From: "Roi Ben-yehuda" Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 13:11:23 -0400 To: sunnyandjoy@hotmail.com CC: rbenyehuda76@hotmail.com Here is a paper that I wrote a while back. I just put it into email format and I thought that you might enjoy reading it. Roi ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Use and Misuse of Jewish-Muslim History in the Arab-Israeli Conflict One of the most interesting aspects of the literature on the Arab-Israeli conflict is the way in which writers on both sides of the debate invoke medieval and early modern Jewish-Muslim history. Pro-Israeli writers argue that the degrading history of the Jews living under Muslim rule proves that Jews and Muslims are engaged in an eternal struggle that predates and transcends the coming of Zionism, while pro-Arab writers argue that the Golden Age of the Jewish-Muslim experience demonstrates that the two peoples’ potential for coexistence has been stymied by Zionism. In the following paper I will explore the use of Jewish-Muslim history in the polemical writings surrounding the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the final analysis, I will argue that a third and more balanced approach needs to be taken if the history of the Jewish-Muslim experience is to be included in the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The polemical use of Jewish-Muslim history dates back to 19th-century Jewish scholarship. The scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of Judaism), the likes of which included Abraham Geiger, Moritz Steinschneider, Salamon Munk, and Heinrich Graetz, were among the first to research and develop the historiography of the interaction between the two peoples. Their pioneering work mainly concentrated on the Golden Age, the period between the 8th and 13th centuries when Jews successfully participated in the cultural, spiritual, social, and economic spheres of the dominant Muslim society. The work of the Wissenschaft scholars centered on the contributions that the Jews made in poetry, philosophy, philology, and rabbinic commentary. > From the very beginning, the attraction to and emphasis on the Golden Age was motivated by political considerations as much as by pure scholarship. Discontented with the protracted process of emancipation and mindful of the debate over the “Jewish question,” 19th-century Jewish scholars were drawn to the model of the Golden Age for several reasons. First, it served as an historical precedent which “proved” that Jews could successfully assimilate into and participate in an enlightened society. Second, the paradigm of the Golden Age under Islam, in contrast to the Dark Ages under Christianity, implicitly suggested that Christian society was in debt to the Jews for centuries of oppression. Finally, it showed that the Christians were also in debt to the Jews (and Muslims) for preserving and eventually disseminating the classical intellectual heritage during Europe’s Dark Ages. In short, as Bernard Lewis put it, the Jewish scholars who first initiated the history of the heyday of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, “used it as a stick with which to beat their Christian neighbors.” The scholarship of the Golden Age narrative continued to develop well into the 20th century. However, with the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and especially after the War of 1967, the narrative was appropriated by anti-Israeli, pro-Arab writers. The new rendition of the account of Jewish-Muslim history stressed the following: Jews and Muslims have lived in peace and harmony for centuries. Islam had tolerated her Jewish subjects, and the Jews embraced that tolerance and acculturated to Muslim society. Yet with the coming of Zionism, the accord that had existed for centuries between the two faiths was shattered. The unjust usurpation of Muslim land, in addition to the displacement of the indigenous population of Palestine, led to the end of the tradition of tolerance and coexistence, and in its place created disharmony and strife. The main use of the Golden Age narrative by anti-Israeli pro-Arab writers was to attempt to shed light on the origins and nature of the conflict in Palestine/Israel. An early example of this perspective comes from the pen of the Christian Arab writer George Antonius. In his 1938 classic, The Arab Awakening, Antonius concluded that Arab hostility to the Jews was motivated by the instinct of self-preservation along with an unfulfilled need for self-determination and not by any form of anti-Semitism. He writes: "Their [the Arabs’] attitude is not dictated by any hostility to the Jewish race. Both in the Middle Ages and in modern times, and thanks mainly to the civilizing influence of Islam, Arab history remained remarkably free from instances of deliberate persecution and shows that some of the greatest achievements of the Jewish Race were accomplished in the days of Arab power, under the aegis of Arab rulers, and with the help of their enlightened patronage. Even today, in spite of the animosity aroused by the conflict in Palestine, the treatment of Jewish minorities settled in the surrounding Arab countries continues to be not less friendly and humane than in England or the United States, and in some ways a good deal more tolerant." Another example of this position comes from Merlin Swartz, a professor at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. In a 1970 essay entitled “The Position of Jews in Arab Lands following the rise of Islam,” Professor Swartz outlines the economic, legal, social, and cultural benefits provided to the Jews by their contact with Islam. He argues that the Arab-Muslim conquest of the Near East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula liberated the Jews from years of anti-Semitism and persecution and brought forth a new era of legalized toleration and social acceptance. According to the author, the history of the Jews of Islam “demonstrates in a rather remarkable way the extent of Islam’s commitment to the ideal of openness and tolerance.” Like Antonius before him, Professor Swartz concludes his essay by pointing out that anti-Judaism in the Muslim world is a recent phenomenon. It is a consequence of “Arab outrage at the displacement of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine through the organized efforts of Zionism and the establishment of an alien state in a land that had been theirs for thirteen centuries.” A final example of the appropriation of the Golden Age narrative by anti-Israeli pro-Arab writers comes from the speeches of Ahmad Shukairy. In his testimony before the United Nations Special Political Committee of the General Assembly in 1963, Shukairy said the following about the treatment of Jews by Arabs in Palestine throughout the ages: "The question of a Jew or non-Jew was never an issue in our national life. Native Jews were simply Palestinians, just as the Muslims or Christians in the country. As in all Arab countries, the Jews were never a problem. In Palestine, they lived in amity, peace and prosperity. It is a fact of history that, when Jews were persecuted, massacred, elsewhere, they found a hospitable refuge in the Arab world, and Palestine was included. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Palestine became a secure haven for many religious Jews; the country received them with open arms. There was no idea of establishing a State, no idea of expelling the indigenous people, seizing their towns and villages and robbing their properties. So it was that a hearty welcome was extended to the Jews in keeping with Arab chivalry and keeping with Arab hospitality. These are the facts of history which no one can deny and which no one can ignore." Mr. Shukairy’s testimony before the UNSPC highlights some key ideas in the adoption of Golden Age narrative by pro-Arab anti-Israeli writers. First, the Jews are presented as “simply Palestinians,” equal citizens living in peace and harmony in a Muslim society. There is no mention of any discrimination or persecution that they suffered. Second, the Arab world served as a safe haven when the Jews were persecuted “elsewhere.” In other words, when the Jews were persecuted by non-Muslims (i.e. Christians), the Arab world fulfilled the function of the Zionist state. Implicitly, Shukairy is stating that the Jews ought to act with much more gratitude and respect since they were taken care of by Arab Muslims during their time of need. Third, the Jews were treated in a hospitable fashion because they came in the name of peace and not with aim of “expelling the indigenous population.” Conversely, this implies that, were the Jews to end their aggression against the Palestinians, relations between the two groups could return to normal. Professor Swartz makes a similar point when he announces that “Israel will be called upon to renounce its present form as an outpost of Western political influence, its quasi-racist character, and its blind and arrogant faith in military supremacy as the answer to its problems.” A return to the Golden Age is possible if only Jews would accept an Islamic state or bi-national solution. In reaction to the appropriation of the Golden Age narrative by anti-Israeli pro-Arab writers, along with the conflict between Israel and her neighbors, pro-Israeli writers responded by creating a counter-narrative. They pointed out that, contrary to the rosy portrait depicted by 19th-century Jewish historians and by 20th-century Arab and pro-Arab writers, Jewish-Muslim history was marred by periods of intolerance and oppression. From Muhammad’s expulsion and massacre of the Jewish tribes of Medina, to the plethora of anti-Jewish passages in the Koran, the status of Jews as second-class citizens under the Pact of Umar, and the eruptions of mass violence against the Jews, the alternative narrative attempted to demolish the notion that Jews and Muslims had coexisted in peace and harmony through the ages. According to this perspective, from the beginning Islam had discriminated against her Jewish subjects both in theory and in practice, and as a result the Jews of Islam had lived a precarious and insecure existence. By constructing an alternative narrative, pro-Israeli writers hoped to offset the Arab appropriation of the Golden Age model and to put forth the argument that the present conflict between the Jews and the Arabs is not a by-product of Zionism per se, but rather of intractable cultural and religious forces. In other words, the goal of this reconstructed account of Jewish-Muslim history is to establish a continuation between Muslim persecutions of Jews throughout the centuries and the Arab-Israeli conflict. This point is made clear in a pamphlet published in 1975 by the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) entitled “The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue”: "Arab oppression of Jews is not … a post-1948 phenomenon. It is rooted in Islam and has been an inescapable characteristic of the relations between Muslims and Jews since Muhammad’s time. Twentieth-century Arab persecution of Jews is only a continuation and intensification of this centuries-long tradition, in which the socially and religiously inferior Jew bore the brunt of the Muslim masses’ contempt and the Muslim government’s arbitrary policies and financial troubles. The passage above brings to our attention another use of the counter-narrative. In the battle over the refugee question, pro-Israeli scholars have argued that, given the ill treatment of Jews in Arab lands throughout the centuries and the fact that over half a million Jews living in Arab lands fled after the creation of Israel in order to escape persecution, it is only fair that Arab states accept an exchange of population - Palestinian refugees for Jewish refugees. A related assertion is made by Allen Dershowitz, who argues that Arabs bear responsibility for their mistreatment of Jews and other minorities throughout history. Dershowitz writes: "The Arab and Muslim nations were completely responsible for the second-class (or worse) status their religions and political leaders had imposed on their Jewish minorities over the centuries. The myth of benign treatment by the Arab and Muslim world of their Jewish minorities has been shattered by modern scholarship. The Jews were victims of an apartheid-like system… In addition to the legal and theological discrimination -the requirement to wear distinctive clothing, not to own self-defense weapons, and to pay a special tax - they were subject to periodic pogroms and blood libels, such as in Damascus in 1840. For Dershowitz, the wrongs committed by Muslim states, in addition to those committed by Christian states, give the Jewish people the right to settle and live as a free nation in Israel. “If rights come from wrongs,” he argues “…then the wrongs imposed on Jewish minority residents of Muslim and Christian states demonstrated to the world that the Jewish people had the right to self-determination in a place in which the Jews were a majority.” Another example of the pro-Israeli counter-narrative comes from the historian Benny Morris. In his study Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001, Morris sets the stage for his work by devoting several pages to the history of Jews living under Islam. Morris begins his section entitled “Islam and The Jews” by mentioning that during the periods of the Islamic High Middle Ages [850-1250] Jews enjoyed a “golden era”, a time when “Jews figured prominently in politics, finance, and the arts and sciences in a number of Islamic Kingdoms and Empires.” > From there, Morris sets out to retell the unfortunate story of Jewish-Arab coexistence. According to Morris, in the Islamic universe, Jews constituted a despised minority who “enjoyed” the insecure status of a second-class citizenry. He supports his diagnosis with a single quotation from the Koran, an analysis of the status of dhimmis (protected people), observations by Western travelers, and incidents of friction between Jews and Muslims in which the latter ended up persecuting and slaughtering the former. For Morris, the history of the Jewish-Muslim experience is important because it helps explain the initial passive reaction of the Ottoman Empire and the Arabs to Jewish colonization, in addition to explaining the ultimate aggression displayed by the Muslim Arabs toward the Jews. Morris writes: "The view of the Jews as objects, unassertive and subservient, was to underlie to some degree both the initial weak, irresolute Ottoman and Arab responses to the gradual Zionist influx into Palestine - Why bother, the Jews could achieve nothing anyway! - and the eventual aggressive reactions, including vandalism and murder - the Jews were accursed of God and meant only harm; their lives and property were therefore forfeit." Arab hostility, Morris argues, is partially the result of the inability of the Muslim Arabs to accept the Jews as equals. The notion that the weak, inferior, and defeated Jews took the land that once belonged to Islam was a great source of humiliation and resentment. Morris ends his account of Jewish-Muslim history by pointing out that the mistreatment of Jews throughout the centuries by Arab Muslims is the main cause of Mizrachi animosity towards Arabs today. Viewing the Golden Age narrative and its counterpart, it becomes obvious that each perspective is offering a skewed take on the history of the Jewish-Muslim experience. Both sides claim to be speaking about the same history, and yet each draws a completely different conclusion about what took place. For one side, Jewish-Muslim history represents a time of harmony, peaceful coexistence, and cultural interchange, while for the other it represents a period of humiliation, discrimination, and oppression. It is clear that, for their work to be considered with any seriousness, the writers in question need to invoke a more balanced historical perspective. To begin with, pro-Arab writers need to take into account that, notwithstanding all the benefits that Islam brought forth to the Jews, by today’s moral and legal standards, the Jews of Islam lived as second-class citizens. They were subjected to unique taxes, the poll tax and the land tax, and the law imposed prohibitions that marked them as different from and inferior to their Muslim counterparts. Jews were prevented from striking Muslims, bearing arms, building or repairing houses of worship, proselytizing, and wearing distinctive clothing. In addition, they experienced bouts of persecution and violence. Examples of this are Mohammed's expulsion and massacre of the Jewish tribes of Medina, the outlawing of Judaism by the Almhodas in 1146, the massacres in Tetuan in 1790 and in Baghdad in 1828, the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, and the destruction of the Jewish quarter of Fez in 1912. Any writer who addresses the topic of Jewish-Muslim history without taking these issues into consideration is being intellectually negligent. Pro-Israeli writers need to realize and acknowledge that, in spite of their unequal status, the Jews of Islam, both in medieval and early modern times, represented communities that were well integrated into the value spheres of the non-Jewish society. The degree to which the Jews were culturally, linguistically, socially, and economically assimilated is proof in and of itself that Jewish-Muslim history cannot be characterized solely in terms of discrimination and persecution. Legally, while the dhimmi was subject to many prohibitions, in exchange he received freedom of religious worship, freedom of self-government, freedom of movement and settlement throughout the empire (with the exception of Mecca and Medina), freedom of occupation (though not in a position of power over Muslims), and protection of law. Again, in view of these facts, we cannot characterize Jewish-Muslim history solely in terms of intolerance. Finally, theologically, while many quotes from the Koran and the Hadith suggest that Jews were viewed as spiritually inferior to Muslims, there are also many quotes from the sacred texts of Islam which contradict this viewpoint. For example, Sura II 62 states “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they be grieved.” The Koran is a complex and contradictory text, and one therefore cannot simply extract from it a single truncated quote, as Benny Morris does, and extrapolate the essence of Islamic theological attitude (never mind practice!) toward the Jews over the centuries. A balanced approach to a complex history forces us to be very careful in linking the past to the present, for such an approach does not make itself readily available for polemical purposes. Taking both the “good news” and the “bad news” of Jewish-Muslim history into consideration, it becomes much harder to exploit history in order to argue either that Islamic civilization is at fault or that Zionism is the sole cause of Muslim anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict. And while the history of the Jewish-Muslim experience cannot but play a part in the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it needs to be approached with great caution. The Arab-Israeli conflict and present Jewish-Muslim relations are the products of many varied factors and cannot be reduced to a single and essential explanation. Considering both uses of Jewish-Muslim history in the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is clear that the Golden Age narrative and its counterpart often represent a type of misuse of history. Both sides take advantage of the historiography of the Jewish-Muslim experience in order to absolve themselves of guilt in the conflict. Pro-Israeli writers argue that the degrading history of the Jews living under Muslim rule demonstrates that Muslim antipathy toward Jews predates and transcends the Arab-Israeli conflict, while pro-Arab writers argue that the Golden Age of the Jewish-Muslim experience proves that Zionism is the sole cause of the animosity, hatred, and violence between the two peoples. As we have seen, both accounts use a very partial and biased description of the history in question. A third approach is desirable both to maintain intellectual honesty and to prevent the use of the Jewish-Muslim narrative for polemical purposes. Bibliography Antonius, George. 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