Under Crescent and Cross

The Jews in the Middle Ages

Mark R. Cohen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400844333
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Jüdische Geschichte

Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia"? Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged ideas as myths, Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--and the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West. Under Crescent and Cross has been translated into Turkish, Hebrew, German, Arabic, French, and Spanish, and its historic message continues to be relevant across continents and time. This updated edition, which contains an important new introduction and afterword by the author, serves as a great companion to the original.

PART ONE

Myth and Countermyth

Chapter One

MYTH AND COUNTERMYTH

THE MYTH OF AN INTERFAITH UTOPIA

Already at the end of the Middle Ages one encounters among Jews the belief that medieval Islam provided a peaceful haven for Jews, whereas Christendom relentlessly persecuted them. These Jews were aware that Muslim Turkey had granted refuge to Jewish victims of persecution from Catholic Spain and elsewhere.¹ A spate of mainly Hebrew chronicles written in the wake of the traumatic expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 drove home the contrast between Christian enmity and Muslim benevolence. In the nineteenth century, the fathers of the modern, scientific study of Jewish history transformed this perception into a historical postulate.

Frustrated by the tortuous progress of their own integration into gentile society in what was supposed to be a “liberal” age of emancipation, Jewish intellectuals seeking a historical precedent for a more tolerant attitude toward Jews hit upon a time and place that met this criterion—medieval Muslim Spain. There, they believed, Jews had achieved a remarkable level of toleration, political achievement, and cultural integration. Jewish historians took the observation of a young Lutheran scholar of Hebrew poetry who had written about a literary golden age (das goldne Zeitalter) that lasted from 940 to 1040, and applied the epithet to the full range of political and social life of the entire Muslim-Spanish period.² They contrasted this with the gloomy Jewish experience of oppression under medieval Christendom. In short, the very Jewish historians who created what Salo Baron disparagingly calls “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history” in Christian Europe also invented its counterpoint: the “myth of the interfaith utopia” in Islam.

Heinrich Graetz, the leading nineteenth-century Jewish historian, makes this point at the beginning of the story of the Jews of Arab lands in his influential History of the Jews:

Wearied with contemplating the miserable plight of the Jews in their ancient home and in the countries of Europe, and fatigued by the constant sight of fanatical oppression in Christendom, the eyes of the observer rest with gladness upon their situation in the Arabian Peninsula. Here the sons of Judah were free to raise their heads, and did not need to look about them with fear and humiliation, lest the ecclesiastical wrath be discharged upon them, or the secular power overwhelm them. Here they were not shut out from the paths of honor, nor excluded from the privileges of the state, but, untrammeled, were allowed to develop their powers in the midst of a free, simple and talented people, to show their manly courage, to compete for the gifts of fame, and with practised hand to measure swords with their antagonists.³

Graetz explicitly pits his romantic, utopian slant on Jewish life among Arabs (the tribes of Arabia) against his “lachrymose” conception of Jewish life under Christendom. Further on, mindful of the advanced age in which he himself lived, and reflecting German Jewry’s conviction about Sephardic supremacy over Ashkenazim (for Graetz and others, represented by contemporary Polish Jewry), Graetz extends his praise for Islam to the cultural domain:

The height of culture which the nations of modern times are striving to attain—to be imbued with knowledge, conviction, and moral strength—was reached by the Jews of Spain in their most flourishing period. . . . No wonder, then, that the Jews of Spain were looked upon as superior beings by their uncultured brethren in other lands—in France, Germany, and Italy—and that they gladly yielded them the precedence which had formerly been enjoyed by the Babylonian academies.⁴

The premise of Islamic toleration of Jews (actually an instance of a more general axiom about Islam’s forbearance toward non-Muslim monotheists) rang true to Jewish Orientalists precisely because of the comparison with medieval Christianity.⁵ In Europe the period beginning with the First Crusade witnessed recurrent acts of violence directed against Jews per se. Christians came to believe that Jews murdered Christian children and extracted their blood for ritual or magical purposes. The Jewish moneylender became the object of intense Christian hatred. Jewish converts to Christianity were suspect; in Spain, especially, this led to the infamous Spanish Inquisition. In addition, entire Jewish communities were expelled from medieval Christian states. None of these excesses, however, seem to have a counterpart in Islam.

In its nineteenth-century context, the myth of the interfaith utopia was used to attempt to achieve an important political end, to challenge supposedly liberal Christian Europe to make good on its promise of political equality and unfettered professional and cultural opportunities for Jews.⁶ First, if medieval Muslims could have so tolerated the Jews that a Samuel ibn Nagrela (d. 1056) could rise to the vizierate of the Spanish Muslim state of Granada, or a Maimonides to a respected position among Muslim intellectuals, could not modern Europeans grant Jews the rights and privileges promised them in the aftermath of the French Revolution? Second, did not the Christian world owe this to the Jews, to compensate for its history of cruelty toward the Jews? Third, just as Jews in Spain (and elsewhere in the Muslim world), benefiting from liberal treatment, had benefited Arab society, so would the Jews of modern Europe, if treated with equality, contribute greatly to European civilization.

The Jewish myth of an Islamic interfaith utopia persisted into the twentieth century, long after the achievement of emancipation in Europe. The title of Adolph L. Wismar’s 1927 book speaks for itself: A Study in Tolerance as Practiced by Muhammad and His Immediate Successors. From the 1940s, there is Rudolf Kayser’s delightful biography of the Spanish Hebrew poet Judah Halevi, published by the Philosophical Library, in which Kayser reiterates Graetz’s tone:

It is like a historical miracle that in the very same era of history which produced these orgies of persecution [the Crusades], the people of Israel in Southern Europe enjoyed a golden age, the like of which they had not known since the days of the Bible.⁷

Eliyahu Ashtor’s Hebrew history of the Jews in Muslim Spain, now popularized in an English translation, glorifies the Golden Age to the point of romance.⁸

A favorable appraisal of the fate of the Jews of Islam, compared with the sorrowful destiny of the Jews of Christendom, also appears in the writings of Jews from Arab lands. André Chouraqui, a North African Jewish intellectual and historian, writing about the Jews of his ancestral homeland, describes the Almohad persecution in the twelfth century as being “of a passing nature.” He attributes most pogroms against the Jews in the oppressive later Middle Ages to “lust and envy, rather than outbursts of hate.” Further,

there was never any time in the Moslem Maghreb [North Africa, when there was] a philosophy and tradition of anti-Semitism such as existed in Europe from the Middle Ages down to modern times. . . . During most periods of history, the Jews of North Africa were happier than those in most parts of Europe, where they were the objects of unrelenting hate; such extreme sentiments did not exist in the Maghreb. The scorn that the adherents of the different faiths expressed for each other could not obliterate the strong bonds of a common source of inspiration and a way of life intimately shared.⁹

To a certain extent, the myth of the Islamic-Jewish interfaith utopia owes its tenacity to reinforcement during and since the Nazi era. The search for the roots of twentieth-century European antisemitism correlates with perpetuation of the myth of idyllic times under Islam in such books as Jews in a Gentile World: The Problem of Anti-Semitism.¹⁰ In his “Anti-Semitism: Challenge to Christian Culture,” Carl J. Friedrich invokes the expulsion of the Jews from Christian Spain in 1492 and the counterexample of Islam:

An interesting contrast between the religious intolerance of Western Christian culture at that time and the relative tolerance of the Mohammedan culture of the Muslims occurred: when, following the brutal persecution of the Jews in Spain, many went to the Levant, the tolerant treatment given by the Ottoman Muslims to these persecuted Jews, as well as Christians, elicited the curiosity of political writers. In his political satires the post-Machiavellian Boccalini has Bodin punished for commending the tolerance of the Turks.¹¹

In Essays on Antisemitism, first published in 1942 (reprinted in 1946), the contributor of the only chapter dealing with Jews and Islam declares: “No study of antisemitism can be complete that does not pay some attention to the position of the Jews under Islam.” Yet his conclusions highlight the “comparative tolerance” of Islam as opposed to Christianity, asserting, following de Gobineau, that the religion of Islam did not play a role in anti-Jewish incidents and attitudes in the past. Rather, these resulted from “political expediency or economic rivalry.”¹² As recently as 1978, the compilers of an annotated historical catalog of antisemitic outbursts relegate the discussion of Islam to a brief section at the end of the book.¹³

The Myth of an Interfaith Utopia in Arab and Arabist Writings

The “myth of the interfaith utopia” went largely unchallenged until its adoption by Arabs as a weapon in their propaganda war against Zionism. According to this view, for centuries, Jews and Arabs lived together in peace and harmony under Islamic rule—precisely at a time when the Jews were being relentlessly persecuted by Christianity. Modern antipathy toward Israel began only when the Jews destroyed the old harmony by pressing the Zionist claim against Muslim-Arab rights to Palestine. Accordingly, Arab hatred and antisemitism would end, and the ancient harmony would be restored, when Zionism abandoned both its “colonialist” and its “neo-crusader” quest.

An early example of Arab historiographical exploitation of the Jewish interfaith-utopia myth occurs in a pioneering work on Arab nationalism by the Christian-Arab writer George Antonius. The book closes with a condemnation of Zionist usurpation of Arab rights to Palestine; in an earlier remark, Antonius states:

Both in the Middle Ages and in modern times, and thanks mainly to the civilising 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 to-day, 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 is in some ways a good deal more tolerant.¹⁴

This emphasis on Islamic benevolence toward the Jews was not new. Christian Arabs—like Jews, considered “infidels” by Islam—have felt a need to affirm historical Islamic tolerance of the non-Muslim for their own sake, just as many have supported Arab nationalism as a means of ensuring their continued acceptance in the Arab world.¹⁵

The proposition that historical Islamic tolerance gave way in the twentieth century to Arab hostility in reaction to Zionist encroachment became a theme of Arab propaganda against Israel both in politics and in writings about Jewish-Arab history, most of them appearing after the Six-Day War. Because the literature is immense, I will touch on just a few examples, from a variety of sources.

An essay by an American professor in Beirut, in 1970, is a case in point. Drawing on Jewish scholars, notably S. D. Goitein and Salo Baron, the author surveys the “new era” of tolerance for the Jews ushered in by conquering Arabs to replace Christian persecution. This tolerance led to what Jewish historians rightly called a golden age and to the “eventual integration [of the Jews] into the mainstream of life in Arab-Islamic society.” In this century, by exception, he argues, anti-Jewish ...