Theme

“Jews and Muslims: a shared history”

Fourteen centuries of Jewish life under Islam, told neither as a golden age nor as a horror story: often both things are true.

  1. Why people find it convincing

    • Each side tends to keep only half of this history: the golden age (pro-Palestinian) or the dhimmi humiliation and the massacres (pro-Israel).
    • Many Muslims today are proud of their countries' Jewish past, and many Jews from Arab lands remember both the neighbours and the expulsion.

  2. The picture

    Real high points.

    In al-Andalus, Jewish poets, philosophers and statesmen flourished in Arabic and Hebrew: Hasdai ibn Shaprut served the caliph of Córdoba, and Samuel ibn Naghrela led Granada's army and wrote Hebrew poetry. Learning passed between the faiths. Arabic translations and commentaries on Greek philosophy and science, many worked on by Jewish scholars, reached Latin Europe through translators in Toledo and changed European thought. Granada's Madrasa Yusufiyya (1349) taught there for a century and a half. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492 and Portugal in 1497, the Ottoman Empire took many of them in, and Salonica, Istanbul and Safed flourished.

    Real low points.

    The same history includes the massacre of Granada's Jews in 1066, the Almohads' forced conversions from the 1140s (Maimonides' family fled), discriminatory dhimmi rules, the Damascus blood libel (1840), the Farhud (1941), and the expulsions and flight of some 850,000 Jews from Arab countries after 1948. The Reconquista ended al-Andalus for Muslims and Jews alike: the Moriscos, Spain's converted Muslims, were expelled in 1609–14.

    The living memory.

    Morocco's 2011 constitution names the 'Hebraic' as one of the influences enriching national identity. Moroccan Jews and Muslims share the Mimouna celebration at the end of Passover, and Essaouira's Bayt Dakira preserves the city's Jewish memory. Across the region, Muslims restore synagogues and cemeteries, and many Israelis of Moroccan, Iraqi or Yemeni descent keep the language, music and food of the places their families came from. Neither the golden-age myth nor the dhimmi-horror myth survives contact with the people who lived it.

    Traps here:◆ The exception as proof

    primary documentConstitution of the Kingdom of Morocco (2011), Preamble (2011) ⚠

Keep exploring

Jews lived peacefully in the Arab world for centuries until Zionism ruined it; they left because Israel lured them.Under Islam, Jews were humiliated second-class dhimmis — and Islamists want to bring it back.Coexistence where there's contact◆ Which Islam?Islam is a cancer destroying the West — Israel is just the front line.There was a Jewish Nakba too — it was a population exchange, so the Palestinian refugee question is settled.