The Jews of Islam
Bernard Lewis
Princeton University Press
“As we might expect from the foremost and most prolific of today’s Orientalists... The Jews of Islam is an elegant and masterly survey.”—Alain Silvera, New York Times Book Review
“Lewis refuses… simplistic approaches and tries to explain the complex and often contradictory history of Jewish-Muslim relations over fourteen hundred years. He does this in prose that combines eloquence, dispassion, and wit.”—Norman A. Stillman, The New York Review of Books
“In this pioneering and masterful primer, the distinguished Princeton historian Bernard Lewis presents a systematic overview of how Jews fared in various Muslim countries at different times.”—Jacob Neusner, Boston Globe
Probing the Muslims’ attitude toward Judaism as a special case of their view of other religious minorities in Islamic countries, Bernard Lewis demolishes two competing stereotypes: the fanatical warrior, sword in one hand and Qur’an in the other, and the Muslim designer of an interfaith utopia. Available for the first time in paperback, his portrayal of the Judaeo-Islamic tradition is set against a vivid background of Jewish and Islamic history.
Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the author of numerous works on the Middle East.
Contents
Note on Illustrations / viii
Foreword / ix
One. Islam and Other Religions / 3
Two. The Judaeo-Islamic Tradition / 67
Three. The Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods / 107
Four. The End of the Tradition / 154
Notes / 193
Index / 227
FOREWORD
A reading of medieval and modern Jewish history would seem to suggest that Jews in the Diaspora can only flourish, perhaps even only survive in any meaningful sense, under the aegis of one or the other of the two successor religions of Judaism—Christianity and Islam. Virtually the whole panorama of Jewish history, or rather that part of it which is of any significance between the destruction of the ancient Jewish centers and the creation of the new Jewish state, is enacted either in the lands of Islam or in the lands of Christendom. There were occasional Jewish settlements in areas dominated by other civilizations and religions, such as India and China, but—despite the very large measure of tolerance they enjoyed—they did not flourish. They had no great share in the life and culture either of those countries or of the Jewish people, and appear to have produced nothing of any real importance for the one or the other. In India it was only with the advent of Islam that the small Jewish communities of that country received a modicum of attention and played a small part. In the realms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the religions of the Far East, the Jews remained few and inactive, attracting neither persecution nor favor nor even attention. In Hindu India and in China, Judaism atrophied. When Arnold Toynbee used the term “fossil” to describe the Jews and some other minority groups that survived from the ancient world, he was vehemently criticized. Indeed the term “fossil,” applied to something as vibrant as Jewish life in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the Americas, seems an absurdity. It is less absurd when applied to the isolated and immobilized Jewish communities of southern and eastern Asia.
The main centers of Jewish life and activity since the early Middle Ages have always been in the lands of Islam and Christendom. It seems that these two religions share some quality that is conducive to active Jewish life and that is lacking in societies dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths, to which perhaps in our own day we should add communism.
Under Christian or Muslim rule, Jewish life has not always been comfortable. Jews may be slighted or hated; they may be despised or oppressed or slaughtered, but they are never ignored. For both Christianity and Islam, and therefore for both Christians and Muslims, the Jews and Judaism have a certain cosmic stature. They are known; they have a place, and indeed an important place, in both the theological and historical scheme of things. For good or for evil, they are seen as significant. The Christians even adopted the Jewish scriptures. The Muslims, though they did not go that far, were prepared to recognize the Jewish scriptures as a corrupt relic of an authentic revelation. For the Christian and the Muslim alike, the Jewish religion was neither alien nor absurd. It was a faith of the same kind as his own, but in an earlier and outdated version. He might punish the Jew for not catching up with his own, final version of God’s message; he would not brush him aside as a votary of one minor sect or cult among a multiplicity of others. For the believer, persecution is easier to endure than disregard.
There are, it would seem, certain preconditions required to make possible the kind of cultural symbiosis—and still more the mutual and interacting cultural influences—that gave rise to what is now commonly called the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the Western world, and its equivalent in Islam. Until the twentieth century, when the positions of both Jews and Muslims underwent radical change, the term “Judaeo-Islamic” is at least as meaningful and as valid as “Judaeo-Christian” to connote a parallel and in many ways comparable cultural tradition.
As far as I am aware, the term “Judaeo-Islamic” has been used only by Western scholars and was never adopted either by Jews or by Muslims in the Islamic lands, since neither side saw their relationship in this light. At the present time it is a term of purely historical relevance, since the Judaeo-Islamic tradition no longer exists as a living force. The tradition has been destroyed, and its bearers have gone into exile or to Israel, where the two great branches of the Jewish people, the Jews of Islam and the Jews of Christendom, are meeting again for the first time in centuries and are struggling to create a new synthesis based on their common Jewishness. Their encounter repeats in miniature the clash of the two civilizations from which they come, and the aim of unity will not easily be achieved. The attempt will in part determine, in part be determined by, the parallel effort—so far of little avail—to create a new and different symbiotic relationship between Israel and the Islamic world by which it is surrounded.
In the following pages I have tried to examine the origins, the flowering, and the ending of the Judaeo-Islamic tradition, and to set these processes against the background of both Jewish and Islamic history. At most times and in most places, the Jews of Christendom were the only non-Christian minority in an otherwise wholly Christian land. Under the rule of Islam, in contrast, the Jews were normally one of several religious minorities, usually not the most important. The attitude of Islam to Judaism, of Muslims to Jews, is thus one aspect of a larger and more complex issue. The first chapter is therefore devoted to a general consideration of the relations between Islam and other religions—in theology and in law, in theory and in practice. The second chapter deals with the beginning and formation of the Judaeo-Islamic tradition, and is mainly concerned with the formative and classical periods of medieval Islam. The third chapter concentrates on the Ottoman Empire, the last of the great Islamic world states and the home of large and important Jewish communities; it also touches more briefly on other Muslim states in North Africa and in Asia. The fourth and last chapter, covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, takes as its theme the era of Western impact on the world of Islam, and. the final phase of the Judaeo-Islamic tradition.
This book is based on the Gustave A. and Mamie W. Efroymson Memorial Lectures delivered at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 1981. I have considerably expanded the material presented in those lectures and added annotations. I should like to express my appreciation to my hosts and to my attentive and well-informed audiences, from whose questions and comments I derived much benefit. My thanks are also due to the Alliance Israelite Universelle for permission to use its archives, and to the archives staff for their patience and courtesy. I am greatly indebted to several friends and colleagues for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this book; to Professors S. D. Goitein, Halil Inalcik, and Itamar Rabinovitch; and to Professors Judith Goldstein and Amnon Cohen, both members of the Institute for Advanced Study in the academic year 1982-83, who generously sacrificed some of their carefully hoarded time to read my drafts. I responded gratefully to some of their suggestions, and apologize to them for resisting others. I would like to thank Mr. Nikola Stavroulakis of Athens for his generous and invaluable advice and help in selecting and procuring illustrations. Finally, a special word of thanks to David Eisenberg, a graduate student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, for his invaluable efforts as a research assistant, and to Ms. Dorothy Rothbard for her uncomplaining typing of innumerable revisions and changes in the long journey from the first draft of the lectures to the final text of the book.
A French version of parts of chapter 1 was published in Annales (1980). I would like to offer my thanks to the editors of that journal.
B. L.
September 1983
The Jews of Islam
One
Islam and Other Religions
Two stereotypes dominate most of what has been written on tolerance and intolerance in the Islamic world.' The first depicts a fanatical warrior, an Arab horseman riding out of the desert with a sword in one hand and the Qur’an in the other, offering his victims the choice between the two. This picture, made famous by Edward Gibbon* in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is not only false but impossible—unless we are to assume a race of left-handed swordsmen. In Muslim practice, the left hand is reserved for unclean purposes, and no self-respecting Muslim, then or now, would use it to raise the Qur’an. The other image, almost equally preposterous, is that of an interfaith, interracial utopia, in which men and women belonging to different races, professing different creeds, lived side by side in a golden age of unbroken harmony, enjoying equality of rights and of opportunities, and toiling together for the advancement of civilization. To put the two stereotypes in Jewish terms, in one version classical Islam was like modern America, only better; in the other it was like Hitler’s Germany, only worse, if such can be imagined.
Both images are of course wildly distorted; yet both contain, as stereotypes often do, some elements of truth. Two features they have in common are that they are relatively recent, and that they are of Western and not Islamic origin. For Christians and Muslims alike, tolerance is a new virtue, intolerance a new crime. For the greater part of the history of both communities, tolerance was not valued nor was intolerance condemned. Until comparatively modern times, Christian Europe neither prized nor practiced tolerance itself, and was not greatly offended by its absence in others. The charge that was always brought against Islam was not that its doctrines were imposed …
Bernard Lewis
The Jews of Islam
Princeton
Princeton University Press
The Jews of Islam
Bernard Lewis
Princeton University Press
Princeton, New Jersey
Copyright © 1984 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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ISBN 0-691-05419-3
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First Princeton Paperback printing, 1987
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For Y, who will understand
No ha de haber un espiritu valiente?
Siempre sc ha de sentir lo que se dice?
Nunca se ha de dear lo que se siente?
—Francisco de Quevedo
