One of the most horrifying aspects of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza—which the secretary general of the Norwegian refugee council considers “among the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age”—is that it is being unleashed on a nation which is innocent of the atrocities Jews suffered in the past.
It was the Christian West—the biggest patron of Israel today—which had historically tyrannised the Jews. Historian Gerard Sloyan points out in his essay, ‘Christian Persecution of Jews over the Centuries’, that modern anti-semitism originated in “the church’s preaching and its catechising”. Arno Mayer argues in his book Why did the heavens not darken? that the attack on Jews during the First Crusade (1096-1099) “set a disastrous precedent, depositing a fatal poison in the European psyche and imagination”.
The ‘fatal poison’, of course, was the baseless accusation that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus which, according to scholar Solomon Grayzel, “consigned them to perpetual servitude”. Grayzel’s study reveals how papal letters and conciliar decrees urged Christian rulers to ensure “that the Jews will not dare to raise their neck, bowed under the yoke of perpetual slavery, against the reverence of the Christian faith”. One such decree by Pope Innocent III in 1215 forbade any social or business interaction between Jews and Christians throughout the Christian world. A consequence of this was the burning of 20 cartloads of the Jewish holy book Talmud in Paris in 1242.
Before that, in 1182, Philip Augustus had expelled the Jews from France. They were readmitted in 1198 after agreeing to pay a variety of extortionate taxes and duties. In 1290, it was the turn of Edward I to banish Jews from England. They went to France only to be purged again in 1306 by Philip IV. Their misery, however, did not end there. Pope John XXII in 1322 he evicted all of them from his sovereign territory, the Comtat Venaissin. Meanwhile, Philip’s son Louis offered some respite by allowing Jews back into France in 1315, but they were expelled again in 1394.
In 1391, one of the worst anti-semitic pogroms in Jewish history was perpetrated in the Iberian cities of Castile and Aragon as a precursor to the ouster of Jews from Spain in 1492 on the orders of Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Their infamous Alhambra decree cited Jewish attempts “to subvert and to draw away faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith” as the main reason for the expulsion. The fleeing Jews were warned that the death penalty awaited them “without trial, sentence, or declaration” if they returned.
As is evident, it was the brazen misinterpretation of Christianity that engendered these atrocities and ultimately led to the horrific holocaust during World War II. But there was another interesting outcome of Christian anti-semitism—the trust that developed between Jews and Muslims. This was brought out by the British-American historian Bernard Lewis in his 1968 article, ‘The Pro-Islamic Jews’. Lewis explained that European Jews looked back nostalgically to the tolerance of mediaeval Islam because their Christian compatriots deprived them of the freedom and equality they had enjoyed under Muslims. Endorsing this view in his essay, ‘The Golden Age of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality’, historian Mark Cohen affirms that the several centuries of the Islamic high middle ages “were indeed a golden age” for the Jews. A more detailed account of Muslim-Jewish conviviality can be found in historian Alan Mikhail’s recent book, God’s Shadow: The Ottoman Sultan Who Shaped The Modern World. Mikhail dedicates an entire chapter to highlight the warmth with which Muslims welcomed Jews after Christians expelled them. He writes, quoting a Jewish refugee, that when all Christian nations were uprooting the Jews, the Ottoman empire (which included Palestine) was the only Mediterranean locale where “their weary feet could find rest”, thanks to Sultan Bayezit II’s 1492 decree that welcomed them to his empire.
This helped Jews establish in the Muslim empire “the only Jewish majority city for two thousand years”—the port of Salonica, now the Greek city of Thessaloniki. Over the next four centuries, Salonica grew into such a huge centre of Jewish culture that it was called the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’. Cairo too became an important centre of Sephardic learning, as did the Palestinian town of Safed which boasted 21 synagogues and 18 Talmudic colleges. According to Benson Bobrick, even 8th-century Baghdad had 10 rabbinical schools and 23 synagogues and a Talmudic institute which “helped disseminate the rabbinical tradition into southern Europe”. More recently, during the holocaust, some Muslims risked their lives to protect Jews. In an exhibition in a New York synagogue in 2017 to highlight this, holocaust survivor Johanna Neumann remarked: “What [the Muslims] did, many European nations didn’t do.”
It was this accommodative Islamic spirit that forced Palestinians to accept the inequitable division of their country by the UN in 1947 even though they considered it illegal. But despite this recognition of Israel’s right to exist on a large portion of their land, the Palestinians are not being allowed to establish their independent state on the remaining land.
If this gross injustice defies a remedy it is because the Christian West continues to uncritically back the Jewish state’s invocation of mythic theology to subjugate, dispossess, starve and now obliterate Palestinians in total violation of international law and Judeo-Christian values.
(Views are personal)
A Faizur Rahman, Secretary general, Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought
(themoderates2020@gmail.com)
(On X @FaizEngineer)