Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Haggai Ben-Shammai‘s 1988 essay "Jew Hatred in the Islamic Tradition and Koranic Exegesis" 91 rivets on two key examples of Jew hatred in the Koran (and Koranic exegesis)—the "curse against the Jews" (in Koran 2:61, repeated elsewhere), and Koranic verses (most notably, 5:82) rationalizing why Jews were to be held in greater contempt than Christians. Ben-Shammai highlights the centrality of the Jews‘ "abasement and humiliation," and being "laden with God‘s anger" in the corpus of Muslim exegetic literature on Qur‘an 2:61, including the hadith and Koranic commentaries. Despite the literal reference of 2:61 to the Israelites in the wilderness during their exodus from Egypt, he notes,
to all of the Muslim exegetes, without exception, it was absolutely clear that the reference was to the Jews of their day. The Arabic word translated as "pitched upon them" also means, literally, that the "abasement and poverty" were decreed for them forever. The "abasement" is the payment of the poll tax [jizya] and the humiliating ceremony involved. As for the "poverty," this insured their remaining impoverished forever. There are traditions which attribute this interpretation to Muhammad himself.
The terrifying rage decreed upon the Jews forever is connected in the hadith and exegeses to Koran 1:7, where Muslims ask Allah to guide them rightly, not in the path of those who provoke and must bear His wrath. This verse is in turn linked to Koranic verses 5:60 and 5:78, which describe the Jews‘ transformation into apes and swine (5:60), having been "cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary‘s son" (5:78). Ben-Shammai explains the primary reason for this "fearful decree," which resulted in the Jews being "so terribly cursed":
[F]rom time immemorial the Jews rejected God‘s signs, the wonders performed by the prophets. They did not accept the prophecy of Jesus whom the Koran counts among the prophets. But this is all part of the Jews‘ nature: they are by their very nature deceitful and treacherous.
Indeed according to the sira of both Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa‘d, just before subduing the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza, and orchestrating the mass execution of their adult males, Muhammad himself invoked Koran 5:60, addressing these Jews, with hateful disparagement, as "You brothers of monkeys" (Ibn Sa‘d‘s account adds, "and pigs"). Muhammad also repeats the Koranic curse (of verse 5:78) upon the Jews in a canonical hadith, "He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: '...curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary‘."
Although the Jews initially longed for Muhammad to triumph over the pagan Arabs, "Would that Allah send this prophet of whom our Book says that his coming is assured" (according to a tradition cited by Ben-Shammai), realizing that Muhammad was not one of them, Ben-Shammai observes, quoting from Koran 5:64,
they then denied him out of jealousy of the Arabs, though they knew in truth he is the prophet. Furthermore, this Jewish trait brought them to grave heresy. They thought that they would succeed not only in leading humankind astray but also in fooling God . . . (5:64). "The Jews have said, God‘s hand is tied. . . . As often as they light a fire for war, God will extinguish it." Exegetes cite traditions which prove that the Jews always hated the true prophets and put them to death. Therefore they always failed in their wars and their Temple was destroyed time and again.
Ben-Shammai‘s analysis of Koran 5:82 links this verse to Koran 3:54-56, and in turn to the tradition, "The Christians are to be above the Jews until the day of Judgment, for there is no land where the Christians are not above the Jews, neither in the east nor the west. The Jews are degraded in all the lands."...
Ben-Shammai, arguing for prolonged historical continuity, "As has been stated, this tradition (i.e., of more intense Muslim-Jewish hatred) has remained alive to this very day," refers to the travelogue accounts of Edward William Lane, which record Lane‘s observations of Egyptian society, originally published in 1835. But Ben-Shammai fails to discuss a remarkable essay by the polymath Arabic writer al-Jahiz (d. 869), composed a millennium earlier, which bolsters his argument by illustrating the anti-Jewish attitudes already prevalent within an important early (i.e., mid-9th century), Islamic society—the seat of the Abbasid-Baghdadian Caliphate.
Al-Jahiz‘s essay—an anti-Christian polemic believed to have been commissioned by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 861), who inaugurated a literary campaign against the Christians L59— explores the reasons why the Muslim masses prefer the Christians to the Jews...
Al-Jahiz offers two primary explanations for this abiding hostility of the Muslim rank and file toward the Jews. First was the "rancorous" relationship between the early Muslim community, exiles from Mecca, and their Jewish neighbors in Medina:
When the [Muslim] Emigrants [from Mecca] became the neighbors of the Jews [in Medina] . . .the Jews began to envy the Muslims the blessings of their new faith, and the union which resulted after dissension. They proceeded to undermine the belief of our [i.e., the Muslim] masses, and to lead them astray. They aided our enemies and those envious of us. From mere misleading speech and stinging words they plunged into an open declaration of enmity, so that the Muslims mobilized their forces, exerting themselves morally and materially to banish the Jews and destroy them. Their strife became long-drawn and widespread, so that it worked itself up into a rage, and created yet greater animosity and more intensified rancor. The Christians, however, because of their remoteness from Mecca and Medina, did not have to put up with religious controversies, and did not have occasion to stir up trouble, and be involved in war. That was the first cause of our dislike of the Jews, and our partiality toward the Christians.
However, al-Jahiz then identifies as "the most potent cause" of this particular animus toward the Jews, Koran 5:82, and its interpretation by the contemporary (i.e., mid-ninth-century) Muslim masses. It is also worth noting that al-Jahiz (described as a "skeptic," who harbored "indifferent views toward religion in general") included these sociological observations that reveal the interface between Islamic religious and indigenous (and indigenous ethnic/racial discriminatory attitudes toward) Jews expressed a millennium before any secular Western European antisemitic ideologies would be exported to the Muslim Near East:
Our people [the Muslims] observing thus the occupations of the Jews and the Christians concluded that the religion of the Jews must compare unfavorably as do their professions, and that their unbelief must be the foulest of all, since they are the filthiest of all nations. Why the Christians, ugly as they are, are physically less repulsive than the Jews may be explained by the fact that the Jews, by not intermarrying, have intensified the offensiveness of their features. Exotic elements have not mingled with them; neither have males of alien races had intercourse with their women, nor have their men cohabited with females of a foreign stock. The Jewish race therefore has been denied high mental qualities, sound physique, and superior lactation. The same results obtain when horses, camels, donkeys, and pigeons are inbred.
Al-Jahiz‘s contention that the Muslims harbored greater enmity toward the Jews than the Christians is supported by the independent observations of another Arab author active during the beginning of the ninth century in Iraq, the Sufi theologian al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857). He maintained that because the Jews stubbornly denied Muhammad‘s truth, they were "in the eyes of the Muslims worse than the Christians."
One thousand years later, Lane‘s testimony on the difference between the attitude of Egyptian Muslims toward the Jews and the Christians again highlights the influence of Koran 5:82:
They [the Jews] are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general, and they are said to bear a more inveterate hatred than any other people to the Muslims and the Muslim religion. It is said, in the Koran [quoting 5:82] "Thou shalt surely find the most violent all men to those who have believed to be the Jews . . . "
Lane further notes:
It is a common saying among the Muslims in this country, "Such one hates me with the hate of the Jews." We cannot wonder, then, that the Jews are detested far more than are the Christians. Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten for merely passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed: but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering disrespectful words against the Koran or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and, after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.
