)What are two questions prompted by the readings that you would like to discuss further in class? (These can be questions seeking clarification about the readings or broader questions that readings have led you to think about.)
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Part I
The Middle
Ages
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
Chapter I. The Emergence of Islam
Chapter II. In Islamic Lands
Chapter III. In Christendom
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
Prologue
The “Golden Age”
of Jewish-Muslim Relations:
Myth and Reality
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
Mark R. Cohen
In the nineteenth century there was nearly universal consensus that Jews in the
Islamic Middle Ages—taking al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, as the model—lived
in a “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim harmony,1 an interfaith utopia of tolerance
and convivencia.2 It was thought that Jews minMark R. Cohen
gled freely and comfortably with Muslims,
immersed in Arabic-Islamic culture, including
Professor of Near Eastern Studies at
Princeton University, he holds the Khethe language, poetry, philosophy, science, meddouri A. Zilka Professorship of Jewish
icine, and the study of Scripture—a society,
Civilization in the Near East. His publications include Under Crescent and
furthermore, in which Jews could and many
Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages
did ascend to the pinnacles of political power
(Princeton University Press, 1994; rein Muslim government. This idealized picture
vised edition 2008).
went beyond Spain to encompass the entire
Muslim world, from Baghdad to Cordova, and extended over the long centuries,
bracketed by the Islamic conquests at one end and the era of Moses Maimonides
(1138–1204) at the other.
The idea stemmed in the first instance from disappointment felt by central
European Jewish historians as Emancipation-era promises of political and cultural
equality remained unfulfilled. They exploited the tolerance they ascribed to Islam
to chastise their Christian neighbors for failing to rise to the standards set by nonChristian society hundreds of years earlier.3
The interfaith utopia was to a certain extent a myth; it ignored, or left unmentioned, the legal inferiority of the Jews and periodic outbursts of violence. Yet,
when compared to the gloomier history of Jews in the medieval Ashkenazic world
of Northern Europe and late medieval Spain, and the far more frequent and severe
persecution in those regions, it contained a very large kernel of truth.
The image of the Golden Age remained dominant among scholars and in the general public throughout the nineteenth century, as Jews in Europe confronted a new,
virulent strain of political anti-Semitism, reinforcing a much older feeling of alienation and persecution in Christian lands. It endured well into the twentieth century,
as the flames of Jew hatred burned ever brighter in Europe, culminating in the
Holocaust.
28
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality
•
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
This scene, depicting a Jew and a Muslim, is often used to illustrate the golden age of interfaith relations
in Al-Andalus. El Libro de los Juegos, commissioned by Alphonse X of Castile, thirteenth century. Madrid,
Escurial Library, fol. 63 recto.
In the twentieth century, Muslims appropriated the Jewish myth of the interfaith utopia as a weapon against Zionism and the State of Israel. They expressed this both in
political broadsides and in books and articles about Jews or about non-Muslims in
general in the Middle Ages. The leitmotif of these writings is Islamic “tolerance” (Arabic
samāḥa or tasāmuḥ), often contrasted with the persecutions of medieval Christian society. Characteristically, these writings soft-pedal the legal inferiority of the Jews and gloss
over, or ignore, episodes of violence that call the harmony into question.4
The response on the Jewish side has been to turn the idea of the Golden Age utopia
on its head.5 Muhammad, the revisionists insist, was bent on extirpating the Jews
from the very beginning. The Qur’an and other early Islamic sources are packed
with anti-Jewish, even anti-Semitic, venom. And, rather than protecting the Jews,
Islam persecuted them relentlessly, often as badly as medieval Christendom. This
undisguised rejoinder to Arab/Muslim exploitation of the old Jewish depiction of
interfaith harmony constitutes a “counter-myth of Islamic persecution.” Adapting
the famous coinage of historian Salon W. Baron, who labeled historiography about
medieval Jews living under Christendom a “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,”6 we may call this a “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history.”7 It
29
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
• Prologue
has taken hold in many circles and has flourished in the soil of the ongoing IsraeliPalestinian conflict. The chief proponent of the “neo-lachrymose school,” Bat
Ye’or, pseudonym for Gisele Littman, has made famous the term “dhimmitude” to
describe all the humiliating restrictions imposed by Islam on Jews and Christians in
Muslim-Arab lands since the rise of Islam.8
The highly politicized debate, exacerbated by the worldwide fear of Islamism and
by the Islamophobia following the attack by radical Muslims on the World Trade
Center in New York on September 11, 2001, makes the questions that underlie
this book all the more controversial, but, at the same time, all the more begging for
dispassionate inquiry.
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
Jewish-Muslim relations: The comparative perspective
The most useful way to understand Jewish-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages is
to compare the Muslim world with the Christian world of Northern Europe. The
choice of Northern Europe is dictated by the fact that there relations between Jews
and Christians, reasonably tolerable in the early Middle Ages, declined precipitously
later on to become the worst in Europe, leading the way in persecuting and ultimately expelling the Jews from Christian society. By choosing this case to compare
with the Islamic world, one is able to isolate the specific factors determining how
Jews were treated by the majority of society. In this way, this comparative study also
constructs a paradigm that can be used to explain Jewish-gentile relations in premodern times in general.
If Islam seems to have been more tolerant than Christendom, this is true only in a
qualified sense. In the Middle Ages, tolerance, in the modern, liberal meaning of full
equality, was not considered to be a virtue to be emulated. Monotheistic religions
were by nature mutually intolerant. Adherents of the religion in power considered it
their right and duty to treat the others as inferiors rejected by God, and, in extreme
cases, to treat them harshly, even to encourage them (in some cases by force) to
abandon their faith in favor of the faith of the rulers. Though the religious minorities (Jews living under Christian rule; Jews and Christians living under Muslim
rule) were hardly happy with their second-class status and legal inferiority, let alone
the occasional persecutions, for the most part they accepted their inequality and
subordination with resignation. As long as they were allowed to live in security and
practice their religion without interference—this was “toleration” in the medieval
sense of the word—they were generally content. For them, as for their masters,
the hierarchical relationship between chosen religion and rejected religion, between
superior and inferior, between governing and governed, was part of the natural order
of things. The subjugated people may have dreamed of a reversal of the hierarchy, in
history or in the messianic era, but for the time being, generally speaking, they bore
their fate with a certain amount of equanimity.
30
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality
•
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
The paradigm
The paradigm that results from this comparative approach delineates five interrelated factors that explain why anti-Jewish violence was so much less prevalent
in the Islamic world than in Northern Europe. Violence was related, in the first
instance, to the primacy of religious exclusivity. Historically, religious exclusivity
characterized both Islam and Christianity. But anti-Jewish violence was more pronounced in Christendom because innate religious antagonism, present from the
first decades of Christianity, was combined with other erosive forces. The second
component of the paradigm is legal status; namely, the evolution of a special law
for the Jews and a system of baronial or monarchical possessory rights—though
varied in character and uneven in its application in different times and places—that
could be manipulated in an arbitrary manner. This law frequently clashed with its
competitor, papal policy, and the Jews were frequently caught in the middle. The
third element concerns the economic circumstances that excluded the Jews from
the most respected walks of life.
Religious exclusivity, a special, arbitrary legal status, and economic marginalization
interacted with another adverse factor, the fourth element of the paradigm: social
exclusion, which steadily robbed the Jews of their rank in the hierarchical social
order. Last, the gradual replacement of the ethnic pluralism of Germanic society of
the early Middle Ages by a medieval type of “nationalism,” paralleling the spread
of Catholic religious exclusivity to the masses and the rise of the crusading spirit
in the eleventh century, contributed to the enhancement of the Jew’s “otherness”
and to his eventual exclusion from most of western Christendom by the end of the
fifteenth century. Before that, the Jews survived among Christians—were “tolerated” in a manner of speaking—in part because they performed useful economic
services for Christian rulers, such as importing precious spices and other goods
from the East and paying taxes from the proceeds of commerce and moneylending;
and in part because of a doctrine of Saint Augustine that proclaimed that the Jews See article
John
played an important role in Christian salvation history as a fossil religion: wit- by
Tolan, p. 145.
nesses, by their abjugated state, to the triumph of Christianity, bearers of the Old
Testament, and ultimately by their conversion to Christianity at the time of the
Second Coming of Christ.
In the Islamic world, the erosive factors described above were less severe. Religious
exclusivity was modulated by the multiplicity of non-Muslim religions, primarily
Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian. The Qur’an itself, for all its harsh language refer- See article
Mark
ring to Christians and Jews, contains the nucleus of a kind of religious pluralism.9 A by
R. Cohen,
Qur’anic verse, “there is no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256), was understood to pp. 58-71.
mean that the non-Muslims were not to be forcibly converted. Moreover, as venerated “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab), Jews and Christians were allowed to live
securely in their autonomous communities and to develop: they were not fossils.
Legally speaking, Jews shared with other non-Muslims the status of dhimmīs, or
31
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
• Prologue
See
Counterpoint,
The Pact of
‘Umar,
pp. 72-73.
“protected people.” In return for security, freedom of religion, and communal
autonomy, they were obligated by the Qur’an to pay an annual poll tax. They were
also subject, in theory, to regulations prescribed in the so-called Pact of ‘Umar and
kindred documents, which imposed limitations on their conduct. New houses of
worship were not to be built and old ones could not be repaired. They were to act
humbly in the presence of Muslims. In their liturgical practice they had to honor the
preeminence of Islam. They were further required to differentiate themselves from
Muslims by their clothing and by eschewing symbols of honor. Other restrictions
excluded them from positions of authority in Muslim government.
The Muslim pragmatism
“
De facto, however, these discriminatory regulations, most of them originating
outside Islam, were largely honored in the breach, often with the tacit approval
of Muslim rulers. The rules limiting the free practice of religion were frequently
overridden in practice by the more pragmatic policy of the conquest treaties, which
protected houses of worship and guaranteed freedom of religion. The discriminatory
restrictions were likely adopted by Christian
converts to Islam serving in Muslim governThese discriminatory regulations,
ment who wished not to be confused with
most of them originating outside
their former coreligionists.10 Many of the rules
Islam, were largely honored in
of differentiation, it has recently been shown
the breach, often with the tacit
by the historian Milka Levy-Rubin, imitated
approval of Muslim rulers.
discriminatory practices in Sasanian society
aimed against the lowest class of Zoroastrian
11
society. Whether they originated in Byzantine or in Sasanian practice, however,
many of these foreign practices conflicted with the pragmatic spirit of “live and let
live” of early Islam and so could often be overlooked or ignored in the day-to-day
realities of Muslim and non-Muslim coexistence.
This coexistence is particularly evident in economic life. Jews were not limited to a
small range of pursuits isolated from the rest of the population in deplored professions like moneylending, as in Europe. They worked as craftsmen, pharmacists, and
physicians; as craftsmen in textiles, in glassmaking, and in jewelry; as retailers in the
marketplace specializing in a whole host of products, including foodstuffs; in longdistance commerce, as government functionaries; and in many other walks of life.
In these endeavors, Muslims and Jews (and also Christians) manifested “loyalties of
category,” to use terminology coined by historian Roy Mottahedeh, that straddled
the Muslim and non-Muslim divide and mitigated the discrimination inherent to
the ever-present religious hierarchy.12
In the Islamic marketplace, there existed a substantial degree of interdenominational
cooperation. Jews mixed freely with their Muslim counterparts, even forming part-
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
”
32
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality
•
nerships, with a minimum of friction. Jews lent money to Muslims, but the reverse
was also true. When, after about the twelfth century, Jewish economic circumstances
declined, this was not a confessional phenomenon alone, but one that Jews shared
with the Muslim majority, though as a minority group they naturally experienced
greater hardship.
Speaking in social-anthropological terms—and this provides an important corrective to the view that Islam is fundamentally oppressive, if not persecutory—the rules
of the Pact of ‘Umar and other restrictions served as a means to create and preserve
a “natural” hierarchy, in the sense that it characterizes most religious societies in premodern times. In
In the Islamic marketplace,
the Islamic hierarchy, everyone had a rank, including
there existed a substantial
non-Muslims, who occupied a low rank, to be sure, degree of interdenominational
but a secure rank nonetheless. Jews occupied a percooperation.
manent niche within the hierarchical social order of
Islam, and, though marginalized, they were not ostracized or expelled. The original
and long-lasting ethnic and religious pluralism of Islamic society encouraged a certain tolerance of diversity. The diffusion of hostility among two and in many places
three “infidel” religions helped mitigate the Jews’ “otherness” and prevent the emergence of the irrational hatred we call anti-Semitism. As humiliating as the restrictions in the Pact of ‘Umar were (when successfully enforced), Jews and other nonMuslim People of the Book seem to have grudgingly accepted them because they
guaranteed their security, and because they, especially the religious leaders, wished
to maintain a separate identity for their own communities.13 In such an atmosphere,
Jews—and not just the philosophers and the physicians among them—fraternized
with Muslims on a regular basis with a minimum of hostility. This sociability constituted an essential ingredient in the cultural interchange between Jews and Arabs
in the high Middle Ages.
For all these reasons, the Jews of Islam had substantial confidence in the dhimma
system. If they kept a low profile and paid their annual poll tax, they could expect
to be protected and to be free from economic discrimination—not to be forcefully
converted to Islam, massacred, or expelled. To be sure, the system occasionally broke
down. A ruler, goaded by pious Islamic clerics, might crack down on the dhimmīs
for ignoring the regulations of the Pact of ‘Umar. But serious persecutions were
exceptional. The most infamous one occurred in the mid-twelfth century, when the
fanatical Muslim Berber Almohads, the “Islamists” of their time, destroyed entire
Jewish communities in North Africa and Spain, and forced thousands of Jews and
Christians to accept Islam, even as they imposed their own stringent form of Islam
upon impious Muslims. Also notorious, because of the rare preservation of detailed See
bene,
Islamic and Christian sources, was the destruction of houses of worship and forced Nota
al-Hakim,
conversions ordered by the “mad” caliph al-Hakim in Egypt and Palestine at the pp. 106-107.
beginning of the eleventh century. Violent, too, was the assassination in 1066 of the
“
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
”
33
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
• Prologue
“haughty” Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela, successor of his more illustrious father
as head of the Jewish community in the Muslim principality of Granada, Spain,
and the subsequent “pogrom” against the Jewish quarter of the city, with great loss
See article of life. The incident was apparently triggered by an Arabic poet who wrote a poem
by Mark
R. Cohen, in which he called the Jews “apes and pigs,” quoting a Qur’anic motif (e.g., Qur’an
pp. 546-553. 5:60) and excoriating the Jews for violating the code of humility vis-à-vis Islam.
Exceptional as it was in targeting the Jews per se, the sorry episode is regularly cited
by proponents of the “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history” as a typical example of Islamic anti-Semitism.14
During these rare episodes, Jews felt the impact of violence no less than the
Ashkenazic Jews of Europe, but they did not preserve them as part of a collective memory of suffering the way their Ashkenazic brethren did. They recognized
these as temporary lapses of the dhimma arrangement and trusted that forced conversions, a violation of Qur’anic law, would be reversed after the initial zealotry faded.
Doubtless this is one factor among others that explains why Jews in Islamic lands
under threat favored “superficial conversion” (like the Islamic taqiyya recommended
for Muslims faced with persecution for heretical beliefs) over martyrdom, unlike
their self-immolating Ashkenazic brethren, who had little hope of being officially
allowed to return to Judaism after their baptism. In this respect the Jews of Islamic
Spain and other places in the medieval Islamic world where occasional acts of intolerance threatened Jewish life anticipated the response of Jews in Christian Spain—
the so-called Marranos—who converted to Catholicism rather than accept a martyr’s
death during and after the pogroms of 1391.15
Judeo-Arabic culture
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
See article
by Marina
Rustow,
pp. 75-98 and
Part IV, p. 653
and following.
The paradigm summarized here helps explain not only Muslim-Jewish coexistence
but also why Jews were so open to Arab-Islamic culture. Other contributions to this
book will describe this is detail. Here I shall limit myself to a few general comparative observations.
For the Jews in the Middle East and Spain, Arabic was the key to an entirely new
way of thinking. There, too, Jews abandoned Aramaic for the new language, but
Arabic functioned both as the language of high culture and the common tongue
of both Jews and Arabs in everyday exchange. It was at the same time linguistically
akin to Aramaic and Hebrew, with morphological forms and cognates that facilitated transcribing Arabic into Hebrew letters and reading it—the form of Arabic we
call Judeo-Arabic. Assimilating Arabic was even less of a “leap” for the indigenous
Aramaic-speaking Jews of the Middle East than it was for Jewish immigrants to
Europe making the transition from Aramaic to European vernaculars. Furthermore,
Arabic, the language of the Islamic faith, like the faith itself, was less repugnant and
less threatening to the Jews than the language and doctrine of the Christian Church.
34
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
•
The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
By the tenth century, therefore, some two and a half centuries after the rise of Islam,
Jews had made a total and largely effortless transition from Aramaic to Arabic and
now used Arabic, not only in daily speech but for nearly everything they wrote. This
prepared them to share lock, stock, and barrel in the high culture of Islamic society.
Islam came into contact with the science, medicine, and philosophy of the GrecoRoman world centuries earlier than European Christendom. Translated early on
into Arabic, these works gave rise to what the German scholar Adam Mez famously
called “Die Renaissance des Islams.”16 Jews of the Fertile Crescent, the heartland of
the Islamic Empire and the first center of the new Arabic science, medicine, and
philosophy, had both access to and interest in the translated texts read by Muslim See
IV of
intellectuals. This facilitated the cultural convivencia of the Judeo-Arabic world, Chapter
Part IV.
which began in the eastern Islamic domains and spread to the Muslim West. It led
to Jewish adoption of philosophy, science, and medicine—philosophy serving as a
handmaiden of religious truths, as it did for Islamic philosophers themselves.
The Bible translated into Arabic by Saadia Gaon in the tenth century. Egyptian manuscript copy, first pages of
the book Psalms, 1584–85. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. or., Arabic 1, fol. 232 and 233 verso.
35
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
• Prologue
The Arabic and Islamic “renaissance” laid the groundwork for other Jewish cultural
innovations. The Bible was translated into Arabic. Hebrew as a language began
to be studied “scientifically,” so to speak, using linguistic tools in vogue among
Arab grammarians. But nearly everything Jews wrote they wrote in Arabic, and
this was not limited to philosophy, for which Hebrew entirely lacked a vocabulary.
Poetry, the major exception, was composed in Hebrew, but it, too, bore the stamp
of Arabic culture.
Arabic poets prided themselves in writing in the language of their Holy Scripture,
the Qur’an, believing Arabic to be the most beautiful of all languages. Jews followed
suit by choosing biblical Hebrew for their poetry, asserting the wonderment and
uniqueness of the language of their own scripture. The social setting for this new
poetry also followed the Arabic model. The poems were recited and sung in gardens,
like the gardens of the caliph’s palace or of private homes, the physical setting for
Arabic poetry. Jews continued to compose religious poetry for the synagogue, but
it, too, employed biblical Hebrew and Arabic meter, and borrowed themes from
Islamic pietistic thought.17 Poetry in the Arabic mode, and the way of living that
accompanied it, led many Hebrew poets, especially in their later years, to question
the frivolities of their youth.18 Judah Halevi represents the most extreme example of
this rejection of the Golden Age; toward the end of his life he abandoned his native
Spain and embarked on a pious pilgrimage to the Holy Land.19
See Nota One of the greatest rabbis of the Middle Ages, Saadia Gaon (d. 942), rightly called
bene, Saadia
Gaon, the “father” of Judeo-Arabic culture, wrote poetry. He served as head of the great
pp. 758-761. yeshiva located in Baghdad, one of the two most important religious centers for
Jews throughout the Islamic domains. He composed the first comprehensive Jewish
prayer book, writing the directions for the worshipper in Arabic (the prayers, of
course, remained in their original Hebrew) and including poems of his own. Saadia
also compiled monographs on Jewish law in Arabic, as did other geonim, or heads
of the yeshiva. Even the supposedly sacrosanct realm of Jewish law was not immune
See article
by Phillip to Islamic influence. In fact, in the works of some scholars, the entire structure of
Ackerman Jewish legal discourse was altered in accordance with Islamic categories, while some
Lieberman,
20
pp. 683-693. of the content of Islamic law influenced Jewish legal thought as well. Saadia was
also a pioneer in applying Greco-Arabic rational philosophic categories to Jewish
thought in a systematic way, adopting current methods from Islamic theologians.21
Maimonides (1138–1204), the acme of Judeo-Arabic philosophy, strove to make
Judaism compatible with neo-Aristotelian philosophy.22
Other religious developments within Judaism also drew inspiration from Islam. The
Karaite movement—the first oppositional movement in Judaism since the ascendancy of the Talmudic rabbinic scholars in late antiquity over the Sadducees—arose
in the eastern Islamic world at just about the same time and in the same place that
Shi‘ism began to flourish, in opposition to the dominant Sunni “orthodoxy.”23 Later
on, Sufi pietism exerted a powerful influence on Jewish religious thought and prac36
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Accessed January 18, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from uaz on 2022-01-18 13:22:53.
The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality
•
Copyright © 2013. Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
tice as early as the eleventh century in Spain and then, beginning in the early thir- See article
Elisha
teenth century, in Egypt. Abraham, the son of Maimonides (d. 1237), was a “Jewish by
RussSufi,” as were his descendants, the leaders of the Jewish community in Egypt, for Fishbane,
pp. 856-864.
several more generations.24
The Arabic language gave Jews entrance to the corridors of Muslim power and made
possible the remarkable careers of such luminaries as Samuel ha-Nagid ibn Naghrela
in the eleventh century, head of the Jewish community, poet, Talmudist, and vizier
of Granada (the father of the Jewish vizier assassinated in 1066), as well as scores
of other Jewish denizens of Islamic courts, many of whom occupy pages in Islamic See Nota
Samuel
chronicles. Other dignitaries, as well as merchants, less well known because they did bene,
ibn Naghrela,
not leave books behind, but whose quotidian lives are described in minute detail in pp. 132-133.
the documents of the Cairo Geniza, are no less important as Jewish exemplars of the See Nota
The
Jewish-Muslim coexistence that reigned for several centuries during the Islamic high bene,
Cairo Geniza,
Middle Ages. For such illustrious figures in the Jewish elite, those centuries were pp. 99-101.
indeed a Golden Age.
1. Much of the first part of this essay relies on my book Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984; new edition with new introduction and afterword, 2008). Much
of the second part draws on my article “The ‘Convivencia’ of Jews and Muslims in the High Middle Ages,” in The
Meeting of Civilizations: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, ed. Moshe Ma‘oz (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press,
2009), 54–65.
2. For a discussion of the debate over convivencia and its corollary, the tension between tolerance and intolerance
in Spanish history, of which the Jewish thesis was a part, see Alex Novikoff, “Between Tolerance and Intolerance in
Medieval Spain: An Historiographic Enigma,” Medieval Encounters 11 (2005): 7–36.
3. This insight was first expressed, as far as I know, by Bernard Lewis in his essay “The Pro-Islamic Jews,” Judaism
17 (1968): 402: “The myth was invented by Jews in 19th century Europe as a reproach to Christians—and taken up
by Muslims in our time as a reproach to Jews.”
4. See the representative sample of books in Arabic and other languages by Arabs and others treating the subject of
the Jews of Islam, often apologetically, mentioned in the notes in chapter 1 of my Under Crescent and Cross.
5. The clarion call of danger from Muslim exploitation of the myth of Islamic tolerance was sounded in an essay
by British historian Cecil Roth in the Zionist Organization of America’s New Palestine (October 4, 1946), and in
the British Zionist Jewish Forum in the same month. The essay was virtually forgotten until it was reprinted by the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in the “Myths and Facts” supplement to its Near East Report,
shortly after the Six-Day War of June 1967. Coincidentally, at exactly the same time as the Roth essay (September
1967), a more conciliatory article appeared in the magazine the Jewish Spectator, by Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, entitled
“Toward Jewish-Muslim Dialogue.”
6. See his “Ghetto and Emancipation,” Menorah Journal 14, no. 6 (June 1928): 515–26, at the end; reprinted in the
Menorah Treasury: Harvest of Half a Century, ed. Leo W. Swartz (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America,
1964), 59–63.
7. Mark R. Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History,” Tikkun (May/June, 1991): 55–60;
also “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 38 (1986): 125–37; and Under
Crescent and Cross, chapter 1.
8. Of her many books, Le Dhimmi: Profil de l’opprimé en Orient et en Afrique de Nord depuis la conquête arabe (Paris:
Anthropos, 1980) is representative.
9. For a thoughtful discussion of Islam’s pluralistic approach to religion, grounded in the Qur’an, see Abdulaziz
Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also
Heribert Busse, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Theological and Historical Affiliations (Princeton, NJ: Markus
Wiener, 1998), 33–35. Part 4 of my Under Crescent and Cross discusses sociological factors underlying this Islamic
pluralism.
37
Meddeb, Abdelwahab, and Stora, Benjamin, eds. A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations : From the Origins to the Present Day. Princeton: Princeton University Press
