The author has an interesting argument: institutionalised and prescribed Islamic religious discrimination against Jews precluded worse forms of anti-Semitism.
"In the nineteenth century there was nearly universal consensus that Jews in the Islamic Middle Ages—taking al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, as the model—lived in a “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim harmony, an interfaith utopia of tolerance and convivencia. It was thought that Jews mingled freely and comfortably with Muslims, immersed in Arabic-Islamic culture, including the language, poetry, philosophy, science, med- icine, and the study of Scripture—a society, furthermore, in which Jews could and many did ascend to the pinnacles of political power in Muslim government. This idealized picture went beyond Spain to encompass the entire Muslim world, from Baghdad to Cordova, and extended over the long centuries, bracketed by the Islamic conquests at one end and the era of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) at the other.
The idea stemmed in the first instance from disappointment felt by central European Jewish historians as Emancipation-era promises of political and cultural equality remained unfulfilled. They exploited the tolerance they ascribed to Islam to chastise their Christian neighbors for failing to rise to the standards set by non- Christian society hundreds of years earlier.
The interfaith utopia was to a certain extent a myth; it ignored, or left unmentioned, the legal inferiority of the Jews and periodic outbursts of violence...
The image of the Golden Age remained dominant among scholars and in the gen- eral public throughout the nineteenth century, as Jews in Europe confronted a new, virulent strain of political anti-Semitism, reinforcing a much older feeling of aliena- tion and persecution in Christian lands...
In the twentieth century, Muslims appropriated the Jewish myth of the interfaith utopia as a weapon against Zionism and the State of Israel. They expressed this both in political broadsides and in books and articles about Jews or about non-Muslims in general in the Middle Ages. The leitmotif of these writings is Islamic “tolerance” (Arabic samāḥa or tasāmuḥ), often contrasted with the persecutions of medieval Christian society. Characteristically, these writings soft-pedal the legal inferiority of the Jews and gloss over, or ignore, episodes of violence that call the harmony into question...
The most useful way to understand Jewish-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages is to compare the Muslim world with the Christian world of Northern Europe. The choice of Northern Europe is dictated by the fact that there relations between Jews and Christians, reasonably tolerable in the early Middle Ages, declined precipitously later on to become the worst in Europe, leading the way in persecuting and ulti- mately expelling the Jews from Christian society. By choosing this case to compare with the Islamic world, one is able to isolate the specific factors determining how Jews were treated by the majority of society. In this way, this comparative study also constructs a paradigm that can be used to explain Jewish-gentile relations in pre- modern times in general.
If Islam seems to have been more tolerant than Christendom, this is true only in a qualified sense. In the Middle Ages, tolerance, in the modern, liberal meaning of full equality, was not considered to be a virtue to be emulated. Monotheistic religions were by nature mutually intolerant. Adherents of the religion in power considered it their right and duty to treat the others as inferiors rejected by God, and, in extreme cases, to treat them harshly, even to encourage them (in some cases by force) to abandon their faith in favor of the faith of the rulers. Though the religious minori- ties (Jews living under Christian rule; Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule) were hardly happy with their second-class status and legal inferiority, let alone the occasional persecutions, for the most part they accepted their inequality and subordination with resignation. As long as they were allowed to live in security and practice their religion without interference—this was “toleration” in the medieval sense of the word—they were generally content. For them, as for their masters, the hierarchical relationship between chosen religion and rejected religion, between superior and inferior, between governing and governed, was part of the natural order of things. The subjugated people may have dreamed of a reversal of the hierarchy, in history or in the messianic era, but for the time being, generally speaking, they bore their fate with a certain amount of equanimity.
The paradigm that results from this comparative approach delineates five interrelated factors that explain why anti-Jewish violence was so much less prevalent in the Islamic world than in Northern Europe. Violence was related, in the first instance, to the primacy of religious exclusivity. Historically, religious exclusivity characterized both Islam and Christianity. But anti-Jewish violence was more pronounced in Christendom because innate religious antagonism, present from the first decades of Christianity, was combined with other erosive forces. The second component of the paradigm is legal status; namely, the evolution of a special law for the Jews and a system of baronial or monarchical possessory rights—though varied in character and uneven in its application in different times and places—that could be manipulated in an arbitrary manner. This law frequently clashed with its competitor, papal policy, and the Jews were frequently caught in the middle. The third element concerns the economic circumstances that excluded the Jews from the most respected walks of life.
Religious exclusivity, a special, arbitrary legal status, and economic marginalization interacted with another adverse factor, the fourth element of the paradigm: social exclusion, which steadily robbed the Jews of their rank in the hierarchical social order. Last, the gradual replacement of the ethnic pluralism of Germanic society of the early Middle Ages by a medieval type of “nationalism,” paralleling the spread of Catholic religious exclusivity to the masses and the rise of the crusading spirit in the eleventh century, contributed to the enhancement of the Jew’s “otherness” and to his eventual exclusion from most of western Christendom by the end of the fifteenth century. Before that, the Jews survived among Christians—were “tolerated” in a manner of speaking—in part because they performed useful economic services for Christian rulers, such as importing precious spices and other goods from the East and paying taxes from the proceeds of commerce and moneylending; and in part because of a doctrine of Saint Augustine that proclaimed that the Jews played an important role in Christian salvation history as a fossil religion: witnesses, by their abjugated state, to the triumph of Christianity, bearers of the Old Testament, and ultimately by their conversion to Christianity at the time of the Second Coming of Christ.
In the Islamic world, the erosive factors described above were less severe. Religious exclusivity was modulated by the multiplicity of non-Muslim religions, primarily Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian. The Qur’an itself, for all its harsh language referring to Christians and Jews, contains the nucleus of a kind of religious pluralism. A Qur’anic verse, “there is no compulsion in religion” (Sura 2:256), was understood to mean that the non-Muslims were not to be forcibly converted. Moreover, as venerated “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab), Jews and Christians were allowed to live securely in their autonomous communities and to develop: they were not fossils. Legally speaking, Jews shared with other non-Muslims the status of dhimmīs, or “protected people.” In return for security, freedom of religion, and communal autonomy, they were obligated by the Qur’an to pay an annual poll tax. They were also subject, in theory, to regulations prescribed in the so-called Pact of ‘Umar and kindred documents, which imposed limitations on their conduct. New houses of worship were not to be built and old ones could not be repaired. They were to act humbly in the presence of Muslims. In their liturgical practice they had to honor the preeminence of Islam. They were further required to differentiate themselves from Muslims by their clothing and by eschewing symbols of honor. Other restrictions excluded them from positions of authority in Muslim government.
De facto, however, these discriminatory regulations, most of them originating outside Islam, were largely honored in the breach, often with the tacit approval of Muslim rulers. The rules limiting the free practice of religion were frequently overridden in practice by the more pragmatic policy of the conquest treaties, which protected houses of worship and guaranteed freedom of religion. The discriminatory restrictions were likely adopted by Christian converts to Islam serving in Muslim government who wished not to be confused with their former coreligionists. Many of the rules of differentiation, it has recently been shown by the historian Milka Levy-Rubin, imitated discriminatory practices in Sasanian society aimed against the lowest class of Zoroastrian society. Whether they originated in Byzantine or in Sasanian practice, however, many of these foreign practices conflicted with the pragmatic spirit of “live and let live” of early Islam and so could often be overlooked or ignored in the day-to-day realities of Muslim and non-Muslim coexistence.
This coexistence is particularly evident in economic life. Jews were not limited to a small range of pursuits isolated from the rest of the population in deplored professions like moneylending, as in Europe...
Jews lent money to Muslims, but the reverse was also true. When, after about the twelfth century, Jewish economic circumstances declined, this was not a confessional phenomenon alone, but one that Jews shared with the Muslim majority, though as a minority group they naturally experienced greater hardship.
Speaking in social-anthropological terms—and this provides an important corrective to the view that Islam is fundamentally oppressive, if not persecutory—the rules of the Pact of ‘Umar and other restrictions served as a means to create and preserve a “natural” hierarchy, in the sense that it characterizes most religious societies in premodern times. In the Islamic hierarchy, everyone had a rank, including non-Muslims, who occupied a low rank, to be sure, but a secure rank nonetheless. Jews occupied a permanent niche within the hierarchical social order of Islam, and, though marginalized, they were not ostracized or expelled. The original and long-lasting ethnic and religious pluralism of Islamic society encouraged a certain tolerance of diversity. The diffusion of hostility among two and in many places three “infidel” religions helped mitigate the Jews’ “otherness” and prevent the emergence of the irrational hatred we call anti-Semitism. As humiliating as the restric- tions in the Pact of ‘Umar were (when successfully enforced), Jews and other non- Muslim People of the Book seem to have grudgingly accepted them because they guaranteed their security, and because they, especially the religious leaders, wished to maintain a separate identity for their own communities. In such an atmosphere, Jews—and not just the philosophers and the physicians among them—fraternized with Muslims on a regular basis with a minimum of hostility. This sociability constituted an essential ingredient in the cultural interchange between Jews and Arabs in the high Middle Ages.
For all these reasons, the Jews of Islam had substantial confidence in the dhimma system. If they kept a low profile and paid their annual poll tax, they could expect to be protected and to be free from economic discrimination—not to be forcefully converted to Islam, massacred, or expelled. To be sure, the system occasionally broke down. A ruler, goaded by pious Islamic clerics, might crack down on the dhimmīs for ignoring the regulations of the Pact of ‘Umar. But serious persecutions were exceptional. The most infamous one occurred in the mid-twelfth century, when the fanatical Muslim Berber Almohads, the “Islamists” of their time, destroyed entire Jewish communities in North Africa and Spain, and forced thousands of Jews and Christians to accept Islam, even as they imposed their own stringent form of Islam upon impious Muslims. Also notorious, because of the rare preservation of detailed Islamic and Christian sources, was the destruction of houses of worship and forced conversions ordered by the “mad” caliph al-Hakim in Egypt and Palestine at the beginning of the eleventh century. Violent, too, was the assassination in 1066 of the “haughty” Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela, successor of his more illustrious father as head of the Jewish community in the Muslim principality of Granada, Spain, and the subsequent “pogrom” against the Jewish quarter of the city, with great loss of life. The incident was apparently triggered by an Arabic poet who wrote a poem in which he called the Jews “apes and pigs,” quoting a Qur’anic motif (e.g., Qur’an 5:60) and excoriating the Jews for violating the code of humility vis-à-vis Islam. Exceptional as it was in targeting the Jews per se, the sorry episode is regularly cited by proponents of the “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history” as a typical example of Islamic anti-Semitism.
During these rare episodes, Jews felt the impact of violence no less than the Ashkenazic Jews of Europe, but they did not preserve them as part of a collective memory of suffering the way their Ashkenazic brethren did. They recognized these as temporary lapses of the dhimma arrangement and trusted that forced conversions, a violation of Qur’anic law, would be reversed after the initial zealotry faded. Doubtless this is one factor among others that explains why Jews in Islamic lands under threat favored “superfi cial conversion” (like the Islamic taqiyya recommended for Muslims faced with persecution for heretical beliefs) over martyrdom, unlike their self-immolating Ashkenazic brethren, who had little hope of being officially allowed to return to Judaism after their baptism. In this respect the Jews of Islamic Spain and other places in the medieval Islamic world where occasional acts of intol- erance threatened Jewish life anticipated the response of Jews in Christian Spain— the so-called Marranos—who converted to Catholicism rather than accept a martyr’s death during and after the pogroms of 1391.
The paradigm summarized here helps explain not only Muslim-Jewish coexistence but also why Jews were so open to Arab-Islamic culture"
--- The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality / Mark R. Cohen
