CONCLUSION

IN THIS BOOK, I have sought to explain why Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Christian relations followed strikingly different courses in the Middle Ages. I have shown how, in the lands of Christendom, relations, favorable in the early Middle Ages, deteriorated beginning with the Crusades and especially in the thirteenth century, until one can speak of a “persecuting society.”

In Islam, Jews and Christians, though protected as dhimmīs, were considered infidels and suffered humiliation and contemptuous treatment from the dominant group. This was in keeping with their religious inferiority and lowly rank in the hierarchy of Muslim society. Nonetheless, in day-to-day life, the Jews of Islam regularly crossed boundaries in the hierarchy to participate—however temporarily and, at times, tenuously—as virtual equals with Muslims of similar category. Though always at risk of incurring Muslim wrath and even persecution, Jews, nonetheless, enjoyed substantial security during the formative and classical periods of Islam.

According to the Islamic “law of the land,” the sharī'a [holy law], the dhimmī enjoyed a kind of citizenship, second class and unequal though it was.¹ The jurisdiction claimed by Islam over the Jewish and Christian communities—complementing the grant of internal autonomy (the right, inherited from pre-Islamic regimes in the Near East, “to live by their ancestral laws”)—gave non-Muslims an aura of embeddedness in society. This was less true for Jews living in Latin Christian lands, where competing legal systems complicated their status and where the “law of utility” inexorably led to arbitrariness and eventually to isolation of the Jews into a special category of persons, legally possessed by this or that ruling authority.

In the economic sphere, the Jews of Islam apparently enjoyed parity with their counterparts belonging to the Islamic umma. Jewishness hardly impeded their integration into the nonconfessional Islamic marketplace, at both its local and international levels. Neither merchant status (which, in Islam, unlike Christendom, was a high status) nor Jewish credit activities carried the problematic associations that plagued the Jewish-Christian relationship in the West. The demand of Islamic law that dhimmīs remain subordinate in partnerships formed with Muslims was often ignored, as proved by the documents of the Cairo Geniza. Even when observed, the restriction may have represented little more than a minor irritant to the dhimmī partner.

Occupational integration and economic achievement were sometimes hazardous. Success tempted some Jews (and Christians) to feel so much at home outside the niche assigned them by their lowly religious rank that they frequently ignored the sumptuary restrictions of the dhimma. Seeming to acquiesce, many a Muslim ruler overlooked these flagrant violations of the stipulations of the Pact of 'Umar. This combination of circumstances often created resentment in Muslims, exacerbating latent religious contempt and leading to acts of oppression.

The double-edged sword in Muslim-dhimmī relations is exemplified in the highest-status category in which Jews and Christians had visibility: government service. In this domain divergence between theory and practice was considerably more pronounced than in commerce. As kātibs (government clerks), not to speak of the higher-status position of chief minister, dhimmīs commanded authority over Muslims in a way that grossly flouted the rules of proper subordination.² Many of the most painful episodes of oppression and persecution Jews and Christians experienced were triggered by Muslim exasperation at their exploitation of the prerogatives of their category in a manner totally at variance with the limitations imposed by their religious rank.

In medicine, where dhimmīs were similarly prominent, this does not seem to have been so problematic, perhaps because the intrinsic benefits of medical healing overrode the (temporary) indignity of dependency upon the infidel. Similarly mitigating must have been the long tradition—pre-Islamic, in fact—of transmission of Greek medical knowledge by non-Muslim (particularly, Christian) physicians. In addition, Muslims, early on, lost whatever inferiority they might have felt toward non-Muslim transmitters of the Galenic corpus as they became their peers, thanks to newly translated Greek medical works. The contrast with northern Europe is stark. There, the general backwardness in medical knowledge in the early Middle Ages catapulted the Jewish physician to a place of superiority and made Christians jealous, often to the point of suspecting the Jewish doctor of inimical practices toward his Christian patient. Unfortunately, this damaging stereotype did not disappear after Christian medical knowledge improved, for by then the Jews as a group had come to be seen as allies of the Devil.

The situation of the Jewish infidel in Latin Christendom is set in bolder relief via the comparison drawn in this book. It was less equivocal and more threatened than that of the Jewish infidel in Islam. In the Latin West, Jewish activity in the economic realm, especially in the High and later Latin Middle Ages, intensified Christianity’s inherent anti-Jewish feelings. The barriers against social interaction were raised higher and were less easily traversed. Also, deeply engrained theological hatred had a profoundly negative impact on law and policy that only grew over time.

The liberal Jewish privileges of the Carolingian era began to give way in the twelfth century to restriction on movement, to tightening of control over the Jews (the beginnings of “Jewish serfdom”), to unprecedented violence, and to incipient expulsions. The Christian polemical theme of divine rejection and Jewish inferiority assumed new momentum.

Writing at the end of the twelfth century, a prominent north European rabbi registered his protest against one aspect of the deterioration in Jewish status, the restriction on movement. Commenting in one of the Tosafot (glosses on Rashi and the Talmud), part of a discussion of the third-century dictum that Jews must obey the “law of the kingdom,” Rabbi Isaac b. Samuel of Dampierre (in Champagne) stated:

This case is not in the nature of the “law of the kingdom” [which must be respected], but rather in that of the “robbery of the kingdom.” For we have seen in the countries around us that Jews have had the right to reside wherever they wished, like the nobles [kemo parashim, the Hebrew word for horseback-riding fighters, hence “knights”], the law of the kingdom being that the ruler should not seize the property of Jews who left his town. This was indeed the practice in all of Burgundy. Therefore, if there is a regime which tries to alter the law and make a new law unto itself, this is not to be considered the “law of the kingdom,” for this is not proper law at all.³

The Jews of Islam in the classical period seem not to have felt the need to protest oppression in the same way as R. Isaac of Dampierre. After all, they mingled more freely than their Ashkenazic brethren with merchants, courtiers, scholars, and physicians from the dominant religious group. They did not suffer restrictions on their freedom of movement. And they did not experience a degradation in legal status similar to the Jewish serfdom of Latin Europe. Rather, Jews seem to have accepted their lowly rank as the natural order of things. This was true, in part, because Islam devoted somewhat less polemical energy than did Christianity to the theme of divine rejection. It was true, partly, because the Jews shared their lowly religious rank with the numerically superior Christians. It resulted, too, from the circumstance that the Muslim social order permitted the Jews a certain degree of beneficial marginality: they sampled high status in government service, medicine, and commerce often enough to satisfy the human yearning to shake off the yoke of subordination. More important, the elite Jews of Islam enjoyed among themselves a truly aristocratic status and culture: the Judaeo-Arabic courtier society of Muslim Spain and other Arab lands, a calque of the Arabic-Islamic high society well known to them from firsthand experience.

To be sure, the agony of galut persisted for the Jews of Islam. The pain of galut came home anew to the Jews of Islam with each episode of persecution. These were few and far between in our period, however. The galut of Ishmael, unlike that of Edom, stopped short of exclusion, which rendered it more bearable. Some, in fact (particularily in Muslim Spain before the Almohad invasion) found it quite bearable. When, around 1140, the celebrated Spanish Hebrew poet Judah ha-Levi abandoned his native land for the Holy Land—actualizing the theoretical verses of what moderns have called his “Zionide” poems—some of his Jewish friends were shocked, and we may imagine that his move challenged many to question their comfortable accommodation to the Arabic-Islamic world.⁴ Ha-Levi’s act of rejection of Andalusian Jewish complacency assumed terrifying corroboration less than a decade later, when the Almohads swept across the Straits of Gibraltar, forcing Jews and Christians in their path to choose between Islam and the sword.

Nonetheless, the Jews (those who were not killed or did not manage to escape to safer territory) responded to the persecution with dissembling acceptance of the Islamic religion while awaiting enforcement anew of the categorically strict law against forced conversion and the predictable restoration of the status quo ante. In the “persecuting society” of Christendom, to use R. I. Moore’s term, the Jews resisted their dire fate with vigorous anti-Christian polemic and, when called on, with martyrdom. In Islam, less persecutory by circumstance if not in part by nature, the Jews assumed a more acquiescent posture toward their periodic difficulties.

This is not to say that the Jews of Islam abided oppression or that they accepted it with equanimity. They simply saw their oppression differently than the Jews of Christendom.⁵ To take the point further, let us compare the statement of Rabbi Isaac b. Samuel of Dampierre with that of Maimonides, his contemporary in Egypt. The passage deserves our attention because it is a continuation of the crucial passage in which the great sage of Old Cairo writes, regarding “the nation of Ishmael”: “no nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing, humiliating, and hating us.” Ruminating on Islamic oppression and about the danger to the Jews of Yemen of following the local Jewish messianic pretender, he writes:

Daniel, too has depicted our humiliation [dhull] and debasement [iṣghār] till we would become “like the dust in the threshing” [2 Kings 13:7]. He was describing none other than our condition under the rule of Ishmael—may it speedily be vanquished—when he said, “And some of the host and of the stars it cast down to the ground, and trampled upon them” [Daniel 8:10]. Although we have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear, and have become as in the words of the prophet [the Psalmist], “But I am as a deaf man, I hear not, and I am as a dumb man that opens not his mouth” [Psalm 38:14], and have done as our sages of blessed memory have instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ishmael, listening and remaining silent. ... In spite of all this, we are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness and their outbursts at any time. On the contrary, the more we suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose to act belligerently toward us. Thus David depicted our plight: “I am at peace, but when I speak, they are for war” [Psalm 120:7]. How much worse it would be if we were to stir up a commotion and claim before them dominion [mulk], with ranting and raving. Then indeed we would be plunging ourselves into destruction.⁶

Maimonides’ protest against oppression takes a different tack from that of Rabbi Isaac. However unrealistically, the French Tosafist seems to insist on a kind of entitlement to the privileges accorded nobles.⁷ The Egyptian legist and philosopher acquiesces to the Jews’ lowly place in society, the dhimma system, with its combination of humble rank and protection. What angers Maimonides is that, lately (in Almohad North Africa and Spain and now in Yemen), some Muslims had violated their own commitment to the bargain by their unwonted persecution. The present danger for the Jews of Yemen was that they might succumb to the blandishments of the local self-proclaimed Jewish messiah, and this inversion of the mutually accepted hierarchy of the social order in Islam would bring the axe down on them even more fiercely.

Physician to the Muslim ruling elite, intellectual equal and friend of many a Muslim scholar, head of the Jews of the Egypt—a position of high standing in the Islamic court—and illustrious leader of the aristocratic elite within the Jewish community, Maimonides sensed that times were changing, that the old, relatively comfortable operation of the dhimma system had entered a period of crisis.

People who live in periods of transition usually are ignorant of the change. It is historians who, with the benefit of hindsight, impose this construct on the past. Maimonides—who had witnessed the Almohad storm from close up, who knew about the oppression of Jews in nearby Yemen, and who probably observed that the Crusader advent to the Middle East had begun to shake the self-confidence of Islam—seems (we know this explicitly from other of his writings) to have intuited that one era was coming to a close and that another, this one less secure for the Jews, was beginning. It is this perception, too, that seems to have given rise—among Jewish refugees from Almohad persecution living in the, at that time, safer haven of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain—to a new Jewish saying (a purposeful distortion of an ancient midrashic utterance): “Better [to live] under Edom [Christendom] than under Ishmael [Islam].”⁸ The extent to which one can speak historically of deterioration in the Muslim world simulating if not rivaling the gloomy position of the Jews in medieval Christendom, and the degree to which one might justifiably apply the adjective lachrymose to the life and history of the Jews of Islam in recent centuries, are matters beyond the scope of this book.