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CHAPTER

1

Modern Myths of MuslimAnti-Semitism

MARK R. COHEN

In my 1994 book, Under Crescent and Cross, I used a comparative method-ology to establish a paradigm that explains why Jews in the medieval Muslimworld experienced so much less violence than their brethren, the AshkenaziJews of Latin Europe, and why, by extension, Arabic-speaking Jewry was somuch more comfortably embedded than their European brethren in thesurrounding culture.

1 The paradigm also explains why the Jews of the Muslim

world lacked a historical memory of persecution akin to the doleful chroni-cles of Christian persecution and Jewish martyrdom, as well as mournfulliturgical poems, that carried the lachrymose memory of Ashkenazi Jewsdown to modern times.

Under Crescent and Cross appeared during the heady, optimistic daysfollowing the Oslo Accords. The many translations of the book into Europeanand Middle Eastern languages since then suggest that the ideas developed inthe book and the approach it takes still have relevance.2 Today, however, theongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, the rise of Islamist anti-Jewish terrorism, and the abiding presence of anti-Semitic writings andiconography in the Muslim world have cast a gloomy pall over post-Oslohopes for a speedy and just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict andrendered the discussion of Muslim anti-Semitism even more important thanin the past.

In my book I stuck largely to the historiographical and historical issues inMuslim-Jewish relations, some of which are summarized below. I dealt withanti-Semitism inter alia, contrasting its appearance in medieval ChristianEurope with its absence in medieval Islam. In this essay I extend my thinkingto the contemporary scene. In doing this I am in full agreement with what myGerman colleague Gudrl1n Kraemer wrote recently, as guest editor of an issueof the academic joii I'n i Die Welt des lslams3 devoted to Islamic anti-Scmidsni. Shc wrill'H: "ISlpediilists can hardly remain silent when others,fl'I~(lIlllltly 011 the h;i~is iil Si';\111 inforinniioii nnd liinit(~d insight, engagc force..

i I I IVIl\ 1\ ~ II, ¡, I , I I I', N

fully in the pu blic deba te, forgi ng ¡ 11iagl!S and erc:ui IlI.pili'n'lil y PC'~ ihill IweoDlcthe more difficult to critique the more solidly entl'l!il(Jwd they ;\I'~ Îii the publicmind. The debate is still largely a western one; for obvious reasons ii: resonatesstrongly within Germany."

Israelis and diaspora Jews first became aware of Muslim anti-Semitismthanks to Yehoshafat Harkabi's 1968 book, Arab Attitudes towards Israel,published in both English and Hebrew. Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe is ofmore recent vintage. The survey of the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe

following 9/11 by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism andXenophobia revealed that Muslims were more prominent than any othersingle group in propagating this hatred, contradicting the expected findingsthat it was fringe fanatics like the skinheads who were the main culprits.4 Astudy by the German Ministry of the Interior published in 2007 came to asimilar conclusion about Muslim anti-Semitism in Germany.

The data about Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe, like the better knownanti-Semitism in the contemporary Islamic world, are shocking in themselves,but they raise the question, whence this Jew-hatred? Where does it come from?

Many modern myths swirl around this volatile issue. Is this anti-Semitismsomething new, incited initially by Zionism and more recently by the policiesand actions of Israel in the Middle East, particularly as applied to thePalestinians? Many Europeans believe this to be the case, recognizing a similarmotivation underlying the "new anti-Semitism" of the European left, whichis in part a protest against the State of Israel and its policies since the occu-

pation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Others, European and AmericanJews and Israelis, for whom the findings of the EU commission were lesssurprising, believe that the new Muslim anti-Semitism is nothing new at alL.In their view it is part of an age-old Jew-hatred ingrained in the religion ofIslam and traceable to the Qur'an itself.

Muslims, for their part, have always denied that anti-Semitism is a Muslimphenomenon. In a well-known refrain, they claim that Muslims opposeZionism and the State of Israel, not Jews, with whom they have always livedin harmony. In this they have found support in the old Jewish myth about an"interfaith utopia" in medieval Islam. That myth has its antecedents in the16th century among Jews expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492, who foundrefuge in the far more tolerant Muslim Ottoman Empire. It is better knownfrom the writings of the first generations of Jewish historians in Europe in the19th century, who used it for their own political purposes, to vent their frus-tration at European Christians for failing to live up to the promise ofEmancipation. These historians looked longingly to Islamic Spain as a"Golden Age" of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, a kind of interfaith utopia,marked by flowering cultural achievements and acceptance as equals into thehighest social, professional, and political ranks of Arab society - the veryachievements they had hoped to realize in 19th-century Europe.

There is more thana large kernel of truth in this characterization ofMuslim-Jewish relations in medieval Spain, and it even applies to other parts

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ill till Islullii wodd us welL. l.ts 1l1ythk quiiliiy lies iii die fact thai: ii: glosses

i IV\' the inferior ¡ega i a Ill! religious i;tai:us of the Jews n uti i:he occasional actsIII oppression and even YioIence,

In the 20th and 21st century context, Arabs and other Muslims haveC'iiploited the old Jewish myth of the interfaith utopia in order to blame the,11'WS and Zionism for destroying the traditional harmony between the twoiwoples. Some Arabs, particularly Palestinian Arabs, have gone so far as to~Ilggest that Israelis give up their State and return to living under the benev-olent protection of Islam, in a version of the "one-state solution."

In response, there has been a Jewish backlash, what I have called a"counter-myth.,,5 It asserts that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins andthat anti-Semitism is endemic in the Islamic religion. This counter-myth ispropagated mainly by popular writers, journalists, and blog-masters, as wellas a few bona fide scholars, who have fanned the flames of fear of Islam, inIsrael, in the United States, and in Europe, by distorting the past as one longera of unmitigated Jewish (and Christian) suffering since the rise of Islam inthe 7th century.6

The counter-myth parallels a similar conviction among some Arab Jews(Jews from Arab countries) in Israel and elsewhere. Seeking to find their placein a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by centuries of Christianpersecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they claim that IsIam has indeed

persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication, they have a"past of miserylike the Ashkenazim, including dislocation from their ancient homelands, andare thus eligible for a larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazicfounding fathers of Israel have granted them.

Historians, for their part, are similarly divided on the issue. On one sidewe have the "harmony" school, continuing the myth promulgated by theCentral European Jewish historians of the 19th century, which understandsJewish-Muslim relations in the past as a kind of "interfaith utopia." Hencethe new Muslim anti-Semitism must be "new." Others, representing the"conflict" school, see contemporary Muslim hatred of the Jews as simply acontinuation of an unending Arab and non-Arab Muslim hatred of the Jewsfrom time immemorial, corresponding to the counter-myth that I havedescribed above.

It is, of course, dangerous to indulge in sweeping judgments about thesources of Muslim attitudes towards Jews and Israel today. The picture is fartoo complex and the circumstances in which manifestations of hatred reartheir head in the Muslim world far too encumbered by political issues andinternational affairs to lead to faciIe conclusions about the past. The effortsof certain Islamophobic writers to prove from history that Muslim jihadistsare about to take over of the world - an ironic inversion of the classic anti-Semitic calumny about the Jews reiterated disturbingly in recent speeches byIranian President Ahmadinejad - are, to my mind, a distortion of the past andincendiary. The most extravagant recent book on this subject is Eurabia, bythe prolific counter-myth writer Bat Ye'or, a book based on years of publishing

1'1 I MAIU" It, UnlliN

about Islamic persecution of non.Musliinsin past tÎlne.'1 SIlt l'lllblVOI'S to"expose" what she thinks is an invidious European plot to conspire with Arabcountries in an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic campaign, whichwill, in the end, backfire by reducing Europe to what she calls by themisleading term "dhimmitude." This servile state of sufferance and sufferingunder Islamic dominion will reproduce on an international plane thesubservient condition of persecuted Jews and Christians in the medieval

Islamic world. Bat Ye'or is the guru of many of the Islamophobic blog-masters, who scan the media carefully, watching for signs of Muslimanti-Semitism, and publish them widely on the Internet.

The Islamophobic obsession is spread widely today in Europe and in Israel,and, most recently, in the United States, as a reaction to the tragic events of9/1 i. It even insinuated itself into the recent US presidential election, whenrumors flew of Barack Obama being a secret Muslim and a terrorist sympa-thizer. Like Islamophobia, the question of Muslim anti-Semitism, needs to beaddressed dispassionately because, together, they have become a force behindthinking about policy issues in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

In presenting my own views, I should first define what I mean by anti-Semitism because of the fuzziness that prevails in contemporary discussionsof anti-Semitism in Islam. This fuzziness emanates especially from represen-tatives of the counter-myth school, for whom every nasty expression aboutJews in the Qur'an, the Hadith and other Arabic literature and every instanceof harsh treatment or violence experienced by Jews in the past is deemed anti-Semitic. But this is decidedly not anti-Semitism. It is, rather, the typical, thoughnonetheless unsavory, loathing for the "other" found in most societies, eventoday, a disdain that, in the Middle Ages, was shared by all three westernmonotheistic religions in relation to pagans as well as to rival monotheist:laimants to divine exclusivity and the right to dominate society.8

The proper definition of anti-Semitism, which is shared by most students)f the subject, is a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and;tereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew,nfused, in its modern, secular form, with racism and the belief that there is afewish conspiracy against mankind. Defined this way, I can say with a greatleal of confidence, in agreement with other seasoned scholars, that such anti-ìemitism did not exist "under the crescent" in the medieval Muslim world.n fact, during the formative and early centuries of Islam, the classical period,rom the seventh to the 12th or 13th century, Jews enjoyed rather good rela-ions most of the time with their Muslim neighbors, judged in comparisonvith the plight of their brethren living "under the cross" in Christian Europe.lut this relative harmony - relative to the problematic and sometimes disas-rous experience of Jews living in medieval Christian lands, where

nti-Semitism was born - had less to do with some abstract Islamic tolerance,s we in the West have understood it since John Locke, than with the religious,~gal, economic, and social realities of Jewish-Muslim interaction in the;fiddle Ages.

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Fii:st of cd I, howevcr, let us not make thc mistake of thinking that Jews livedin the Middle Ages as the equals of Muslims. Equality among monotheisticreligions was unknown. The fact that Jews (and Christians) were discrimi-nated against must be understood in the context of its time, when toleranceamong the three western monotheistic faiths was not regarded as a virtue, buta weakness, and no one practiced it in the modern sense of the term. Ifanything, it was a virtue to be intolerant, since God himself had rejected onereligion in favor of another and it was the duty of followers of the replace-ment religion to subordinate, if not persecute, those who had forfeited theirclaim to the truth.

Jews (and Christians) in the Islamic world were second class subjects, atbest. They were classed along with other religious minorities as unbelieverswho did not recognize the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of theQur'an. But, this kind of unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewishunbelief was to Christians, for unbelief in Christianity means rejection of Jesusas Messiah and as God, a greater affront to the dominant faith than Jewishunbelief was to Islam because it challenged the entire theological basis of theChristian religion.

In addition to the payment of an 'annual poll tax, restrictions on Christiansand Jews were many, though in practice, with the exception of the poll tax,they were often ignored by non-Muslims and Muslim rulers alike. In theory,they were not to build new houses of worship, were required to wear distinc-tive marks on their clothing, to avoid Muslim honorific titles, to refrain fromselling foods forbidden to Muslims in Muslim quarters, to avoid seekingservice in Muslim government, and so forth. Most of these discriminatoryrules are attributed to the second Caliph 'Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644) inthe famous "pact" bearing his name.9 They were originally intended not somuch to exclude Jews and Christians from society as they were meant to rein-force the hierarchical distinction - characteristic of medieval monotheisticsocieties in general- between Muslims and non-Muslims within a single socialorder.

10 Non-Muslims, however, occupied a definite rank in Islamic society-

a low rank, but a rank nevertheless. Most of the time, they managed to co-exist more or less harmoniously with the higher-ranking dominant Muslimgroup because both sides recognized and accepted the place of the other -whether superior or inferior - and this facilitated interaction with a minimumof conflict. In such an environment, lacking the theological reasons to hatethe Jews that animated irrational Christian Judeophobia in the Middle Ages,anti-Semitism properly understood did not emerge.

The flip side of the discriminatory regulations imposed upon Jews, and Ishould add Christians, is that, as respected "People of the Book," they enjoyedthe status of a "protected people," ahl al-dhimma or dhimmis in Arabic, whowere entitled to security of life and property, freedom from forced conversion,communal autonomy, and equality in the marketplace, in return for payingthe annual poll tax and recognizing the superiority of Islam.

We may choose to employ the noun "dhimmitude," the term Bat Ye'or has

3 Ô I MAUi( 1(, CtlllliJ~

madc fal1ous.l: But wc necd to keep in mind that thc terni cllJimlia çoiinotesprotection (its meaning in Arabic) and that it guarantccd communal

autonomy, relatively free practice of religion, and equal economic opportu-nity, as much as it signified inferior legal status.

For all its religious exclusivity and hostility towards the Jews, expressed inthe Qur'an and in other Islamic literature, Islam contains a nucleus ofpluralism that gave the Jews in Muslim lands greater security than Jews hadin Christian Europe. For other important reasons, too, Jews in the Islamicorbit were spared the damaging stigma of anti-Semitism suffered by Jews inEurope. They were, for one thing, indigenous to the Near East - not immi-grants, as in many parts of the Christian West - and largely indistinguishablephysically from their Arab-Muslim neighbors (the very reason for the dressregulations in the Pact of 'Umar). Moreover, Jews were one of two and in someplace three non-Muslim minority religions, which diffused hostility towardsthe "other." The restrictive laws were frequently honored in the breach, espe-cially during the first six Islamic centuries and to a certain extent evenafterwards, when a general decline set in in the Muslim world, affectingMuslims as well as non-Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.

As documents from everyday life found in the Cairo Geniza abundantlyattest - and these are one category of primary source material that Bat Ye'orand her ilk totally ignore, for obvious reasons - in the earlier, classical periodthey prospered as merchants, physicians, retailers, craftsmen, even agricul-turalists. They formed partnerships with Muslims and felt comfortableadjudicating economic issues, even matters of personal and family status,before Muslim religious judges. Good business relations in the market placehelped foster good relations between Jews and Muslims in other arenas of lifeand forged bonds across confessional lines.

The contrast with the Christian West is revealing. Although for a few cen-turies in the early Middle Ages (up to the 11th century) Jews enjoyed a moreor less secure place in the natural hierarchical order of Christian society as

well as substantial economic rights, a combination of factors led to theexpulsion of most of western Jewry by the end of the 15th century. These

factors include the loss of the pluralism that had marked the Germanic,"barbarian" early Middle Ages. The spread of Christianity to the masses bythe 11th century was accompanied by a panoply of negative theologicalviews of the Jews. Especially with the Christian "discovery" of the Talmudin the 12th century, the old doctrine of St. Augustine that Jews _ Biblical

Jews - must be allowed to live in Christian society as witnesses to the tri-umph of Christianity eroded, and missionizing among the Jews increased. Inaddition, the commercial revolution of the 11 th-13th centuries relegatedJews in most places in northern Europe to a few, despised economic activi-ties like money lending. The advent of rationalism in Latin Europe in the12th century fostered a belief that the Jews were, like the animals, bereft ofhuman, rational character. Enmity came, too, from the mistaken associationof the Jews with the Muslim enemy encountcred during the Cnisacles.

Muder! Myths of Muslim Anti-Semitism I 37

Finally, the gradual political unification of European countries, especiallyEngland, France, and Spain, left the Jew even a more vulnerable outsiderthan in the past.

12

In the Muslim world, by way of contrast, Jews retained for centuries theirsubstantial security as well as their recognized place in the social order. Theydid so as long as they acknowledged, at least by their behavior in public, thesuperiority of Islam and Muslims and acceded to Islamic rule. This meantadhering to the prescribed restrictions of Islamic law and restraining from thetemptation to serve in government offices, where they might incur enmity byoccupying positions of superiority over Muslims. To be sure, there were peri-odic outbursts of violence, though, like the infamous persecution under theso-called "mad" Egyptian Caliph aI-Hakim at the beginning of the 11thcentury and that of the Almohads in North Africa and Muslim Spain in the12th, they were almost always directed against dhimmis as a category -meaning Jews and Christians - and not against Jews per se. These excessesoccurred when the dhimmis were seen to be violating the terms of the dhimmaarrangement and not behaving with humility - such was the case in the infa-mous massacre of the Jewish community of Granada, Spain, in 1066,following the assassination of a "haughty" Jewish vizier ("haughty" is thewords describing him in a 12th-century Jewish source, Serer ha-Qabbalah,"The Book of Tradition"). The violence seems to have been inspired by a viru-lent anti-Jewish poem about the evils wrought by the high-handed Jewishvizier. This episode, exceptional as it was in its targeting the Jews per se, isregularly cited by counter-myth revisionists as a sign of Islamic anti-Semitism.In reality, it represents an extreme instance where Muslims retaliated againstdhimmis because they had exceeded the accepted norms of the hierocraticMuslim-dhimmi relationship by exercising power over Muslims - this isindeed the theme of that poem.

Oppression of non-Muslims often occurred when Islam as a polity cameunder attack from the outside, as happened from the late 11th century onduring the Crusades (the Crusade against the Muslims in the Holy Land andthe Crusade to reconquer Spain from the Muslims) and during the Mongolinvasions of the 13th century. Jews were, however, rarely forced to convert toIslam (the Qur'an forbids compulsion in religion) and, with two major excep-tions proving the rule, they were not expelled from Muslim lands. Oneexpulsion took place in the Hijaz, the holy sanctuary of Arabia that includesMecca and Medina, shortly after the death of the Prophet, and the other, inYemen in the 17th century. After three years in exile in a remote desert regionon the Red Sea, during which great numbers died from exposure, the remnantof dislocated Jews were readmitted to the city of San'a' and confined to a"ghetto." Though, unlike in Europe, they were not permanently expelled fromthe country, perceptions are as important as reality, and Yemenite Jews stillremember the "exile of M,a wza" as a terrible event. Yemen continued to be aspccial cascin MLlsUin~Jewisli rclations, with demeaning treatment of theJews fight down LO Inodt'l'U i:incs, Thc fact that Jcws constitutcd thc only

3 8 I MARK R. COHEN

significant non-Muslim religion in Yemen made them especially vulnerable.Without any other non-Muslim population on the scene to help diffuseMuslim hostility, Jews alone felt the full brunt of oppression when it occurred.The prominence of strict Shi'ite rulers in Yemen's history is often cited asanother reason for Jewish suffering. The ongoing debate whether all of theArabian Peninsula was subject to the Prophet's dictum, "there should not betwo religions in the Hijaz," led to atypical coercion, usually indirect, to

encourage Jews to convert to Islam.13In general, the later Middle Ages saw an increasingly harsh enforcement

of the dhimma regulations. Jewish fortunes declined as part of general polit-ical, economic, and cultural setbacks in the surrounding society. In Morocco,as in Yemen, moreover, Jews constituted the only dhimmi group, for onlyJews, not Christians, returned to their former religion after the Almohadepersecutions in the mid-12th century.

Shi'ite Islam pursued harsher policies than Sunni Islam towards dhimmis,and this was particularly true in Iran in the later Middle Ages. Beginning inthe late 16th century with the establishment of Shi'ism as the official religionof the Iran under the Safavids, things became especially difficult for Jews,owing, in part to the religious doctrine of impurity, najãsa, mentioned in theQur'an (9:28) but applied in pre-Safavid times to both Christians and Jews.l4It became focused more commonly on the Jews in Shi'i Iran, where pre-IslamicZoroastrian notions of purity and impurity enhanced the polemical signifi-cance of the Qur'anic concept and contributed to a harsher attitude towardthe Jews. The more looming centrality of messianism in Shi'i than in SunniIslam might also have been a factor.

Again, to understand the relatively decent Jewish-Muslim relations duringmost of the early and high Islamic Middle Ages, one needs to contrast themwith Jewish-Christian relations in Europe. In Christian society hostility wasfocused on one, "evil" non-Christian group, the Jews, paving the way forwhat was to become - beginning in the 12th century - irrational anti-Semitism, understood in the way I defined it at the beginning of this paper.This belief, classifying all Jews as Satanic enemies of society, did not exist inthe medieval Muslim world, even in the later Middle Ages, when, from aboutthe 13th century on, Jewish fortunes declined as part of general political,economic, and cultural setbacks in the surrounding society.

c0If, as I and many other scholars contend, modern views of a primeval, anti-Semitic Islam are a myth, why have Muslim-Jewish relations deteriorated tosuch an extreme in recent times and why is anti-Semitism so widespread inthe Islamic world today? There are, of course, many complex and interrelatedreasons. The first is colonialism, which disrupted traditional Muslim societyand engendered resentment against those Jcws who ¡lit'llified with thcEuropean colonizers and thc "civilizing mission" thill' St,t'llIt'd 10 Ill I'll path

Modern Myths of Muslim Anti-Semitism I 39

to modernization and an improved way of life. This drove a wedge betweenArab Jews and Arab Muslims, who resisted colonialism. Another is nation-alism, influenced by European secular nationalism and imported into theMiddle East in the 19th century, where it undermined some of the pluralismand relative tolerance that marked Muslim society in earlier centuries andpitted Arab against Jew as rival claimants to the same land. Yet another causeis the emergence of Islamist movements, responding to the birth-pangs ofmodernization imposed by European foreigners. We need to remember,

however, that the early Islamist movements were inner-directed, striving toreform latitudinarian and secularizing trends of westernizing and modern-izing Arab regimes.

Deterioration in Jewish-Muslim relations accelerated in the first part ofthe 20th century with Arab belief that the new political Zionism was simplyanother form of European colonialism robbing them of their right to self-determination in a modern State. At the same time and on the other side,relations were eroded by Jewish fear that Ara b and Muslim hostility, and morerecently, suicide terrorism against civilians, could lead to something akin toanother Holocaust. All of these factors have dramatically degraded

Muslim-Jewish relations. On a larger canvas, we should recognize in thebackground of Arab resistance to western modernization and to westernJewish "incursion" in Arab lands the fact, often mentioned, that the Islamicworld never experienced an Enlightenment or a modern scientific revolutionchallenging the old ways and opening the door to critical, transformationalchange, to liberal republican forms of governance, and to acceptance of Jewsas fully tolerated citizens of a secular society.

All this has, finally, erupted in a frenzied and irrational new Muslim anti-Semitism which is not, however, indigenous to Islam, nor is it rooted intheology, as has historically been the case in the Christian world, though it isas frightening to Jews as if it were. Muslims first came into contact withEuropean-style anti-Semitism in the Ottoman period, when the Islamic worldabsorbed new Christian populations.

IS It took off later, in the 19th century

during the colonial period, when Europe missionaries, doubtless out of zealto promote Christianity at the expense of any other option, fostered western-style anti-Semitic Jew-hatred in the Middle East. This propaganda supportedArab-Christian aspirations for a nondenominational, pan-Arab nationalism,a secular Arab world in which Christians would enjoy full equality withMuslims. Many must have felt that anti-Semitism, deflecting Muslim enmityaway from themselves and onto a, to them, familiar enemy, would advancethe nationalist cause in which they played such a prominent role. Theoutbreak of blood libels in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century is sugges-tive in this regard.

The flames of the new Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism were fanned in the1940s by Nazi propagandists currying favor with Arab leaders as part of theirstrategy to rule the world and destroy the Jews,16 and ultimately by the estab-lishment of till Smi'l of' i.~I';lt'l. As for the Islamist movements, they themselves

'I \I i M 1\ It K It,. C LII ii N

did not turn outward towards Zionism uU.d ISl'd Iilllil rrLliivdy late) in the1970s, folJowing thc débâclc of thc Six Day Wai; thi' Hgyptìaii peacc trcatywith Israel, and the Khomeni revolution in Iran. Only elWll did thcy begin toplace Zionism and Israel firmly at the forefront of their radical mission, accen-tuating anti-Semitic propaganda that was only latent or secondary inimportance in the earlier phase of their reformism.17 The most recent andcurrent flare-up of Muslim anti-Semitism, enmeshed with anti-Zionism,

followed the eruption of the second intifada (the al-Aqsa intifada) in late 2000and the events of September 11,2001.18

In its present form, the new Muslim anti-Semitism, with its Arabic idiomand references to the Qur'an and other medieval Islamic texts, seems old,though, in fact, it represents an Islamized version of its Christian roots.19 ThisIslamization has not been easy to achieve because classical Arabic literature,including the Qur'an - for all its nasty references to Jews and Christians _ isrelatively free of the kinds of racist, irrational statements and beliefs about theJews that inform western anti-Semitism.

Remarkably, but not surprising to my mind, when the opportunity waspresented in medieval times to exploit Islamic sources to encourage and justifyviolence against the Jews, the opportunity was not taken up. I can illustratethis with a story.2D It is a tale not related in the Qur'an, but rather, in themanner of Jewish midrash, in the post-Qur'anic traditions, elaborating theskeletal saga of scriptural narrative. It relates that Muhammad and one of hisclose companions were poisoned by a beautiful Jewish captive woman namedZaynab, who belonged to a Jewish tribe recently defeated in battle with theMuslims at the Arabian oasis of Khaybar. Miraculously warned by the voiceof the morsel of lamb that it had been poisoned, the Prophet spit it out, whileone of his companions swallowed it and promptly expired. Confronted by theProphet, Zaynab confessed openly to the act. According to one version, theProphet had Zaynab executed; according to another, he let her off after sheexplained that she was only acting in recompense for the wrong that theProphet had done to her people, a logic that was acceptable in the mores ofArab society.21

Four years later, lying on his death bed, the Prophet came to the conclu-sion (again, according to some versions) that his illness was a residual effectof Zaynab's poisonous meaL. So, in effect, according to this Muslim tradition,Muhammad was killed by a Jew, or rather, a Jewess. This story has in recenttimes gained currency among those on the Islamic side, who wish to provemalevolence and conspiracy on the part of the Jews, and on the Jewish sideby those who, citing the version in which Muhammad orders Zaynab's death,wish to prove that Islam is inherently and violently anti-Jewish.22 Here wehave, then, a perfect example of the contemporary abuse of "history" by bothsides, in the service of conflicting political agendas.

The tale of Zaynab had a different purpose from the one imputed to it bymodern-day (mis)readers. Zaynab's act, the story explains, was meant as achallenge to the Prophet to prove he was indeed the messenger of God and,

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in somc cirdes, to po1'ray him tiS a iiulItyl.)23 not to dcmonstrate the evil ofthe Jcwish pcoplc and ccrtainly not to demonstrate the malevolence of theProphet. Moreover - and this is equally important - the story had hardlyany affect on Muslim-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages. This contrastsstunningly with the story in the Gospels that the Jews killed Christ, alibelous accusation that forms one of the foundational motifs of Christiananti-Semitism from earliest times. The difference lies partly in the fact thatthe killing of Jesus was tantamount to the killing of God, whereas

Muhammad was a Prophet, and not a divine being. But, had medievalMuslims sought a rationale for persecuting and even annihilating the Jews,the Zaynab story could have served the purpose - but nowhere did it doso.24

I believe it is precisely because classical Islamic sources have so little thatcan be construed as anti-Semitic that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion areso popular in the Muslim world today and occupied a central place in the anti-Semitism of Sayyid Qutb, one of the greatest thinkers of 20th-century Islamicradicalism. The Protocols, a blatantly anti-Semitic Russian-Christian forgery,itself a myth, was published in 1903. It recounts the tale of a treacherousJewish and Masonic conspiracy to take over the world. The book has beentranslated into Arabic many times, beginning with - notably - an Arab-Christian translation from the French in the 1920s, and even played a centralrole in the notorious 41-part television series in Egypt a few ye;rs ago (2002).It also finds expression in the infamous Charter of the Islamist Hamas party.I submit, however, that it is precisely the near absence of similar texts in clas-sical Arabic literature that makes the "Protocols," a text taken from Europeananti-Semitic writings, so prominent in modern Muslim Jew-hatred. Indeed,the work must seem to many Muslims almost Islamic because it echoes themesin the Qur'an and elsewhere of Jewish treachery and malevolence towardsMuhammad and his biblical prophetic predecessors, among the mostauthentic and time-honored themes in the arsenal of medieval Muslim anti-Jewish polemic. The "Protocols" seem all the more credible in the light of thepolitical, economic and military successes of the modern State of IsraeL. Theblending of classical European anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Arabic"Protocols" is evident in much of contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism,whether it be in literature, the print and televised media, etched in cartoons,or preached from the pulpits of mosques.

Other themes, taken from original Islamic sources but interpreted moreseverely than they are meant their original context have come to the fore.There is, for instance, the dehumanizing calumny in the Qur'an, calling theJews "apes and pigs," a folkloristic motif present in and apparently borrowedfrom other, non-Islamic cultures, and coming very close to the irrationalbeliefs of Christian anti-Semitism.25 The apes and pigs theme is applied inQur'anic commentary to Christians as well, reducing it from a specificallyanti-Jewish libel to one aimed at non-Muslims in general.

The indictment is based on three verses in the Qur'an proclaiming that the

'i / I MAIU\ 1(,, t:nlll':N

Jcws, OJ. in onc case, thc Pcople of the Book as 11 wlwk, Wt'l',' turned by Godinto apes and pigs as punishment for their sins:

And ye know of those of you who broke the Sabbath, how We said untothem:Be ye apes, despised and hated! (Sura 2:65)

ShaH I teH thee of a worse (case) than theirs for retribution with Allah?

(Worse is the case of him) whom Allah hath cursed, him on whom Hiswrath hath fallen and of whose sort Allah hath turned some to apes andswine, and who serveth idols. Such are in worse plight and further astrayfrom the plain road. (Sura 5:60, teferring to the People of the Book).

So when they took pride in that which they had been forbidden, We saidUnto them: Be ye apes despised and loathed! (Sura 7:166, referring to theSabbath breakers).

The language of the verses does not actually suggest that the Jews areinnately inhuman, only that they were transformed into animals for theirmisdeeds. In an eschatological context in post-Qur'anic sources it is Muslimsinners and heretics, adversely infected by imitation of Jewish and Christianways, who will be turned by God into apes and pigs, a warning and a threataimed at shoring up Islamic identity.26 This recalls the famous homilies of theearly Christian preacher St. John Chrysostom of Antioch in the 4th centuryagainst Christian "judaizers" who imitated Jewish practices, a tactic aimed atstrengthening an independent Christian identity.27

On rare occasions in the Middle Ages the apes-pigs theme in the Qur'anreared its head, urging repression, even violence, against the Jews, notoriouslyby the Spanish-Arabic poet, who used this theme in his poem inciting the"pogrom" against the Jews of Granada in 1066.28 But it never enjoyed thecentrality as an anti-Jewish polemic that it has been given today. Taken out ofits original context in the Qur'an and recast in an irrational, racial mold, it isregularly preached today from mosque pulpits, in Hamas publications and onthe Internet, and has entered popular Muslim consciousness in the form of anirrational belief that contemporary Jews are the descendants, or brothers, ofapes and pigs.

Much bandied about in the Muslim world, and regularly cited on theJewish side as evidence of age-old Islamic anti-Semitism, is a Hadith about theProphet, that, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is enshrined in the

Hamas Charter and is propagated by Islamists as a warrant to kill Jews. Itannounces that the "hour" of the Day of Judgment will not come until theMuslims fight the Jews and kill them, whereupon the rock and tree will say:"Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him,'except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews." This tradition isbut one of many miraculous portents of the end-time and the only one thatmentions violence against the Jews.29 It seems to have had little relevance inMuslim-Jewish relations until modern times, when it can be heard in anti-

Miidi'/'ll Myths 0/ Mu.~'lill IIl1li,Sl.lIilisli I '1:;

,lewish Pl'Ol1011llCements fi:m the pulpits of mosques and in Islamistpropaganda,30

'To be sure, it makes little difference to Jews that the anti-Semitic themesof Islam today, whether in the Middle East or in Europe, had little or noimportance in Muslim-Jewish relations in the past. They are salient today andfrightening to a people that has suffered from Christian as well as westernsecular anti-Semitism and its horrendous consequences in the 20th century.What is important to understand, however, is that ascribing these ideas to thelegacy of classical Islam is yet another myth.

Muslim anti-Semitism has also provoked a reverse phenomenon. On theone hand, we see the rise of frenzied anti-Islamic feeling in fringe circles inEurope. The most well-known is probably the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, whoplays to fears accompanying Muslim immigration to the Netherlands with hisoutspoken, incendiary, Islamophobic pronouncements and a notorious videoon the Internet called "Fitna," which pits Qur'anic verses, taken out of

context, against grim scenes of Muslim terrorist acts in Europe and elsewhere.We also see a growing Israeli and diaspora-Jewish prejudice that looks downupon Arabs and Muslims in invidious, stereotypical, even irrational ways.This is accompanied by amnesia on'the part of many Jews from Arab lands,who no longer remember the friendships with Muslims that Arab Jews knewin the "old country." They no longer recall the substantial e~emption fromMuslim violence that the Jews of the Islamic world enjoyed in most placesuntil the events of the 20th century. And they have forgotten that until the20th century, in some cases right up until the 1940s, many in the Arabic-speaking Jewish middle class were deeply embedded in Arab society andculture, much like their ancestors in the medieval world, who wholeheartedlyembraced Arabic and the Islamic culture of philosophy, science, medicine,scriptural study, legal concepts, and poetry in what was, if not an interfaithutopia, an era of wide-ranging co-existence. The contemporary Arab Jewishcollective memory of centuries of suffering and anti-Semitism is yet one moremyth in the panoply of myths that surround contemporary realities.

One positive sign in all this is the growing literature of nostalgia by Jewsfrom Arab lands living in Israel and elsewhere. The description of the relativecomfort and integrated, if ambivalent, relations with Muslim neighbors andfriends in the lands of emigration right down into the middle decades of the20th century, belies the narrative of Islamic persecution and expulsion

promoted by so many Jews from Islamic lands, a theme that has taken onrenewed salience among Jews in general as a counterweight to Palestinianclaims for reparations for damages done by Israel to Arabs over the past sixdecades.31

áDWhat then of the future? There are at least two ways of looking at this. Inone, the optimistic view, the proverbial "good news," we would say that,

44 I MARK R. COHEN

precisely because anti-Semitism of the western, Christian variety is not nativeto Islam; precisely because it is not part of most classical Islamic texts - oncethere is a just and peaceful solution to the conflict, with two states, Israel andPalestine, living side-by-side, both viable and coexisting in relative peace, letalone economically interdependent, then the "new" Muslim anti-Semitismmight eventually fade away or at least lose its appeal to the majority ofMuslims. This is because it is not deeply rooted in Islam and is largely fueledtoday by the conflict itself.

A pessimistic assessment, the "bad news," would be that, even after a peacetreaty has been signed and Palestine has become a viable state, Muslim anti-Semitism - and I would add, Israeli anti-Muslimism - won't evaporate veryquickly, because, after 40 years of Israeli occupation and oppression, on theone hand, and, on the other hand, years of militant Arab resistance andterrorism directed at Israeli civilians (not to speak of Jews in Europe), themutual hatred has become so firmly entrenched that it will be very diffcultto uproot. To this should be added that, even absent the conflict, anti-Semitism serves and may continue to serve other purposes in Islamic countrieslike Egypt. It constitutes a veiled protest by the political opposition againstthe peace treaty and normalization, and may continue in many Arab regimesas a diversion from domestic problems that cannot easily be solved.

There is, of course, a third possibility, the absence of agreement on thePalestinian-Israeli issue altogether, which, I believe, is the very worst-casescenario. Its consequences for the future of Muslim anti-Semitism would bemade irrelevant by developments that would, I believe, be terrible for the prin-cipals, as for the world at large.

Let us hope that the good news will prevaiL.

Notes

Published in Hebrew in the Israeli journal Politika 19 (Spring 2009), 121-140. ThisEnglish version contains a few minor changes.

1 Under Crescent and Cross: The jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994; newedition with a new Introduction and Afterword, 2008). The present essay is arevised and much expanded version of the Op-Ed essay, "The New Muslim Anti-Semitism," which I published in The jerusalem Post, January 3, 2008. That essaywas reprinted in India in the Hindustan Times. I delivered a lecture on this topicat the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew Universityand also at AI-Quds University in East Jerusalem in July 2008 and am grateful forthe comments I received. The main ideas presented in this essay are consistent withviews expressed by many scholars, for instance, Moshe Ma'oz in his shortpamphlet, "The Image of the Jew in Official Arab Literature and CommunicationsMedia," published in 1976 by the Institute of Contemporary Jcwry of the HebrewUniversity; Bernard Lewis; Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict andPrejudice, new cdition with ncw Afterword (New York, 1999); and nt/ici's. A goodreccnt rcvicw of thc subject can hc foiind in thc 1111110l:H'd hihliiigi':iphicnl CHSllY

ciiitlcd "TIll Clinlk'nl\i' of A'iSI','isiIlH and (Jiid('i'sl:iiidìii~ Ar,i1I/I,liliiiii Anil"

Modern Myths of Muslim Anti-Semitism I 45

Semitism," by Dr. Esther Webman of Tel Aviv University, not yet published (lthank Dr. Webman for allowing me to read her manuscript). What I bring in thepresent essay that is new is (1) the perspective of a historian of Jewish-Muslimrelations in the Middle Ages, founded on several decades of researching andteaching the subject, the main results of which can be found in my above-mentioned book, and (2) some thoughts about several favorite themes in modernMuslim anti-Semitism.

2 Turkish translation, Hac ve Hilal Altindar: Ortacagda Yahudiler (1997); Hebrew,

Be-tzel ha-sahar veha-tzlav, 2001; German, Unter Kreuz und Halbmond: Diejuden im Mittelalter, 2005; Arabic, Bayn al-hilal wa'l-salib: wad' al-yahud fi al-qurun al-wusta, 2007; French, Sous Ie Croissant et sous la Croix: les Juifs auMoyen Age, 2008; Spanish and Romanian forthcoming, 2009.

3 Vol. 46,3 (2006).

4 The report was suppressed until interested parties got a hold of it and made itpublic. It was widely suspected that the EU had been reluctant to publish theresults for fear of antagonizing the growing Muslim population in Europeancountries.

5 I first articulated this in print in my ,article "Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History," The jerusalem Quarterly, no. 38 (1986), 125-137, which wasreprinted several times: in The Solomon Goldman Lectures, Vol. 5, ed. Byron L.Sherwin and Michael Carasick (Chicago, 1990), 20-32; in Jew~ and Muslims:

Communities in the Precolonial Middle East, ed. Shlomo Deshen and Walter P.Zenner (London: Macmillan 1996), 50-63; in Hebrew in Zmanim: A HistoricalQuarterly (Tel Aviv University), vol. 9, no. 36 (Winter, 1990), 52-61; and againin Hebrew, in a revised and expanded version, in Muslim Writers on Jews andJudaism: The jews among their Muslim Neighbours, ed. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh

(Jerusalem, 1996),21-36. I followed the 1986 article up with one entitled "TheNeo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History" in Tikkun (May/June1991), 55-60. These were later incorporated into Under Crescent and Cross,Chapter One.

6 A recently published compendium of articles and primary sources on The Legacyof Islamic Anti-Semitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst, NY,2008), by the blog-master, Andrew Bostom, collects in convenient form a largeamount of material illustrating what the author considers to be evidence of Islamicanti-Semitism from earliest times - differing from the interpretation of the presentwriter and other specialists on the medieval Islamic period. Bostom's virulent

response to my jerusalem Post Op-Ed can be read at http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2008/0 1/19/tendentious-marc-cohen-ok -ba t-ye %e2 % 80 % 990r-not-ok/

Along the same lines, another "counter-myth" collection, by another blog-master,is Robert Spencer, ed., The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law TreatsNon-Muslims (Amherst, NY, 2005).

7 Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Madison, NJ, 2005). Most of Bat Ye'or's books

have been translated into Hebrew and some into Russian; most of them werewritten originally in French.

8 See, for instancc, Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites and more recently, "The New

Anti-Scmitism," The American Scholar 75 (Winter, 2006), 25-36.9 Arnon¡. many stlidi,:s, such as those of Tritton and Fattal, see Mark R. Cohen,

"What was tlw dli'll,ICt: iif 'ITiiiil'? A I,itcrary-llìsrorical Study," Jerusalem Studies¡II II I'il/lit 111tils/,lilill (11)')1)), I (I() ,~,1'1, nnd thc nl'ticlc by Norli r:itccl in the next

'i (1 I MAliK It. i;Olll!,N

.1 I am in agi.'ccnicnt here wich AJbl'Ct:hc Noch in hi~ iiiipon:iiii ,~iiidy, originally inGerman, entitled "Problems of Differentiation betwccn MUNHms and Non-Muslims: Re-reading the 'Ordinances of 'Vmar' (AI-Shuruc al-'lll111I'iyya)" in theEnglish translation in Robert Hoyland, ed., Muslims and Others in Early IslamicSociety (Aldershot, Hants: Burlington, VT. 2004). See also Cohen, Under Crescentand Cross, Chapters Four and Six.

11 Apart from her many books see her concise starement from Midstream magazinein 1997, reprinted in Robert Spencer, The Myth of Islamic Toleration: HowIslamic Law Treats Non-Muslims (Amherst, MA, 2005), 147-157, a book thatwell represents the current Islamophobic trend. See also above note 6.

12 These observations are based on studies by such distinguished scholars as AnnaSapir Abulafia, Robert Chazan, Jeremy Cohen, William Chester Jordan, andKenneth Stow,

13 Yosef Tobi, "Conversion to Islam among Yemenite Jews under Zaidi Rule: The

Position of Zaidi Law, the Imam, and Muslim Society" (Hebrew), Pe'amim 42(1990),105-126. (Hebrew translation of the title is: Hitaslemut be-qerev yehudeiteiman tahat ha-shilton ha-zaydi: emdot ha-halakha ha-zaydit ha-shilton ha-imami veha-hevra ha-muslemitJ

14 I benefited from discussions on these points with Iranian scholar Dr. Katajun

Amirpur, who is currently studying Iranian attitudes towards the Jews in theMiddle Ages.

15 Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 132.16 See Matthias Kuentzel, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of

9/11, tr. Colin Meade (New York, 2007). Kuentzel puts too much emphasis onthe role of the Nazis in precipitating (he would say) modern Arab anti-Semitism,without acknowledging the longue durée of the phenomenon, reaching back tothe 19th century, with antecedents in the Ottoman period.

17 Emmanuel Sivan, "Islamic Fundamentalism, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Zionism,"in Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary World, ed. Robert S.Wistrich (Houndsmill, 1990), 74-84.

18 Esther Webman, "Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Criticism of Israel: The ArabPerspective," Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Geschichte 33 (2005), 306-329.

19 Michael Kiefer, "Islamischer, Islamistischer odeI' Islamisierter Anti -Semitismus,"Die Welt des Islams 46 (2006), 277-306; Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 267

(in the Afterword).20 Mentioned also in Ronald L. NettleI', "Islamic Archetypes of the Jews: Then and

Now," in Wistrich, ed., Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the ContemporaryWorld, 65-67; and elsewhere (see below).

21 For versions of the story see http://www.answering-islam.orglSilas/mo_death.htm.See also Reuven Firestone, An Introduction to Islam for Jews (Philadelphia,2008),40-41.

~2 From the Muslim side see http://www.seerah.netiseerahiarchives/000185.htmland http://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=ZLOC2QvqIlo&feature=related. From

the Jewish side, see http://www.andrewbostom.orglindex. php?option=com_content&task=view &id=67 &Itemid=2 8

~3 Etan Kolberg, "The Image of the Prophet Muhammad as a shahid" (Hebrew) in'Iyyunim ba-islam ha-qadum: devarim she-ne'emru be-yom 'iyyun likhvod MeirJ. Kister bi-mlot 10 tishim shana (Studies in Early Islam: Papers Honouring Meir

Mud/'m .MyllJ.~ ii( Mlislim !\litÎ,.Semilism I tj,l

.I. Kiscei: on hiN Ninetiech Birchday), (.el'isalem: 'rhe Israel Academy of Sciencesand Humanitics, 2005), 45-71.

24 Jacob Lassner, "The Origins of Muslim Attitudes Towards the Jews and Judaism,"

Judaism 39 (1990),494-496, makes the same point, but he adds, regarding therole this story played in fashioning Muslim perceptions of the Jews: "Whether ornot one believes the details. . . the story needs to be seen within the larger contextof Muhammad's relations with the Jews. Recalcitrant tribesmen who opposed himand supposedly supported his enemies, the Jews received what they justly deservedafter crossing his path. Subordination, expulsion, even extermination, the unusualand extreme punishment meted out to Zaynab's kin, the Banu Qurayzah (inMedina, whose male members were executed by the Muslims for collaborationwith the Meccan enemy), was the correct price for what was perceived as bad faithand political treachery."

25 Ilse Lichrenstaedter, "And Become Ye Accursed Apes, " Jerusalem Studies inArabic and Islam, 14 (1991), 153-175.

26 Uri Rubin, "Apes, Pigs and the Islamic Identity," Israel Oriental Studies 17 (1997)89-105. The apes-pigs threat is used today by Muslim preachers to discouragetheir congregants from transgressing, for instance, by listening to musical instru-ments. See http://www.islam-qa.com/enlcatl2008#2022.

27 See Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 20.28 Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 165-166.29 Another portent: "The Prophet said: The Hour will not be esrablished till a man

passes by a grave of somebody and says, Would that I were in his place."30 This Hadith, as well as the one in the previous note and many others, is found in

medieval canonical collections like Bukhari. It is mentioned in the important, longarticle in French by the Arabist and scholar of medieval Jewish philosophy,

Georges Vajda, "Juifs et musulmans selon Ie hadit," Journal asiatique 229 (1937),57-127. This article is conveniently translated for the first time into English inBostom's above-mentioned book (note 6) and heavily relied upon him in his longintroduction.

31 One example from among many of this literature of nostalgia are the memoirs ofthe Israeli-Iraqi scholar of Arabic literature, Sasson Somekh, Baghdad, Etmol (TelAviv, 2003) and in English, Baghdad Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew(Jerusalem, 2007).