so what did the muslims do for the jews ? these days there's a great deal of bad blood between
muslims and jews particularly over the occupation of Palestine and the Middle East .
but historically what did the muslims do for the jews if anything at all ?
and to answer this question i want to turn to a jewish historian , a professor of history
who specializes in the relationship between jews and islam in the early centuries of islam .
and he gave a fascinating lecture at SOAS (the School of African Oriental Studies)
here in london a couple of years ago . and i just wanted to read you his lecture because this man is
an expert on this subject . one of the few people in the world who writes as a jew about jewry
and had experienced the jews under islam in the seventh eighth and ninth centuries . a lot of what
he says would be very surprising and certainly surprising to me when i first came across this
lecture . so his name is David J. Wasserstein if i pronounce it right .
he's a professor now in the united states of history and judaism .
so he asks in his lecture : so what did the Muslims do for the Jews ? he says : Islam saved Jewry .
this is an unpopular discomforting claim in the modern world but it is a historical truth . the
argument for it is double . 1- in 570 CE when the prophet Muhammad was born , the Jews and
Judaism were on the way to oblivion . and 2- the coming of Islam saved them , providing a new
context in which they not only survived but flourished laying foundations for subsequent
jewish cultural prosperity also in christendom through the medieval period into the modern world .
by the fourth century , Christianity had become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire one aspect
of this success was opposition to rival faiths including Judaism along with massive
conversions of members of such faiths sometimes by force to Christianity . much of our testimony about
jewish existence in the roman empire from this time consists of accounts of these conversions .
great and permanent reductions in numbers through conversion between the fourth and
seventh century brought with them a gradual but relentless whittling away of their status
rights social and economic existence of jews all over the roman empire . a long series of
enactments deprived jewish people of their rights as citizens , prevented them
from filling their religious obligations and excluded them from the society of their fellows .
this went along with a centuries-long military and political struggle with Persia . as a tiny
element in the christian world , the jews should not have been affected by this broad political issue
yet it affected them critically because the persian empire at this time included
Babylon . now Iraq at the time home to the world's greatest concentration of jews
and is also the greatest center of jewish intellectual life . the most
important single work of the jewish world for over 3000 years apart from the bible
was the talmud coming into being in Babylon . the struggle between persia and byzantium in our
period led increasingly to a separation between the jews under Byzantine Christian rule and Jews
under Persian rule . beyond all this , the Jews who lived under christian rules seem to have lost
the knowledge of their own culturally pacific languages (Hebrew and Aramaic) and have taken
on the use of Latin or Greek or other non-jewish local languages . this in turn meant that they also
lost access to central literary works of jewish culture : the torah , mishna , poetry , midrash even
liturgy . the loss of the unifying force represented by language was a major step towards assimilation
and disappearance . in these circumstances with contact with the one place where jewish cultural
life prospered in Babylon , cut off by conflict with persia , jewish life in the christian world
was simply a pale shadow of what it had been three or four centuries earlier , it was doomed . had Islam
not come along , the conflict with persia would have continued . the separation between western judaism ,
battle christendom and babylonian judaism that of mesopotamia would have intensified . jewry in
the west would have declined to disappearance . and jewry in the east would have become just another
oriental cult . but all this was prevented by the rise of Islam . the Islamic conquests of the seventh
century changed the world and did so a dramatic wide-ranging and permanent effect for the jews .
within a century of the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 ,
Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where jews lived , from Spain Eastward
across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the Eastern frontier of Iran and beyond . almost
all the jews in the world were now ruled by islam . this new situation transformed jewish experience ,
their fortunes changed in legal demographic , social , religious , political , geographic , economic , linguistic
and cultural terms , all for the better . first , things improve politically . almost
everywhere in christendom where jews had lived now form part of the same political
space as Babylon , Cordoba and Basra lay in the same political world . the old frontier between
the vital center in Babylonia and the jews of the Mediterranean basin was swept away forever .
political change was partnered by change in the legal status of the jewish population . although
it is not always clear what happened during the muslim conquest one thing is certain , the result
of the conquest was by and large to make the jews second-class citizens . now this should not
be misunderstood , to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing than to be not a citizen
at all . for the most part these jews (second-class citizenship) represented a major advance .
in Visigothic Spain for example : shortly before the muslim conquest in 711 , the jews had seen their
children removed from them and forcibly converted to christianity and had themselves been enslaved .
in the developing islamic societies of the classical and medieval periods ,
being a jew meant belonging to a category defined under law . enjoying certain rights and protections
alongside various obligations . these rights and protections were not as extensive or as generous
as those enjoyed by muslims and the obligations were greater but for the first few centuries
the muslims themselves were a minority and the practical differences were not at all that great .
along with legal near equality came social and economic equality , jews were not confined to
ghettos either literally or in terms of economic activity . the societies of islam were in effect
open societies . in religious terms too jews enjoyed virtually full freedom . they might not build many
new synagogues in theory and they might not make too many public professions of their faith
but there was no really significant restriction on the practice of their religion .
along with internal legal autonomy , they also enjoyed
formal representation through their leaders of their own before the authorities of the state
imperfect and often not quite as rosy as this might sound , it was at least the broad norm .
the political unity brought by the new islamic world empire did not last but it created
a vast islamic world civilization similar to the older christian civilization that it replaced .
within this huge area , jews lived and enjoyed broadly similar status and rights everywhere .
they could move around , maintain contacts and develop their identity as jews .
a great new expansion of trade from the 9th century onwards brought the spanish jews
like the muslims into touch with the jews and the muslims even of India . now he continues here with
some comments on the linguistic side of their experience where the arabs moved over to arabic
very rapidly he says and how that brought the jews into more direct contact with the
islamic civilization and he says the jews of the islamic world developed an entirely new culture
which differ from their culture before islam in terms of language and cultural forms .
and instead of being concerned primarily with religion , the new jewish culture of the islamic
world mixed the religious and the secular to a high degree and he talks about how like their
neighbors the jews wrote in arabic as well as their own kind of arabic jewish language as well a
kind of judeo arabic came into being . and he talks about some of the greatest poetry written
in hebrew since the bible comes from that period . he mentions Maimonides (the great Maimonides)
and many more people . and then he goes on to talk about the patronage of jews by the muslim
rulers , and then how this period of great cultural success for the jews and the arab muslims
effectively came to a close by the year 1300 he says . and then i'll just read what he says in
conclusion : jewish cultural identity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of
Muslim , Arabic cultural prosperity . when Muslim Arabic culture thrived so did that of the Jews .
when muslim arabic culture declined (which it did obviously) so did that of them (of the jews) .
in the case of the jews however , the cultural capital thus created also served as the seed
bed of further growth elsewhere in Christian Spain and in the Christian World more generally .
he's alluding there of course to the direct influence on the european renaissance
of the jewish and islamic culture . something that's not really being acknowledged in the west the
indebtedness of the western renaissance to jewish and islamic learning particularly in
Spain . and he concludes : the islamic world was not the only source of inspiration for the jewish
cultural revival that came later in the christian Europe but it certainly was a major contributor to
that development . its significance cannot be overestimated . so we cannot overestimate the
significance of the islamic world for the jewish cultural revival and what came later in christian
europe . so that is 90 percent of the lecture . David J Wasserstein is a professor of jewish
studies and history at vanderbilt university . and that's from his lecture at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) a couple of
years ago . so contrary to our current experience of antagonism and even hatred and violence between
zionist jews and many muslims which has now affected us all globally . historically the jews
found a home and not just to practice their faith but to flourish economically and culturally and
reach great heights in poetry and other writing particularly in Islamic Spain and this propelled
northwards and ignited the European renaissance and of course the rest is history . so what did the
muslims do for the jews ? well they saved jewry . without islam according to this professor ,
judaism was doomed . and this is a fact of history that we need to remember particularly in the
serious nastiness and conflict that has only really come about in the last
less than 100 years because of political events in the middle east .
so i hope you found that as interesting as i did . and until next time