Friday, May 20, 2005

What were Arab-Jewish relations really like?

This article from the Spring 2005 issue of the Jewish Quarterly tries to cast some light on a contentious topic.

Dilemmas of Dhimmitude: Lyn Julius untangles the controversies about Jewish life in Arab lands



‘I have not come to rediscover my memories, nor to recognize those I have distorted, nor to imagine that I could live here again. I came to bury all this, to get rid of it, forget it, even hate it, as we are taught to hate those who do not want us.

I now realize that I am behaving in a typically Jewish fashion. I came back to Egypt as only Jews do, aspiring to return to places they were in such a rush to flee’ – [Andre Aciman, [False Papers: essays in exile



Last year, the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafy invited the Jews of Libya to ‘come home’. In October, a Jewish delegation did return for the first time in almost 40 years - and was well received. They wished to visit their roots, renew business ties, seek the restoration of Jewish communal sites and compensation for lost property. (A follow-up visit of some 20 Israelis of Libyan origin was scheduled for March 2005, the first time Israeli citizens will have set foot on Libyan soil.) And Libya, anxious to be rehabilitated in the post-Saddam era, seems eager to usher in a new era of reconciliation.

Yet this was not the first time the Libyan leader had asked the Jews to return to the land of their birth. When he made a similar offer in 1975 (‘Are you not Arabs like us, Arab Jews?’), Albert Memmi, the Tunisian-born French writer and intellectual, scoffed:

'Yes, indeed we were Arab Jews – in our habits, in our culture, our music, our menu. But must one remain an Arab Jew if, in return, one has to tremble for one’s life and the future of one’s children and always be denied a normal existence? We would have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandoned the idea, it is because over the centuries the Muslim Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty.’ ‘Who is an Arab Jew?’, in [Jews and Arabs[Chicago: O¹Hara, 1975]; this essay can also be read on-line at www.jimena-justice.org/faq/memmi.htm).
Even if it acknowledges that the Jews ever lived in the Middle East ­ an admission which undermines the oft-heard claim that Israel is a white, European, colonialist settler state - modern Arab historiography has marginalized the Jews and their ancient heritage to the point of invisibility, appropriating their achievements. Maimonides has morphed into an Arab scientist. Schoolchildren are taught that the sixth-century Jewish poet As-Samawaa'l and the medieval luminary Avicebron (Ibn Gvirol) were Muslims. How many know that a Jew helped write the constitution for the modern state of Egypt?

The very expression 'Arab Jews' is a misnomer to describe people who were living in the Middle East and North Africa 1,000 years before Islam and the seventh-century Arab invasion. From these communities sprang the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Hillel and the philosopher Philo. In the last 50 years, after almost 3,000 years of unbroken presence, nearly a million Jews fled persecution and legalized discrimination and overcame much hardship to build new lives - mostly in Israel - where they now account for roughly half the Jewish population. The remaining 5,000 live reasonably securely in Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia, in spite of being targeted by recent Al-Qaeda bombings. But a key chapter of Jewish history is drawing to an irrevocable close.
Some have propagated the myth that the Jews left of their own free will, or were forced out by Zionist pressure. Israel itself has been complicit in drawing a veil over the Jewish narrative, emphasizing the romance of the Zionist 'pull' factor, while glossing over the unhappy circumstances of the 'push'. The comparatively neglected story of this Jewish exodus continues to live in the shadows.
So what is the truth about relations between Arabs and Jews? The issue is loaded with political implications for today. Consider two extreme views. If Jews and Arabs can be shown to have always coexisted harmoniously, then Arabs bear no responsibility for the existence of Israel; they are the undeserving indirect victims of European antisemitism. If, on the other hand, antisemitism is seen as endemic to the Middle East, that offers uncomfortably little hope for an end to the conflict. One thing is sure: a complex reality, varying from era to era, from region to region and ruler to ruler, does not lend itself easily to sweeping generalizations.

Ask Jews themselves about the life they left behind and they will wax lyrical about the scent of jasmine and lemon trees: sunsets over Alexandria harbour; samekh mousgouf, the fish grilled on the banks of the river Tigris; sleeping under the stars on the roof; a comfortable life of leisure and servants. Yet most of these same Jews fled for their lives with one suitcase.

Many Jews like to reminisce about their charmed lives and do not dwell on their hasty uprooting. But while these rosy images of the past reflect a genuine reality, Albert Memmi insists that it was temporary, a reasonably secure interlude lasting only for the duration of the colonial era, a matter of a few decades.
So what were Arab-Jewish relations like historically? Again there are two extreme competing answers to this question. On one view, Jews and Christians enjoyed the status of a 'protected' minority under Islam, and the Jews in Muslim Spain enjoyed a golden age of peace and prosperity. Others argue that Jews and Christians were 'protected' only from extermination and were never anything but second-class.

Muslims took control of the Middle East through [jihad ­ religious wars of conquest. The indigenous Christians and Jews were spared conversion and death if they abided by certain terms of a dhimma agreement. They had to pay a special tax, the jizya, cede the centre of the road to Muslims, ride only donkeys, not horses. They could not build a synagogue taller than a mosque, could not testify against Muslims in court, could not bear arms, and had to wear distinctive clothing. In short, their status was one of institutionalized inferiority and humiliation.

However, like all other dhimmis, writes Norman Stillman in The Jews of Arab Lands (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), the Jews

'enjoyed extensive communal autonomy precisely because the state did not care what they did so long as they paid their taxes, kept the peace and remained in place.'
There were massacres, but these were rare and only occurred when the Jews were thought to have stepped out of line.

The golden age myth
One of leading writers on Islamic history, Bernard Lewis, believes the golden age in Spain is a myth - Jews were persecuted by both Muslims and Christians:

'Belief in it was a result more than a cause of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians ­ and taken up by Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews.

If tolerance means the absence of persecution, then classic Islamic society was indeed tolerant to both its Jewish and Christian subjects ­ more tolerant perhaps in Spain than in the East, and in either incomparably more tolerant than was medieval Christendom. But if tolerance means the absence of discrimination, then Islam never was or claimed to be tolerant, but on the contrary insisted on the privileged superiority of the true believer in this world as well as the next ([Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East' [London: Alcove Press, 1973]).
The truth is that both extreme forms of Arab-Jewish relations (and many in between) could obtain in different times and different places. Conditions for the Jews were good in the early Middle Ages, worse in the later Middle Ages, dire under the Almohads, difficult under the Mamluks. Life was best in the centre of the Ottoman Empire, hardest on the periphery. As the European powers increased their influence and during the colonial era, Jews and Christians acquired near-equal status to Muslims. Crucially, however, conditions for the non-Muslim minorities deteriorated again when Arab nation states gained their independence. To blame was a sinister nexus of European fascism and an anti-western Arab nationalist movement. Today, a virulent Islamist strain of anti-westernism and antisemitism sweeping the Arab and Muslim world bears little resemblance to the more tolerant end of traditional Muslim attitudes.

When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, a good period began for the Jews. The Ottoman Turks populated the city not with fellow Muslims but productive and creative Armenians, Greeks and Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Unlike Europe, where the Jews were the only minority, the Ottoman Middle East was a mosaic of religions and ethnicities. Jews, debarred only from the army and the diplomatic corps, rose to prominence as doctors, merchants and courtiers, at a time, to quote Professor Norman Stone's Foreword to Lord Kinross's study of The Ottoman Empire (Bury St Edmunds: Folio, 2003) when Christian kingdoms were shovelling heretics or Jews out to sea'.

Islam, unlike Christianity, did not view Jews as Christ-killers: ­ they were simply benighted unbelievers. As Bernard Lewis explains in Semites and anti-Semites (New York: Norton, 1986),


'The situation of non-Muslim minorities in classical Islam falls a long way short of the standard set and usually observed in the present-day democracies. It compares, however, favourably with conditions prevailing in western Europe in the Middle Ages, and in eastern Europe for very much longer.'

Lewis traces the infiltration of specifically Christian hostility towards Jews - with its blood libels, fears of conspiracy and domination, images of Jews poisoning wells and spreading the plague - to the high Middle Ages, when many Christians converted to Islam, and to the particular influence of Greek Orthodox Christians.

Over the centuries a Muslim family, the Nusseibehs, were the keepers of the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, not because the Christian sects squabbled among themselves (although squabble they did) but as a symbol of Muslim primacy. To escape their inferiority, Christians were at the forefront of twentieth-century pan-Arabism; the founder of the League of the Arab Homeland was a Christian.

Christians, more conspicuous and identified with the Ottomans' European enemies, deflected attention from the Jews. They bore the brunt of persecution ­ the 1915 genocide of over one million Armenians being the most extreme example. But their common dhimmitude did not make them any more sympathetic to their economic rivals, the Jews - quite the contrary. It was Christians, for example, who stirred up a blood libel in Damascus in 1840 (and on 34 subsequent occasions), a Christian who first translated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic.

Dhimmitude on the fringes
In Iran, where there were fewer minorities, and in Yemen and North Africa, where Christianity had died out, the Jews led a miserable and degraded existence subject to a much stricter application of the rules of dhimmitude. They were confined to mellahs or ghettos and periodically subject to forced conversions. Whereas the Turks had introduced the fez in Iraq in 1808, so that religious groups should not be immediately recognizable by their headdresses, in Tunisia over a century later the social rules of dhimmitude were still in force, even under French colonial rule, and Albert Memmi's grandfather was still expected to wear the obligatory and discriminatory Jewish garb. Every Jew could expect to be hit on the head by any passing Muslim, a ritual which even had a name ­ the chtaka. Shi'ites subscribed to ritual purity prejudices until recent times. A Jewish friend who lived in Shi'a Bahrain tells how her grandmother once picked up some fruit to see if it was ripe. The fruit seller tipped his basket to the ground, crying out 'You have defiled it!' In Iran, Jews were executed for brushing up against Muslims in the rain, and so 'defiling' them.

Dhimmitude and Zionism
Why did Zionism elicit fury from the start? An explanation suggested by Francisco Gil-White in 'Whitewashing the Palestinian Leadership' (http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/Israel.htm#part4, 31 August 2003) is that

'the Arab upper classes saw dhimmitude as the cement of the social fabric, helping to guarantee the loyalty of the street. Many Arabs saw in the lowly status of Jews a confirmation of their own worth. And there was special contempt for the Jews, perhaps because, unlike the Christian case, no Jewish states existed to compete with Islamic states.'

The movement for a Jewish state in Palestine overturned the natural pecking order. When slavery was abolished, American whites in the Deep South responded by lynching black slaves. Similarly, as Albert Memmi writes,

'The Arabs . . . have not yet recovered from the shock of seeing their former underlings raise their heads, attempting even to gain their national independence. They know of only one rejoinder ­ off with their heads!'
In Histoire de chiens (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2004), Nathan Weinstock, a former Trotskyist, claims that the breakdown of the traditional dhimmi relationship was one of the root causes of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Jews became the focus of Arab aggression, he believes, when in 1908 the Hashomer Hatza'ir pioneers of Sejera dismissed their Circassian guards - who protected their settlement against Bedouin raids ­ and replaced them with Jewish guards. For the Jews, this was an ideological statement of self-sufficiency. But for the neighbouring Arab [fellaheen, they had crossed a red line. They had reneged on their part of the dhimmitude agreement: the dog-like dhimmi, who was not allowed to bear arms, should always look to the Muslim for protection. The title of Weinstock's book is taken from the battlecry of those who slaughtered members of the old yishuv in Hebron in 1929: 'The Jews are our dogs!' Because the targets were indigenous Jews, not Zionists, he argues that Palestinian nationalism was predicated on bigotry.

The colonial era

By the late nineteenth century, the colonial powers had made inroads into the declining Ottoman Empire, extending protection primarily to the Christian minorities. Under European pressure the jizya was abolished. But even though the Turks declared all the Sultan's subjects equal under the law in 1856, the best guarantee of one¹s inalienable rights was a western passport. (After 1860, Jews, along with Armenians, were denied Egyptian citizenship. The majority were left stateless, but a privileged 25 per cent of the Jews held foreign passports. To them a parallel legal system applied.)

At the turn of the last century, life was incomparably better than before for the Jews of Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Jews sat in the Istanbul parliament after 1908. They served in the Turkish army. The big cities of the Middle East were heavily Jewish; along with other minorities, the Jews controlled trade and business.

But unlike the German Jews, many of whom who aspired to assimilate, the Jews of the Middle East had no desire to be like the Muslim majority. Although they lacked political power, they felt superior. The 60 Alliance IsraƩlite Universelle schools established in 1860 had hauled the Jews out of poverty and ignorance and turned them into an educated elite speaking English, French, Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew. Soon they had also established trading networks through relatives in Manchester, India, the Far East and Latin America.

Iraq ­ a test case
Iraq on the threshold of independence is a good test case of how Arab states were to treat minorities. The authorities had little excuse to treat the Jews badly. They were thoroughly Arabized in language and culture. They were the backbone of the country's civil service. Arriving as Babylonian slaves in 586 BCE, the Jews had sunk deep roots in a country which witnessed the birth of Judaism at Ur of the Chaldees. A Muslim could not tell a Jew to go back where he came from when the Jew had been there before him. The dearth of foreign passport-holders made it hard for the Jews to be tarred with the brush of British imperialism. And there was another thing in their favour: most Jews were indifferent or even hostile to Zionism.

Although the communities were strictly segregated, Muslims and Jews got along perfectly well in everyday life. Children enjoyed a carefree existence ­ although only within certain limits. Naim Kattan writes in Adieu Babylone (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003) that he would never have ventured alone into a dark cinema. Boys his age, Christian and Muslim, would have leapt on him and beaten him up.
Even before the Palestine question started having an impact, it is clear that Jews viewed the prospect of Iraqi independence with foreboding. In 1917 they asked Britain as the mandatory power to allow them to become British subjects. They gave three reasons for not wanting an indigenous government to rule over them. The Arabs, they said, were politically irresponsible; they had no administrative experience; and they could be fanatical and intolerant. Their pleas were not heeded, and in 1921 the Jews sent another delegation to the British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox. They came away empty-handed, but a London-Baghdad agreement signed in 1922 laid down that the laws of the country guaranteed freedom of creed and conscience for all (see Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985).
But if national independence paid lip service to equal rights, Islam was still the state religion. Entrenched cultural and religious attitudes reasserted themselves. One story illustrates the corruptibility of the justice system: in 1931, a Jewish landowner was murdered by an Arab squatter he wished to evict from one of his properties. The killer was arrested and tried, but he was soon released after protests from his clan. The victim, no matter how wealthy or influential, was still a Jew.
The Jews were keen to play their part in building the new Iraq, but in the face of discrimination, their enthusiasm gradually waned and gave way to anger, frustration and disappointment. As Naim Kattan puts it,

'For centuries we learned to live with injustice, even coming to see it as part of the nature of things. Was it not the price we had to pay for being different? We had no reason to envy the Assyrians, the Armenians, the Kurds, nor even the Christians and the Shi¹ites. We lived in the shadow of a beast which for years had maintained a stony silence, and suddenly his giant frame was wracked by a fever. We could feel him quaking and then he threw his full weight upon one victim or another.'
Newly independent Iraq gave formal undertakings on minority rights when joining the League of Nations in 1932 ­ and massacred thousands of Assyrian Christians within the year. Xenophobic nationalism, together with anti-British and anti-French feeling, gave rise to political parties and paramilitary youth movements of the Nazi and fascist type. The German envoy to Iraq, Dr Fritz Grobba, set about disseminating Nazi ideology and anti-Jewish propaganda, reinforcing local prejudice. Dozens of Jews were quietly dismissed (although some were reinstated after the community protested). Laws were gradually brought in to deprive Jews of jobs, then education and, eventually, property, residence and free movement. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, colluded with the ex-Prime Minister, Rashid Ali, to engineer a pro-Nazi coup, eventually culminating in the farhoud massacre of 1941. For two days and one night of looting, rape and murder, the mob rampaged through Jewish districts of Baghdad. One hundred and seventy Jews were killed.

Naturally, the Palestine question was also to have serious repercussions on the Jewish population. Menahem Salih Daniel, a Baghdad Jewish leader, expressed his misgivings as early as 1922 in a letter to the Secretary of the Zionist Organisation in London (quoted by Nessim Rejwan), even though there had as yet been no active resistance to Zionism:

'It is . . . the feeling of every Arab that it is a violation of his legitimate rights, which it is his duty to denounce and fight to the best of his ability. Iraq always having been an active centre of Arab culture and activity, the public mind is always stirred up as regards Palestine.'
One Jewess, growing up in the 1930s, recalls how the mob would rampage every anniversary of the Balfour declaration carrying clubs dipped in tar. It fell to a kindly neighbour to shelter her until the mob had passed.

In the 1941 farhoud too, when the forces of law and order failed to come to the Jews' rescue, the last line of defence was again the kindly neighbour. As Nessim Rejwan writes,

'Throughout the disturbances, with a few exceptions, Jewish homes in mixed neighbourhoods were defended and hundreds of Jews were saved by the willingness of their Muslim neighbours to protect them, in some cases at the cost of their own lives.'

The broader picture
For the Jews, the 1930s and 1940s were a time of turmoil across the Arab world. Seven years before the farhoud, Jews had been killed in the pogrom of Constantine, Algeria. In Libya, 136 Jews, 36 of them children, were slaughtered in 1945. That same year, bloody riots erupted in Egypt and Aden, as in Syria in 1947.
All these events, targeting civilian communities, predated the creation of Israel. They demonstrated the vulnerability and insecurity to which Jews were exposed up to 50 years ago. Things might have turned out differently ­ Crown Prince Faisal, later the British-appointed King of Iraq, had signed a pact in 1919 with Chaim Weizmann viewing with sympathy the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. Instead, Arab ruling elites made Zionism a crime from 1948 onwards, passed discriminatory legislation and whipped up popular feeling against the Jews to distract attention from their illegitimacy, their internal problems and obligations.
The 1948 defeat of the Arab armies by Israel marked the beginning of the end for most of the Jewish communities, although some claim that Arab governments had planned to expel their Jews even before the UN partition vote (see Yaakov Meron, 'Why Jews fled the Arab countries', [Middle East Quarterly, September 1995). Three-quarters of the Iraqi community fled in 1951, stripped of all possessions. The Egyptian Jews were expelled after Nasser amended the Egyptian nationality law in 1956, their property confiscated and a number imprisoned. The Jews of Algeria left en masse with the French. The other Maghreb countries adopted a policy of economic strangulation and emigration restrictions. When these were lifted in the early 1960s the Jews streamed out to France and Israel. With every Israeli triumph on the battlefield the remaining Jewish communities were targeted with economic boycotts, mob violence, mass arrests and even show trials and executions.

Ultimately, the Jewish populations of the Arab countries were given little choice but to leave. Jews signed loyalty petitions, proclaimed themselves Arabs first, gave money to the Arab war effort against Israel­, all to no avail. The situation of all Jews, even the anti-Zionists and the nationalists among them, was untenable. The root cause of the exodus was the dangerous failure of Arab autocracies to protect their minorities ­ and, indeed, their propensity to scapegoat them.

The situation today

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of Ottoman pluralism (whatever its limitations) could not be more remote. The Arab world is almost monolithically Muslim and judenrein. Pan-Arab nationalism is a spent force but pan-Islamism is asserting its grip. Those Copts, Assyrians and other groups who have not fled continue to be persecuted and marginalized.

The mass media of the Muslim world pump out a new antisemitism, inspired by Saudi Wahabism, fed by Koranic accounts of Jewish treachery and drawing on every antisemitic motif and conspiracy theory in the book. This antisemitism is a product of the Israel-Arab dispute, but a fight between two nationalisms over the same piece of land has changed, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, into an intractable religious conflict. Israel is an affront to the umma: what was once Muslim territory can never become non-Muslim. Palestine must be reconquered by jihad and the Jews revert to their natural status of dhimmitude. Until this alarming religious dimension is addressed and the forces of Islamic militancy subdued, the conflict will be insoluble.


The only long-term answer is Arab democratization. Already the Iraqi elections have whetted the popular appetite across the Arab world for change. Dissidents have been emboldened. Despots are quaking in their boots. Democracy will bring accountability, end arbitrary government and enforce pluralism, freedom and equal rights for all ethnic and religious groups. Only then might Arab states once again be able to give any Jews who chose to live in them that protection against vulnerability - what Albert Memmi calls 'our constant sense of frailty of the underdog' ­ - they enjoy in Israel and the West.

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3 comments:

  1. Dhimmitude: the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by jihad wars, encompassing all of the demographic, ethnic, and religious aspects of the political system. The word "dhimmitude" as a historical concept, was coined by Bat Ye'or in 1983 to describe the legal and social conditions of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule. The word "dhimmitude" comes from dhimmi, an Arabic word meaning "protected". Dhimmi was the name applied by the Arab-Muslim conquerors to indigenous non-Muslim populations who surrendered by a treaty (dhimma) to Muslim domination. Islamic conquests expanded over vast territories in Africa, Europe and Asia, for over a millennium (638-1683). The Muslim empire incorporated numerous varied peoples which had their own religion, culture, language and civilization. For centuries, these indigenous, pre-Islamic peoples constituted the great majority of the population of the Islamic lands. Although these populations differed, they were ruled by the same type of laws, based on the shari'a.

    This similarity, which includes also regional variations, has created a uniform civilization developed throughout the centuries by all non-Muslim indigenous people, who were vanquished by a jihad-war and governed by shari'a law. It is this civilization which is called dhimmitude. It is characterized by the different strategies developed by each dhimmi group to survive as non-Muslim entity in their Islamized countries. Dhimmitude is not exclusively concerned with Muslim history and civilization. Rather it investigates the history of those non-Muslim peoples conquered and colonized by jihad.

    Dhimmitude encompasses the relationship of Muslims and non-Muslims at the theological, social, political and economical levels. It also incorporates the relationship between the numerous ethno-religious dhimmi groups and the type of mentality that they have developed out of their particular historical condition which lasted for centuries, even in some Muslim countries, till today.

    Dhimmitude is an entire integrated system, based on Islamic theology. It cannot be judged from the circumstantial position of any one community, at a given time and in a given place. Dhimmitude must be appraised according to its laws and customs, irrespectively of circumstances and political contingencies.

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  2. Thank you for your comment. You are right that 'dhimmitude', as coined by Bat Ye'or has a specific meaning, and has come to describe the subservient mentality of non-Muslims even if they are no longer technically-speaking 'dhimmis.' The problem is that no word exists other than 'dhimmitude' to describe the 'dhimmi condition'. Perhaps we could coin the term 'dhimmihood.'

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  3. This is the problem with all three monotheistic religions. The Jews started by claining that they are the 'Chosen'.But when they invoked God's wrath, it was only on the 'Goyim who do not know You'. So in effect this excludes Moslems and Christians.
    Then came Christianity which borrowed heavily from the Pagan World, then insists that there is no salvation except through Jesus.
    This, in effect, consigns the others to the netherworld.
    Islam started in a much more liberal mode, but changed when conflict errupted with the Jewish tribes of Medina. As the Moslem domains expanded, it was at the expense of Christian lands. This caused a rift with the two 'People of the Book'. Their successful military adventures put Islam at the head of the hierarchy. a position it still claims.
    Can we hope for a more open dialogue between the three religions. I doubt it. My be we should wait till the Messiah comes and see what happens.

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