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Text auf Deutsch
Jews and Muslims:
The Myth of the Interfaith Utopia
By Mark R. Cohen
In the nineteenth century, the
experience of medieval Jewry under Islam was portrayed by Jewish historians
in idyllic, almost mythic terms and in stark contrast to the sorrowful,
oppressive, persecutory history of Jews living in medieval Christendom. The
Jews of Arab lands, particularly those in Muslim Spain, were said to have
lived in a "Golden Age," even an "interfaith utopia."
This antinomy served the political agenda
of nineteenth-century European Jewish intellectuals. Though promised
emancipation and full political and cultural integration into society
following the French Revolution, they continued to experience
discrimination, including exclusion from university teaching positions. By
the second half of the nineteenth century, this prejudice took the new form
of racial and political antisemitism. The "interfaith utopia"—better, the
"myth of an interfaith utopia"-- in Spain and under Islam, in general,
challenged supposedly enlightened Christians to live up to the promise of
emancipation and grant the Jews rights and privileges that were at least as
"liberal" as the "tolerant" treatment Jews enjoyed under the rule of
medieval Muslims.
This rosy comparison between the "Golden
Age" under Islam and the history of persecution under Christendom, sketched
against the background of the political agenda of nineteenth century Central
European Jewish intellectuals, carried forth into the twentieth century,
reinforced by the brutal Nazi persecution of the Jews culminating in the
Holocaust. On the other hand, the new Arab-Jewish dispute over Palestine
generated a fresh political issue which impacted the historiography of
medieval Jewry in the world of Islam. Opposing sides in the conflict
exploited or revised the "myth of the interfaith utopia" with their own
political purposes in mind. Arabs, as well as partisans of Arab nationalism,
waved the flag of Jewish-Muslim harmony in the past and blamed contemporary
Zionism for Arab hostility in the present.
In response, many Zionist writers replaced
the Golden Age theory with what I have called, interchangeably, the
"counter-myth of Islamic persecution" or the "neo-lachrymose conception of
Jewish-Arab history." The revisionists claimed that Jewish life under Islam,
beginning with the time of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), was marked by
hardship and persecution almost as bitter as the brutalizing ordeal of
Jewish life under Christendom. By implication, Arab antisemitism was not a
new story, but rather an ancient pathology, not likely to go away even if
Israel were to make major political concessions for peace to the emergent
Palestinian nation.
Tolerant Islam?
The myth of the interfaith utopia stemmed
from and at the same time contributed to a sympathetic Jewish view of Islam
as a tolerant religion, quite different from the negative attitude toward
Islam "exposed" in Edward Said’s Orientalism. But constructing Jewish
history around the idea of Islamic tolerance fails to take into
consideration an important fact. Tolerance, at least as we know it in the
West since the time of John Locke, was not considered a virtue in medieval
monotheistic societies. Exclusive by nature, monotheists declare all others
(including other monotheists) to be infidels. If medieval Christianity
"tolerated" Judaism, that is, permitted Jews to live and practice their
religion, it was because Christians believed (especially since the time of
St. Augustine, 354-430; see below) that God wished Jews to be preserved as
witnesses to Christian triumphalism. If medieval Islam treated Jews better
than did Christianity, it was for a variety of reasons.
Legal status
Jews (and Christians) in the world of Islam
benefited from legal toleration as "protected people" (ahl al-dhimma), a
status awarded to the so-called People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), who had
received a scripture revealed by God. As one of two, sometimes three or more
dhimmi groups (Islam assimilated Persian Zoroastrians and Indian Hindus into
the dhimmi category), Jews were not singled out for special consideration.
This meant that the natural Islamic (monotheistic) discrimination against
infidels was diffused. No special law for the Jews developed in Islam, as it
did in Christendom, where by the high Middle Ages Jews were considered
"serfs of the royal chamber," the special "property" of monarchs or barons
or towns. Sometimes the Church asserted exclusive power over the Jews,
invoking an old Patristic doctrine about the "perpetual servitude of the
Jews."
Islamic legal prescriptions governing
Jewish life were embodied mostly in the so-called "Pact of ‘Umar," itself
incorporated into the Islamic holy law (the shari`a). As such, these
regulations were preserved, with stability, over time, and rarely given to
arbitrary deviations. The law of the dhimma included restrictions that
originally seem to have been meant more to protect the fragile identity of
the minority of conquering Muslims than to oppress the infidel. But with the
passage of time, certainly by the end of the first Islamic century, these
came to be discriminatory in a negative sense. Non-Muslims could not erect
new houses of worship nor repair old ones; they had to observe their
religious rites indoors and quietly, so as not to insult the superiority of
Islam; they could not take Arabic honorific names (Abu 'Imran, for
instance); they were required to dress in distinctive garb, notably a belt
called the zunnar; they could not own captive slaves designated for Muslims;
they had to show loyalty to Muslims; they could not sell pork or alcoholic
beverages in Muslim quarters (since these were forbidden in Islam). In
return for observance of these restrictions, and also for payment of an
annual poll tax (jizya), dhimmis were granted freedom of religion,
protection by the state of their persons and property, and also communal
autonomy--the freedom to live according to their ancestral religious laws.
Dhimmis were also forbidden from holding public office, but this expressed
itself mainly as a restriction directed at their Muslim employers and as the
object of complaints poised at complicit Arab rulers who violated the proper
hierarchy underlying the dhimma system.
From the earliest period of Islam and
throughout most of the Middle Ages, restrictive laws were enforced
irregularly and sporadically, with the exception of the poll tax, which
brought income into the treasury of the Islamic ruler. Jews and Christians
encountered little opposition, for example, constructing new synagogues and
churches both in the newly founded Muslim cities and in older settlements
which grew with migration. Moreover, as Islam spread and Jews migrated to
far-reaching parts of the empire, they established or enlarged communities
and erected new houses of worship without opposition. When questions arose,
Islamic jurists generally accepted testimony about the old age of buildings
as sufficient excuse to exempt them from destruction or confiscation.
Repairs were condoned when they met a juridical requirement that previously
existing ("old") materials be employed for the refurbishment.
Unlike Christianity, Judaism is not a
religion of public spectacle, so Jews were far less affected by that
restriction of Islamic law than their Oriental Christian neighbors. An
exception was funeral processions, which took Jews outside, and were
sometimes vulnerable to Muslm mob attacks.
Jews assumed Arabic honorific names--Abu
‘Imran is the name of Moses Maimonides--and, as the Jewish documents from
the Cairo Geniza show, dressed like everybody else. Jews held slaves, mainly
household domestics, but also as financial agents, and both Jews and
Christians continued to hold government posts long after Arabs mastered the
art of bureaucracy, and even during the late Middle Ages, when anti-dhimmi
sentiment increased.
Jews in the economy of Islam
Jews in northern Europe occupied mainly
niches in the economy that were spurned by Christians. In the early Middle
Ages, for instance, they were disproportionately represented in
international trade. At a time when most of society was agrarian and
sedentary and when Christian disdain for commerce and feudal resentment of
urban life still prevailed, Jewish traders carried a stigma. At the same
time, Germanic rulers and other members of the elite encouraged the presence
of Jewish long-distance merchants because they brought precious commodities
like spices from the East. Kings even offered Jewish traders favorable terms
of travel and settlement in order to foster their activities. Later,
however, in the Latin West, Jews moved into moneylending, earning Christian
hatred (and Church denunciation) and (especially in the North) experiencing
mob violence for their preponderance in this despised walk of life.
Recent research by the Israeli historian,
Michael Toch, challenging the thesis of Jewish predominance in commerce (and
the slave trade) in early medieval Europe, if upheld, will still not
overturn the kernel of truth behind the medieval (and modern) stereotype of
the Jewish long-distance trader, whether it be based on anti-Jewish
prejudice or exaggerated claims about the Jewish role in commerce in the
scholarly literature. Most importantly, from a comparative perspective, this
revisionism does not affect the crucial contrast with the Muslim world,
where the Jewish economic role supported rather than undermined Jewish
security. Attempts by others to find economic causes for Muslim
"antisemitism" in the Middle Ages have not been convincing. This is because,
unlike their coreligionists in Latin Christendom, the Jews of Islam were
well integrated into the economic life of society at large. The relative
absence of economic discrimination, especially during the classical
centuries, makes a vivid impression, begging explanation.
To begin with, Islamic scripture and
traditions (unlike most early Christian writings) favor commercial activity,
and this positive attitude carried over into Islamic law as it gradually
took shape during the early centuries following the rise of the new
religion. The compatibility of Islamic law and theology with profitable
economic activity both resulted from and contributed to what S. D. Goitein
called "the rise of the Near Eastern bourgeoisie in early Islamic times."
This occurred centuries before its counterpart in Europe. The brisk and
enterprising trade of early Islam resulted in large measure from the rapid
creation of a vast, unified empire with great resources and a huge demand
for goods. By the ninth century, the Islamic world--innately an urban
civilization (only in a town, for instance, can one discharge some of the
most basic Islamic religious requirements, like weekly congregational
prayer)--was reaping the benefits of flourishing trade and employing
sophisticated instruments of credit for converting capital into profit that
the medieval West did not acquire until the high Middle Ages.
For the largely urban Jews, the
significance of Islam’s positive attitude to both urban life and trade
cannot be overstated. It gave them, by association, more status and a higher
degree of integration than they could achieve in northern Europe, where the
prejudice against merchants, and against the towns in which they lived,
relegated the urbanized, Jewish trader, already scorned on religious
grounds, to the status of an alien, marginal character.
For other important reasons, too, itinerant
Jewish merchants in the Islamic orbit were spared the stigma of "otherness"
suffered by Jews in Europe. They were indigenous to the Near East--not
immigrants, as in the Latin West--and largely indistinguishable physically
from their Arab-Muslim neighbors (originally, one of the main reasons behind
the dress regulations and other symbols of separation in Islamic dhimmi
law). Furthermore, their geographical movement was part and parcel of a
general phenomenon in which Muslim (and Oriental Christian) merchants moved
goods and themselves over vast distances in search of financial gain, often
in partnership with Jews.
The traversibility of boundaries between
Jew and non-Jew in daily economic affairs echoes throughout Jewish sources
for our period. The relatively relaxed ambience of interfaith relations in
the Islamic marketplace created trust and bonds, which diminished the
ever-present religious disdain for Jews as members of an infidel religion.
The place of the Jews in the social
order
With the rise of the crusading spirit and
the deepening of Christian consciousness and piety in the population at
large beginning in the eleventh century, Jews gradually began to lose the
benefits of the circumstances that had supported their security and
prosperity in the early Middle Ages and came slowly but decisively to be
excluded from the hierarchy of the Christian social order. By the thirteenth
century, Christians had come to feel that Jews threatened to enfeeble
Christian society. The universalism of the encompassing whole, with its
place, however lowly, for the Jews, had by that time, as Jacques Le Goff
observes, been tempered by a "Christian particularism, the primitive
solidarity of the group and the policy of apartheid with regard to outside
groups." None of the complex models of subdividing Christendom into
socioprofessional "estates" which increasingly came to characterize the
social order from the beginning of the thirteenth century had any place for
the Jews. Exclusion was, so-to-speak, the "final solution" for the Jews in
medieval Catholicism, and it was carried out in one of three violent ways:
forced conversion, massacre, and, most effectively, the expulsion of most of
western European Jewry from Christian lands by the end of the fifteenth
century.
It is possible to read the Pact of ‘Umar as
a document imposing exclusion on the dhimmis, since it requires that they
distinguish themselves from Muslims by special garb and by certain other
behavior. In reality, however, the regulations of the Pact were intended not
so much to exclude as to reinforce the hierarchical distinction between
Muslims and non-Muslims within a single, encompassing 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. The dhimmi, however, occupied a definite rank in Islamic society--a
low rank, but a rank nevertheless. Marginal though they were, the Jewish
(and Christian) dhimmis occupied a recognized, fixed, and safeguarded niche
within the hierarchy of the Islamic social order. In Bernard Lewis’ words,
they held a kind of "citizenship," though as second class citizens to be
sure.
Additional explanations for the relatively
more favorable position of the Jewish minority in medieval Islam compared to
their brethren in medieval northern Christendom emerge when viewing the
Jewish-Muslim relationship through the lens of ethnicity. Historically,
ethnic heterogeneity has been much more characteristic of the medieval
Orient than the medieval Occident. Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Berbers,
Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and others populated the social landscape,
composing a "mosaic" that gave society a richly hued human and cultural
texture. Further, as noted already, the dhimmi group exhibited heterogeneity
within its own ranks, with two (in some places three) nonconforming
religions coexisting in the same space.
These anthropological and sociological
insights help explain what in the medieval Middle East appears to be a
"tolerant" relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims (though, of course,
we do not mean "tolerant" in our modern sense). By contrast, it better
explains the absence of tolerance and the growth of anti-Jewish violence in
medieval Christendom. As of the twelfth century, Europe experienced an
exclusivism growing from religious and proto-national homogeneity in
medieval Catholicism. This aggravated existing anti-Jewish feeling and begot
a mounting level of anti-Jewish violence. Christendom in northern Europe
from this period on lacked the ethnic differentiation which in Islam worked,
along with religious, legal, and economic factors, to preserve the Jews’
niche in the hierarchy of the social order and to nurture the social,
economic, and cultural embeddedness of the Jewish minority in Arab society.
These factors kept the Jews from being totally excluded from the Islamic
social order, mitigated the perception of them as aliens, and safeguarded
them from the type and severity of violence that plagued Jews especially in
the northern Christian lands for the better part of the high and later
Middle Ages.
Memory of persecution
Not surprisingly, and in stark contrast
with their brethren in Christian lands, who constructed their history as a
long chain of suffering, the Jews of the Islamic Middle Ages preserved very
little collective memory of Muslim acts of violence, let alone antisemitism.
Only one episode comes in for substantial memorialization. That is the
massacres and forced conversions in North Africa and Spain in the twelfth
century perpetrated against Jews, Christians and even nonconforming Muslims
by the fanatic sect of the Almohads. This was the persecution that forced
the Maimonides family into exile from Spain.
Especially following the massacres of Jews
in the Rhineland and elsewhere in Europe during the First Crusade, Jews in
Ashkenazic lands composed myriads of poems, elegies and chronicles in the
wake of persecution and martyrdom, many of which entered the liturgy and are
still recited in synagogues today. By contrast, among the thousands of
Hebrew poems written during the classical Islamic centuries, the only
medieval Hebrew poem bemoaning persecution in an Arab land known to me is a
lament on the extirpation of several Jewish communities in North Africa and
Spain during the Almohad terror. The only other examples of Hebrew elegies
about persecution written by poets in Muslim Spain refer to acts of violence
perpetrated by Christians, not Muslims. In 1066, a Jewish vizier was
assassinated in the Berber kingdom of Granada, Spain, and afterwards the
entire Jewish community was wiped out by the Muslim mob. This episode is
regularly trotted out to prove the antisemitic nature of medieval Islamic
society. But it was an exception that proves the rule. Indicatively, two
elegies on the death of this vizier by a contemporary Hebrew poet lack the
faintest allusion to the fact that he was the victim of anti-Jewish
political assassination or to the pogrom that followed.
Interfaith utopia?
In the light of the portrayal of Jewish
life under medieval Islam undertaken here, why, the reader may ask, not
"call a rose a rose," and retain the term "interfaith utopia?" It is not
only because the Jews of Islam suffered periodic persecution. In fact, in
that respect, they lived with fewer fears and anxieties than their European
Jewish brethren, who believed that Christianity wanted to destroy or expel
them, or at least severely limit their religious and material freedoms.
It is because the Jews of Islam, even in
the classical centuries, the period of greatest security and economic and
cultural efflorescence, felt they were living in Exile, in galut. They may
have blamed themselves, as Jews have done since Biblical
times--understanding galut as God’s punishment for their sins. But they felt
the agony of exile, and this reality came home anew with each episode of
persecution.
Nonetheless, persecutions were few and far
between. And the galut of Ishmael, unlike the galut of Edom, the eponymous
ancestor of Christianity in the midrash, stopped short of exclusion, which
rendered it somewhat more bearable. This is not to say that the Jews of
Islam abided oppression or that they accepted it with equanimity. Quite the
contrary. But they did not expect to be treated as equals (as nineteenth
century German Jews thought they were). They believed that, as long as they
adhered to the restrictions imposed upon them by Muslim law, they would be
protected. This conviction was proved true when Jews exceeded the
restrictions--violated them--for instance by dressing lavishly or serving in
government positions having authority over Muslims, and were punished by
Islamic authorities, in effect, for breaking the bilateral agreement known
as the Pact of ‘Umar. Paradoxically, however, those sporadic instances of
government oppression confirmed the essential stability of the dhimma
system, and made Jews less anxious about arbitrary persecution of an
irrational nature. And, when all is said and done, this, along with the
economic integration that Jews enjoyed in the classical centuries, is what
made them open to sharing the culture of their Arab-Muslim neighbors in the
most remarkable period of Jewish history from this point of view prior to
the European Renaissance.
Epilogue
It is regrettable that today, Islam has
adopted many of the traits of European antisemitism. The first to make
antisemitism of the Christian variety popular in the Middle East were
actually Christian Arabs in the nineteenth century. Later, this Jew hatred
was Islamized with a thick admixture of passages from Islamic sources
unfriendly toward the Jews, but which had had little effect on Islamic
treatment on Jews in earlier centuries. It is doubly regrettable that
so-called Islamic "fundamentalism" has chosen as one of its prime targets
the State of Israel. In its origins in the eighteenth century, what we today
call "Islamism" or "radical Islam"--better terms for the phenomenon of
return to the fundamentals of Islam--focused its anger on secular, even
seemingly infidel, westernizing Muslim regimes and rulers, not on the Jews.
To Jews, of course, it seems like a carbon
copy of traditional, medieval European Jew-hatred. Unfortunately, this has
clouded a more balanced understanding of the authentic Islam of the past and
of its more indulgent attitude and policy towards the Jews and other
non-Muslim minorities. Many Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, now
believe that Islam is congenitally antisemitic--that Muslims have hated and
persecuted the Jews since the time of Muhammad--and that Islam is the
eternal enemy of the Jewish people. Many (though not all) of the Jews from
Arab lands living in Israel have replaced the memory of Islamic acceptance
of Jews and of an era of greater harmony in the past with a vehement,
anti-Islamic antipathy of the present.
Efforts throughout the world, whether in
the Middle East, Europe, or America, to promote a more balanced
understanding of Jewish-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages by bringing
Muslims and Jews (including Israelis) together to explore the shared culture
of the past, are to be welcomed. Germany can play an important role in this
regard, whether it be through programs already in existence, such as those
at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and in other institutions, or in
projects yet to come into existence, such as the one recently proposed by
Wolf Lepenies and Navid Kermani.
Hopefully, once the conflict between Jews
and Arabs has truly ended, it will be possible to visualize the past once
again, not, of course, as an interfaith utopia, but as a time when Jews
lived an embedded existence in Islamic society, largely free of the
antisemitic excesses that afflicted their brethren in Christian lands,
sharing a creative coexistence with Muslims in so many realms.
English version of article
published in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 25, 2003
Mark R. Cohen is Professor of
Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (USA) and was Fellow of the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2002-2003. His book, Under Crescent and
Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, has been translated into Hebrew and
Turkish. The German translation of this article was done by Sophia Pick,
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Text auf Deutsch
hagalil.com
04-11-2003 |
