NOTES
PREFACE
1. Chapter 10 presents evidence that supports this—the still regnant, though in recent years vigorously challenged—view.
2. “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 38 (1986), 125-37; repr. in The Solomon Goldman Lectures, ed. Byron L. Sherwin and Michael Carasik (Chicago, 1990), 5:20-32; trans. into Hebrew in Zemanim: A Historical Quarterly (Tel-Aviv University) 9, no. 36 (Winter 1990), 52-61; to appear in a revised and expanded version as a chapter in Muslim Authors on Jews and Judaism (Hebrew), ed’. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History (Jerusalem), forthcoming.
3. “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History,” Tikkun (May-June 1991), 55-60.
4. See, for instance, the apposite remarks of Juan R. I. Cole in the introductory paragraph of his “Of Crowds and Empires: Afro-Asian Riots and European Expansion, 1857-1882,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 106.
5. This book fills an important gap in the secondary literature. In many ways it complements the new, narrative history of Jewish life in medieval Latin Europe by Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), which does not, however, deal comparatively with its subject. Stow’s book reached me some two months after I had submitted the manuscript of my own book to be considered for publication. I was pleased to find many of the ideas about medieval Jewish-Christian relations that I had developed as a result of my comparative research confirmed by this specialist in Jewish-Christian relations.
6. For further readings beyond works I cite in my notes, see my bibliographical essay, “The Jews under Islam: From the Rise of Islam to Sabbatai Zevi,” which, since its original publication in Bibliographical Essays in Medieval Jewish Studies (New York, 1976), has been updated twice: Princeton Near East Paper 32 (Princeton, N.J., Program in Near Eastern Studies, 1981); and in Sephardic Studies in the University, ed. Jane S. Gerber (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 43-119. For the Jews of Christendom, see the bibliographical essays by Ivan G. Marcus and by Kenneth Stow in Bibliographical Essays in Medieval Jewish Studies, and the more recent bibliography in Stow's Alienated Minority.
INTRODUCTION
1. Salo W. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” The Menorah Journal 14, no. 6 (June 1928), 515-26, at the end: “Surely it is time to break with the lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe, and to adopt a view more in accord with historic truth.” Essay repr. in The Menorah Treasury, ed. Leo W. Schwarz (Philadelphia, 1964), 50-63. In later writings, Baron called it “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” The term lachrymose school of Jewish history (the coinage imprecisely attributed to Israeli historians who of late have begun to challenge this approach) recently achieved broad, popular exposure, thanks to an article in Newsweek magazine, “Rethinking Jewish History,” May 18, 1992, 38; compare the corrective letter to the editor, ibid., June 22, 1992, 6, by Robert Liberles, who is writing a biography of Salo Baron.
In his classic history of Jewish persecutions, Sefer ha-dema'ot [Book of Tears] (Berlin, 1924-26), Simon Bernfeld was only able to fill a very few pages of the three volumes on the topic, “Muhammad and Islam” (1:114-34). Bernfeld’s proclivity for finding persecution mainly under Christendom (and little under Islam) was consistent with the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” as Salo Baron coined the term, but also in part a result of the availability of sources.
2. See Preface, note 3.
3. Moses ben Maimon, The Epistle to Yemen, trans. in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia, 1979), 241 (trans. slightly altered here). The translation in A. Halkin and D. Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides (Philadelphia, 1985), 126, varies a bit. For instance, the Arabic, al-tafaqquh fī sharrinā, is rendered “passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us.” Stillman’s rendition is somewhat closer to the Arabic text, as is also the Hebrew translation of J. Kafiḥ, Iggeret teiman, in his Iggeret le-rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon (Jerusalem, 1972), 53.
4. Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Dhimma,” 229.
5. Ibid., 230 (emphasis added).
6. H. H. Ben-Sasson, Peraqim be-toledot ha-yehudim bi-mei ha-beinayim [On Jewish History in the Middle Ages] (Tel Aviv, 1969), 36 (trans. mine).
7. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 85.
8. Ibid.; compare p. 19.
9. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 5 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967-88), 2:277-78.
10. Norman A. Stillman, “Antisemitism in the Contemporary Arab World,” in Antisemitism in the Contemporary World, ed. Michael Curtis (Boulder, Colo., 1986), 73.
11. Persecution and Toleration: Papers Read at the Twenty-Second Summer Meeting and the Twenty-Third Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. W. J. Sheils ([Oxford], 1984), xiii.
12. It is generally agreed among historians that beginning in the thirteenth century, the Islamic world entered a long period of political, economic, and cultural decline, and that Jewish fortunes ebbed along with the general tide. S. D. Goitein writes: “The abject economic and general conditions of the Jewish masses in most Arabic-speaking countries, which have impressed countless visitors in modern times, are the outcome of the general decline of these countries, and a corollary of the unfavorable socio-religious position of the non-Muslims” (Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages [New York, 1955], 72). Normal Stillman, echoing scholarly consensus, appropriately calls the era ushered in by the thirteenth century a “long twilight” (Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 64) following “the best years,” from 900 to 1200 (ibid., 40). The extended downturn was punctuated by a short intermission in Iraq and Iran during the second half of the thirteenth century, when a few Jewish courtiers flourished under the relatively tolerant rule of the pagan Mongol conquerors; this indulgence of non-Muslims ended abruptly with the Mongols’ conversion to Islam in 1295. The other interruption was the brief but dramatic recovery during what some have called the “second Golden Age” in the orbit of Turkish rule in the sixteenth century. Here, too, characteristically, Jewish revival paralleled, even contributed to, an upswing in the general society.
13. Some suggestive lines of thinking about Polish Jewry that could be applied in such a comparative study are to be found, for instance, in Gershon Hundert’s “An Advantage to Peculiarity? The Case of the Polish Commonwealth,” AJS Review 6 (1981), 21-38.
14. William C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 110-12, cogently explains the reasons for the improved status of Midi Jewry.
CHAPTER ONE
MYTH AND COUNTERMYTH
1. A famous letter from Isaac Tzarfati—a Jew from France living in Turkey in the fifteenth century, encouraging his brethren back home to abandon Christian persecution for Islamic refuge—was surely but one of many means by which Ottoman largess became known to Jews in the West. There is an English translation of the letter in Franz Kobler, Letters of Jews through the Ages (Philadelphia, 1952), 1:283-85. The same favorable assessment of benevolent Ottoman rulers, as distinguished from persecutory Christians, appears in Ottoman rabbinic responsa (responses to questions on Jewish law) of the sixteenth century and, in turn, in the chronicle of the Egyptian Jewish historian Joseph Sambari in the seventeenth century. See also, Shimon Stober, “The Chronologies of the Muslim Kingdoms in Sambari’s Chronicle Divrei Yoseph” (Hebrew), in Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. A. Mirsky et al. (Jerusalem, 1988), 418-19.
2. See Franz Delitzsch, Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Poësie vom Abschluss der heiligen Schriften Alten Bundes bis auf die neueste Zeit (Leipzig, 1836), 44; and Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989), 61.
3. Graetz, A History of the Jews (New York, 1894), 3:53. The translation was slightly revised here to add the words “in Christendom” found both in the German original, Geschichte der Juden, 3d ed. (Leipzig, 1895), 5:65, and in the popular German abridged edition, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden von Heinrich Graetz (1923; repr. Munich, 1985), 3:223. This passage is also cited by Jane S. Gerber in “Reconsiderations of Sephardic History: The Origin of the Image of the Golden Age of Muslim-Jewish Relations,” in The Solomon Goldman Lectures, ed. Nathaniel Stampfer (Chicago, 1985), 4:90.
4. Graetz, History of the Jews, 3:236. I have restored in the translation some phrases deleted from Geschichte der Juden, 5:327. Ivan G. Marcus has dealt with “the Sephardic mystique” and its left hand, the denigration of Ashkenazic culture, in “Beyond the Sephardic Mystique,” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 1 (1985), 35-53. See also, Schorsch, “Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” 47-66.
5. For instance, Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), a leading Jewish Orientalist, wrote in 1910: “It is undeniable that, in this earliest phase of the development of Islamic law, the spirit of tolerance permeated the instructions that Muslim conquerors were given for dealing with the subjugated adherents of other religions. What today resembles religious toleration in the constitutional practice of Islamic states—features in the public law of Islam often noted by eighteenth-century travelers—goes back to the principle of the free practice of religion by non-Muslim monotheists, stated in the first half of the seventh century.” Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori (Princeton, N.J., 1981), 33 (German orig. Vorlesungen über den Islam [Heidelberg, 1910]). See also, Cohen, “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” 127; and, idem, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History,” 55.
6. Bernard Lewis puts it succinctly when he writes that Jewish scholars of the nineteenth century used the myth of Spanish-Islamic tolerance “as a stick with which to beat their Christian neighbors.” Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 77. In an earlier publication, Lewis writes that Jews used the myth “as a reproach to Christians.” “The Pro-Islamic Jews,” Judaism 17 (1968), 391-404; repr. in Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (London, 1973), 123-37. See also, more recently, Gerber, “Reconsiderations of Sephardic History.”
7. Kayser, The Life and Time of Jehudah Halevi, trans. from the German by Frank Gaynor (New York, 1949), 50.
8. Eliyahu Ashtor, Qorot he-yehudim bi-sefarad ha-muslimit [History of the Jews in Muslim Spain], 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1960—66); English trans., The Jews of Moslem Spain, trans. Aaron Klein and Jenny Machlowitz Klein, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1973-84).
9. André N. Chouraqui, Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa, trans. Michael M. Bernet (Philadelphia, 1968; French orig., Paris, 1952), 53-54. Alfred Morabia, a native of Egypt, writes in a similar vein in his “About Relations between Judaism and Islam throughout History,” Alliance Review 28, no. 48 (Fall 1978), 13-19; and 29, no. 49 (Fall 1980), 9-13.
10. Isacque Graeber and Steuart Henderson Britt, eds. (Westport, Conn., 1942). A bevy of scholars, including distinguished social scientists, set forth “the first attempt to utilize the findings of the various social scientists with respect to the practical issues that face both Jew and non-Jew.” Graeber and Britt, p. v.
11. Graeber and Britt, 2. Compare the following observation of the sociologist J. O. Hertzler: “Whatever peace and happiness the Jews enjoyed in non-Christian lands, as in Spain under the Moors, was destroyed the very moment that Christianity conquered. As a notable example one need only mention an institution like the Inquisition.” Graeber and Britt, 69.
12. Samuel Rosenblatt, “The Jews and Islam,” in Essays on Antisemitism, ed. Koppel S. Pinson, 2d ed. (New York, 1946), 112-20. Rosenblatt quotes (120) A. de Gobineau: “If one separates religious doctrine from political necessity, which has often spoken and acted in its name, there is no religion more tolerant—one might even say more indifferent, regarding the faith of men than Islam. . . . The religious factor is only invoked as a pretense but in reality remains outside.”
13. Paul E. Grosser and Edwin G. Halperin, The Causes and Effects of Anti-Semitism: The Dimensions of a Prejudice (An Analysis and Chronology of 1900 Years of Anti-Semitic Attitudes and Practices) (New York, 1978), 365-89. As the compilers write in their introduction, they did so because, one, Muslim anti-Jewishness was “qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from the anti-Semitism of the Christian/Western World”; and, two, the Jew, “for the most part [was] protected by law from assault almost on a par with his neighbors” (7). In a note to the introduction, they add: “There is general agreement among historians that the golden age of the Islamic Empire was also a golden age for Jews living under Islamic rule. Jewish historians, Arab historians, historians specializing in Jewish or Arabic history and other general historians share this view” (12).
14. Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Philadelphia, 1939), 391-92, 409-10.
15. Emil Zaidan, a Christian Arab, published an essay in the Egyptian monthly, Al-hilāl 22, no. 4 (January 1914), 243-56, entitled Al-yahūd fi’l-ta’rīkh [the Jews in History]. The author contrasts the oppression and suffering of the Jews under Greek, Roman, and, particularly, Christian rule with the Jewish “Golden Age, especially in Muslim Spain” ['aṣruhum al-dhahabī wa-lā siyyammā fi’l-andalus]. His purpose (243f.) is to counteract the negative stereotype of the malevolent, child-murdering Jew prevalent among Christians—analogous, Zaidan says, to Christian prejudices against Islam and Muslim prejudices against Christianity. I suspect, too, that the author wished to praise Islam for providing a more comfortable home for the Jews than did Christendom, with a hoped-for continued Muslim toleration of Arab Christians in mind.
Less oblique in its purpose is the more recent multivolume work by the Christian Arab, Edmond Rabbath, Les chrétiens dans l’Islam des premiers temps: Mahomet: Prophète arabe et fondateur d’état (Beirut, 1981); La conquête arabe sous les quatre premiers califes (11/632-40/661), 2 vols. (Beirut, 1985). Rabbath chooses epigraphs from Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, such as “Les arabes étaient les plus cléments de tous les conquérants de la terre” (epigraph to the first volume of La conquête arabe). The Christian-Arab, S. A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, in L’impact de la religion sur l’ordre juridique: cas de l’Egypte: Non Musulmans en pays d’Islam (Fribourg, 1979), pleads for the establishment of Western-style nation-states, with their separation of religion and politics, of obvious advantage to Christian citizens.
16. Merlin Swartz, “The Position of Jews in Arab Lands Following the Rise of Islam,” Muslim World 60 (1970), 6-24. The final quotation is from 23 (italics in original).
17. Amir Hasan Siddiqi, Non-Muslims under Muslim Rule and Muslims under Non-Muslim Rule (Karachi, 1969), 158-74. Similarly, Ibrahim Amin Ghali’s Le monde arabe et les juifs contrasts Islamic tolerance with Christian persecution (Paris, 1972), 210—14, esp. 212-14. A book by the journalist Marion Woolfson, Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World (London, 1980), characterizes Jewish history under Islam as a golden age and labels as a myth the claim that Jews from Arab countries suffered severe persecution in their homelands. Woolfson asserts that Oriental Jews were treated worse by the Ashkenazic ruling establishment in Israel after their mass immigration from Middle Eastern homelands. In Islam versus Ahl al-Kitāb: Past and Present, an obscure publication from India, a Jewish convert to Islam who emigrated to Pakistan draws on the myth of the interfaith utopia to praise her adopted religion at the expense of the religion into which she was born. “The rise of the modern Zionist movement brought more than a thousand years of friendly Muslim-Jewish relationships to an abrupt end, with the result that since the days of the Holy Prophet never has Jewish hatred towards Muslims nor Muslim hatred for Jews been more bitter than at the present time.” The author goes on to contrast relations between Muslims and Jews in the past with “the relation between Christendom and Jewry [which] was one of unremitting hostility, blackened by interminable chronicles of persecutions, massacres, [and] oppressive measures.” Maryam Jameelah, Islam Versus Ahl al-Kitāb: Past and Present (Delhi, 1982), 11.
18. Following are some examples. Barakat Ahmad, Muhammad and the Jews: A Reexamination (New Delhi, 1979). W. N. Arafat, “New Light on the Story of Banū Qurayẓa and the Jews of Medina, "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1976), 100-107: argues that the story originated among descendants of the Jewish Medinan tribes who wished to glorify their ancestors with a story of a Massada-like martyrdom. Tawfīq Sulṭān Yuzbakī, Ta’rīkh ahl al-dhimma fi’l-'Irāq (12-247 A. H.) [History of the Protected People in Iraq (12/633-247/861)] (Riyad, 1983), 69: mentions the expulsions but omits the massacre. Hussein Mu’nis, 'Ālam al-islām [The World of Islam] (Cairo, 1989): refers to “the elimination” [taṣfiya] of the three main Jewish tribes (37) and to “the termination of the affair” [intihā’ sha'n] without mentioning actions taken by the Prophet (161). For a discussion of the problem, see M. J. Kister, “The Massacre of the Banū Qurayza: A Re-examination of a Tradition,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986), 61-96.
19. Said Abdel Fattah Ashour, “Al-yahūd fi’l-'uṣūr al-wusṭā: dirāsa muqārina bayn al-sharq wa’l-gharb,” Kitāb al-mu’tamar al-rābi' li-majma' al-buḥūth al-islāmiyya ([Cairo], 1968), 2:349-61; The Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research (Cairo, 1970), 497-505.
20. English edition, 505. Some of the antisemitic sections from the beginning of this paper were published in a pamphlet containing photographically reproduced extracts from the English version of the proceedings of the Al-Azhar Conference of 1968 (Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel, ed. D. F. Green [pseudonym] [Geneva, 1971], 46-47). Through this pamphlet, also published in French and in German, the antisemitic tenor of that now infamous conference became widely known in Israel and elsewhere.
21. 'Abd al-Karīm Zaydān, Aḥkām al-dhimmīyyin wa’l-musta’minīn fī dār al-Islām [The Laws Concerning the Protected People and Those Granted Safe Conduct] ([Baghdad], 1963), 77-80.
22. Al-yahūd fī miṣr mundh al-fatḥ al-islāmī ḥattā al-ghazw al-'uthmānī (Beirut, 1980).
23. Much of his book on the Jews was extracted from his earlier publication, Ahl al-dhimma fī misr al-'uṣūr al-wusṭā [The Protected People in Egypt during the Middle Ages], 2d ed. (Cairo, 1979), which aimed at documenting the general postulate that Islam tolerated all non-Muslim monotheists, both Jews and Christians.
24. Al-islām wa-ahl al-dhimma [Islam and the Protected People] (n.p., 1969).
25. Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, Ghair al-muslimīn fi’l-mujtama' al-islāmī [Non-Muslims in Islamic Society] (Cairo, 1977), highlights the theme of Islamic toleration of the dhimmīs, drawing, among other sources, from al-Kharbūṭlī. Qaraḍāwī devotes a chapter to refuting challenges to the notion of Muslim toleration, based on allegedly oppressive practices such as the poll tax and discriminatory differentiation in dress. A chapter at the end, entitled “Comparison,” glorifies Islamic toleration by contrasting it with the intolerance shown by other religions in the past and in our own time—for example, the oppression of Muslims in Christian countries and in the Soviet Union, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the persecution of Christians by other Christians throughout history. Qaraḍāwī’s book, which appeared in English translation, Non-Muslims in the Islamic Society, trans. Khalil Muhammad Hamad and Sayed Mahboob Ali Shah (Indianapolis, 1985), is aimed at “both Muslim and non-Muslim readers in order to introduce them to this important subject, which has been distorted and misrepresented by some non-Muslim writers” (from the introduction).
26. Other examples are: Yuzbakī, Ta’rīkh ahl al-dhimma fi’l-'Irāq (12-247 A.H.): “When the Arab conquest of Iraq and Persia took place, the Christians, Jews, and some of the Zoroastrians welcomed them because they rescued them from the harshness of their former rulers [the Sassanians]. For Islam tolerated [samāḥa] them by allowing them to enjoy religious freedom and relieved them of military service in exchange for payment of the poll tax [jizya]. This tolerance [tasāmuḥ] was a significant factor in the support given by the people of the conquered lands to the Muslim Arabs, and also in their acceptance of the Islamic religion with enthusiasm” (43).
Sallām S. M. Sallām, Ahl al-dhimma fī Miṣr al-'aṣr al-fāṭimī al-thānī wa’l-'aṣr al-ayyūbī (467-648/1074-1250) [The Protected People in Egypt during the Second Fatimid and Ayyubid Periods] (Cairo, 1982): “The Protected People in Egypt witnessed a golden age in all aspects of life in a society governed by a spirit of love and harmony, and they benefited from the wonderful principle of religious tolerance (al-tasāmuḥ al-dīnī) under the shelter of the regime of the caliphs of the second Fatimid period and of the Ayyubid sultans” (22).
Salwā 'Alī Mīlād, Wathā’iq ahl al-dhimma fi’l-'aṣr al-'uthmānī wa-ahammiyyatuhā al-ta’rīkhiyya [Documents Concerning the Protected People during the Ottoman Period and Their Historical Importance] ([Cairo], 1983): “Islam spread by virtue of its special traits and benevolent teachings, just as Arab tolerance (tasāmuḥ) was one ofthe factors that helped it to spread. . . . The Arabs allowed the conquered people freedom of religion, just as the Muslims joined vigilance on behalf of their religion with a spirit of tolerance towards the adherents of other religions” (7).
Hussein Mu’nis, 'Ālam al-islām: “They [the non-Muslims] were encompassed by Islam’s tolerance [tasāmuḥ], tolerated by being safeguarded in their religion and in the continuity of their life within the Islamic community. . . . The Geniza documents confirm what we know, namely, that the Jews in Islamic-Arab lands lived in complete tolerance. . . . While they were experiencing harsh persecution in the West, compelled to live in quarters or 'the ghetto,’ the Jews in Islamic lands lived in freedom, unfettered other than by the general system of regulations imposed upon them as ‘Protected People’ [ahl al-dhimma]" (249, 251-52).
27. A meritorious exception to Arabist devotion to the myth of the interfaith utopia is Toleranz im Islam (Munich, 1980), by Adel Théodor Khoury, a Christian-Arab scholar who has written extensively on interreligious polemics between Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages. Khoury wrote this book for the German series, “Entwicklung und Frieden” [Development and Peace], in response to Western concern over the radical militancy of Islamic fundamentalism. With its balanced objectivity, this volume forms a useful secondary source for information about one aspect of the problem under discussion in the present book.
28. This view is well established among scholars. See, for instance, Moshe Ma’oz, The Image of the Jew in Official Arab Literature and Communications Media (Jerusalem, 1976), 5-23; Norman Stillman, “New Attitudes toward the Jew in the Arab World,” Jewish Social Studies 37 (1975), 198.
29. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem, 1972; Hebrew orig.: Tel Aviv, 1968). Regarding the myth of the interfaith utopia, Harkabi writes: “It is true that the position of the Jews was much better in the Arab countries [than in Europe]. ...” But, “[t]he position of the Jews . . . was not so idyllic as it is portrayed today by Arab spokesmen” (218-19). Writing several years later, Harkabi offered reasons for Israeli reluctance to acknowledge the extent and nature of Arab antisemitism: (1) because Arab antisemitism came from above, from governments or from the intellectual elite, rather than from below, as a social phenomenon; (2) because it was not Christian, “as if antisemitism can stem only from Christian sources”; (3) fear by “some Israelis . . . that broaching Arab antisemitism will provide an excuse for a hawkish Israeli position.” Idem, “On Arab Antisemitism Once More,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog and trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford, 1988), 227, 233, 238. The Hebrew original of this publication appeared in Jerusalem in 1980.
30. See Yehoshafat Harkabi, The Indoctrination against Israel in U.A.R. Armed Forces (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1967). Harkabi includes a full Hebrew translation of an Arabic pamphlet, “The Problem of Palestine,” which begins with a short historical survey comparing the suffering of the “misanthropic” Jews of Christendom with the freedom they enjoyed under a tolerant Islam (22).
31. In 1968, the Department of Information of the Israel Foreign Ministry published a pamphlet of representative extracts from Arab school texts, with illustrations, entitled “Hatred Is Sacred.”
32. Reported, among other places, in the New York Times, April 26, 1972, 5, and in the Israeli news media.
33. Ronald L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist's View of the Jews (Oxford, 1987), 20-21.
34. An Arrogant Oppressive Spirit: Anti-Zionism as Anti-Judaism in Egypt (Oxford, 1989; Hebrew orig.: Jerusalem, 1988).
35. See the articles cited in the Preface. With the permission of the editor-publisher of Tikkun, portions of my “Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History” have been reused and expanded in the following section.
36. Published in the October 4, 1946, issue of the Zionist Organization of America’s New Palestine. The essay appears on pages B17-B20 of the 1967 supplement to Near East Report. The supplement section later became institutionalized as a separate AIPAC publication, entitled Myths and Facts: A Concise Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. The nine issues that appeared, with massive distribution between 1970 and 1992, include sections refuting the myth of Arab toleration. In the 1990 issue of Near East Report itself, the editors excerpted the chapter, “Arab Treatment of the Jews,” from Myths and Facts as expanded in the 1989 edition, including the comments of the French thinker Jacques Ellul, in his preface to the English edition of Bat Ye’or’s “countermyth” book, The Dhimmi (see below). Roth’s essay appeared concurrently, with a few editorial variants, in the British Zionist Jewish Forum (October 1946), 28-33—the version that is mentioned by S. D. Goitein in his Jews and Arabs, 66.
37. “The Myth of Arab Toleration,” Midstream 16, no. 1 (January 1970), 56—59; expanded in the first chapter of Friedman’s Without Future: The Plight of Syrian Jewry (New York, 1989). Compare Norman Stillman’s unfavorable review in MESA [Middle East Studies Association] Bulletin 24, no. 2 (1990), 194.
38. Writing about “Arab-Jewish Bi-Nationalism” (Jewish Frontier [April 1976]), Saul Friedman again proclaims that “Arab hostility to Jews, which has been endemic to the Middle East since the time of Muhammad,” confirms the impossibility of Arabs and Jews living in peace in a binational state. Two years later, in the same journal, Friedman explains how pro-Arab apologists invoke the “fabled Semitic fraternity which existed in the Middle East till recently” in order to cover up their intense antisemitism. “Universal Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Frontier (August-September 1976), 14-18.
39. Lewis, “The Historical Jewish Presence in the Middle East,” Jewish Frontier (January 1974), 13-16.
40. “Israel’s Rights and Arab Propaganda,” Commentary (August 1975), 38-43. In another contribution to countermyth revision of Jewish-Arab history, Rose Lewis debunks the “golden age” in Spain. Inspired by Bernard Lewis’s statement in History: Remembered, Recovered, Restored ([Princeton, N.J., 1975], 77), that the “myth of Spanish Islamic tolerance,” once used by Jewish scholars “as a stick with which to beat their Christian neighbors . . . has been taken up by Muslim scholars who use it for their own somewhat different purposes,” Rose Lewis resolves to “take a harder look at the ‘golden age’ . . . with 20th century rather than 19th century eyes.” She sets out to correct the record about Jewish florescence in Muslim Spain. By romanticizing that era, she complains, Jewish historians have provided ammunition for the Arab case against Israel. Her own version of the era features the “bloody pogrom” against the Jews of Granada, Spain, in 1066, and a contemporaneous Arabic poem filled with nasty invective about the Jews that is thought to have triggered the massacre. She writes: “This is Muslim anti-Semitism with deep native roots and a long historical tradition” (“Muslim Glamour and the Spanish Jews,” Midstream [February 1977], 26-37). Lewis expatiates again on the theme of Jewish suffering at Arab hands in “Maimonides and the Muslims” (Midstream [November 1979], 16-22), in describing the fierce Almohad persecution of the twelfth century. Quoting the crucial passage from Maimonides’ “Epistle to Yemen,” she asserts that “[t]here can certainly be no doubt about what Moses Maimonides himself thought of Arab-Jewish relations during the alleged Golden Age he lived in” (22).
41. Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Chicago, 1975; French orig.: Juifs et arabes [Paris, 1974]), 11-12. There is a Hebrew translation, Yehudim ve-'aravim, trans. Aharon Amir (Tel Aviv, 1975).
42. Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 27 (emphasis in orig.). This chapter was also published as an essay in the French-Jewish magazine L’Arche in early 1974.
43. “The Jews of Islam: Golden Age or Ghetto?” Jewish Chronicle Colour Magazine, November 23, 1979, 56-60.
44. East Rutherford, N.J., 1985; French orig., Paris, 1980; Hebrew trans. Aharon Amir (Jerusalem, 1986). The book has also been translated into Russian. The subtitle of the French original, Profil de l’oprimé en Orient et en Afrique du Nord depuis la conquête arabe, better reflects the book’s theme.
45. Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 28. Bat Ye’or’s newest contribution to the history of the dhimmī, Les chrétientés d’orient entre Jihad et dhimmitude: VIIe-XXe siècle (Paris, 1991), also contains a preface by Ellul.
46. Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine (New York, 1984), 75. This book has been heavily criticized—by Israeli specialists, among others—for its flawed, tendentious methodology on the subject of Arab settlement in Palestine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book was published in a Hebrew translation under the title, Me’az umi-tamid, trans. Aharon Amir (Tel Aviv, 1988, 1990).
47. Moshe Gil, “The Constitution of Medina: A Reconsideration,” Israel Oriental Studies 4 (1974), 44-66. Compare Uri Rubin, “The ‘Constitution of Medina’: Some Notes,” Studia Islamica 62 (1985), 5-23.
48. Many more than the one essay on this topic in Essays on Antisemitism, published in the 1940s.
49. Haggai Ben-Shammai, “Jew-Hatred in the Islamic Tradition and the Koranic Exegesis,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, 161-69; quotation from 168.
50. Avraham Grossman, “The Economic and Social Background of Hostile Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ninth and Tenth Century Muslim Caliphate,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, 171—87. In a footnote, Grossman concedes that Maimonides was influenced by recent persecutions in Muslim Spain; ibid., 184, n. 3. Generally speaking, Grossman’s thesis, that Muslim hatred of the Jews began in the ninth century in reaction to Jewish social and economic success, is not convincing. The hatred existed earlier, but, as I shall argue below, it was unrelated to economic factors (see Chap. 5 in this book). The other two essays in Antisemitism through the Ages on the premodern period do not have a countermyth objective: Jacob Barnai, “Blood Libels’ in the Ottoman Empire of the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries”; and Shalom Bar-Asher, “Antisemitism and Economic Influence: The Jews of Morocco (1672-1822).”
51. A pamphlet by Maurice Roumani in collaboration with Deborah Goldman and Helene Korn, “The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue,” vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1975).
52. “Case of the Jews,” 41-57.
53. Ibid., 48. The passage appears in italics in the chapter.
54. This situation seems to have begun to change with the Israeli elections of June 1992. See, for instance, Shlomo Deshen, “The Religiosity of Israeli Middle Easterners: Lay People, Rabbis and Faith” (Hebrew), to appear in Alpayim 9 (forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Deshen for sharing the typescript of this article with me prior to its publication.
55. This view is expressed in, for instance, academic research that focuses on instances of Arab persecution in past centuries; in attempts to show how European fascism, directly or indirectly, caused suffering to Jews in Arab lands before and during the Second World War; and in efforts to document a sometimes elusive indigenous Oriental Zionist response to Arab antisemitism.
56. Yossi Yonah, “How Right Wing Are the Sephardim?” Tikkun 5, no. 5 (May-June 1990), 38-39, 100-102.
57. Heskel M. Haddad, Jews of Arab and Islamic Countries: History, Problems, Solutions (New York, 1984), 20. Haddad dedicated his book to, among others, “my late father, who bore no hatred against Moslems and no grudge against Ashkenazim.”
58. New Outlook (November-December 1991), 15. See also, Daniel Gavron, “Smashing the Stereotype,” Jerusalem Post Magazine, July 8, 1983, 3-4.
59. For more of the “debate,” see two responses to my own work: Bat Ye’or, “Islam and the Dhimmis,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 42 (1987), 83-88; and Norman A. Stillman, “Myth, Countermyth, Distortion,” Tikkun (May-June 1991), 60-64, with “Letters to the Editor,” ibid. (July-August 1991), 96 and rear cover. This latter exchange may be compared with Lawrence Rosen, “Muslim-Jewish Relations in a Moroccan City,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 3 (1972), 435—49, and the responses by Norman A. Stillman, “Muslims and Jews in Morocco,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 5 (1977), 76-83, and “The Moroccan Jewish Experience: A Revisionist View,” ibid., no. 9 (1978), 111-22 (cf. also, Moshe Shokeid, “Jewish Existence in a Berber Environment,” in Shlomo Deshen and Walter Zenner, eds., Jewish Societies in the Middle East: Community, Culture, and Authority [Washington, D.C., 1982], 106-7).
CHAPTER TWO
RELIGIONS IN CONFLICT
1. Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relationship between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire (135-425), trans. H. McKeating (Oxford, 1986), 71-77.
2. Paul’s “innovation” is sharply debated among experts on early Christianity. See John Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York, 1983), 193ff. Regardless of Paul’s true convictions in this matter, what is important here is that subsequent Christian thinkers understood Paul to have preached that the coming of Christ abrogated Jewish law, and that this became a salient feature of the Jewish-Christian conflict.
3. On the contrary, the Gospel (compare Matthew 5:17-19) puts into Jesus’ mouth an unambiguous affirmation of the value of Jewish law: “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. . . . Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
4. Simon, Verus Israel, 74.
5. Ibid., 78-80.
6. A. Lukyn Williams, Adversus Judaeos (Cambridge, 1935), 43-52. See also the survey in the chapter, “Das Alte Testament im Verständnis des Neuen Testaments und der Kirchenväter,” in Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (1.-11. Jh.), 2d rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1990 [first pub. 1982]), 58-73.
7. Much ink has been spilled trying to prove or disprove this allegation. See, for instance, James Parkes, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (1934; repr., Cleveland, 1961), 121ff.
8. Simon, Verus Israel, 115-25. Even Rosemary Ruether, a staunch exculpator of the Jews in the Christian-Jewish conflict, concedes that, in the earliest stages, “it is possible to speak of Judaism as ‘persecuting' Christians.” Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York, 1974), 166.
9. Simon, Verus Israel, 286, 513. The quotation from Tertullian is the second page reference.
10. Ibid., 288, 290-91.
11. Gager, Origins of Anti-Semitism, 117ff.
12. Cited in Simon, Verus Israel, 316, 514.
13. From the first of eight “Homilies against the Jews,” trans. Wayne A. Meeks and Robert L. Wilken, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era ([Ann Arbor], 1978), 92, 98.
14. Simon, Verus Israel, 217, 220.
15. Ibid., 222; Gager, Origins of Anti-Semitism, 118-20.
16. Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), 161-62.
17. St. Augustine, Sermon no. 201, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 38, Saint Augustine, Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, trans. Sister Mary Sarah Muldowney (New York, 1959), 70-71. See also, “Concerning Faith of Things Not Seen,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (repr., Grand Rapids, Mich., 1980), 3:341-42; The City of God against the Pagans 18:46, in Loeb Classical Library, trans. William Chase Greene (London, 1960), 6:46-51; “In Answer to the Jews” [Tractatus Adversus Judeos], in Fathers of the Church, vol. 27, Saint Augustine, Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari, trans. Sister Marie Liguori (New York, 1955). 403. See also, Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der jüdisch-christlichen Beziehungen in den ersten Jahrhunderten (Basel, 1946), 175—81; idem, “Augustin et les juifs, Augustin et le judaïsme,” in Recherches augustiniennes (Paris, 1958), 1:225-41, repr. in Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens: Patristique et moyen âge (London, 1977).
18. Gedaliahu G. Strousma, “Early Christianity as Radical Religion: Context and Implications,” Israel Oriental Studies 14 (1994), forthcoming. Professor Stroumsa presented this paper at Princeton University in February 1992.
19. The extent to which pagan anti-Judaism carried over into Christianity has been hotly debated in the scholarly literature. The view of M. Simon—that Christian anti-Judaism includes a theologized enhancement and expansion of the predominantly social “antisemitism” of pagan antiquity—seems to present the most reasonable balance between those who “blame” Christianity alone and those who would exculpate Christianity by casting all the blame on paganism. Simon’s chapter on Christian antisemitism was selected by Jeremy Cohen for his collection, Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation (New York, 1991), 131-73.
20. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 181. See also various responses to Ruether in the symposium of Christian theologians, Antisemitism and the Foundations of Christianity, ed. Alan T. Davies (New York, 1979).
21. For some bibliography, see the sections “Jews in Arabia” and “Muhammad and the Jews,” in Mark R. Cohen, “The Jews under Islam: From the Rise of Islam to Sabbatai Zevi,” cited in the Preface, note 6. The most extravagant—hence, controversial—theory about the “Jewish origins” of Islam, based on external (non-Muslim) sources, sees it as a conscious adaptation of a marginal form of Judaism, originally focused on Palestine but later on Arabia. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 1977); summarized in Cook, Muhammad (Oxford, 1983), esp. 73-76.
22. English trans. in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 115-18. The revisionist suggestion by Moshe Gil about this passage would vocalize dīn (religion) as dayn (debt) and thereby eliminate from the document its statement of religious toleration. “Constitution of Medina,” 63. But Uri Rubin convincingly upholds the dominant interpretation reflected in Stillman’s translation. Rubin, “The ‘Constitution of Medina,”’ 16.
23. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, ed. Ṣubḥī Ṣāliḥ, part 1 (Beirut, 1983), 238ff.
24. William C. Jordan, “The Last Tormentor of Christ: An Image of the Jew in Ancient and Medieval Exegesis, Art, and Drama,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 78 (1987), 21-47; idem, “The Erosion of the Stereotype of the Last Tormentor of Christ,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 81 (1990), 13-14.
25. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 129—30. As background to the expulsion of the Jewish tribe of the Banū Naḍīr from Medina, a story is told (in al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-maghāzī [Book of the Military Campaigns (of the Prophet)]) about some Jews from the tribe who tried unsuccessfully to kill Muhammad by dropping a stone on him from the roof of a house, in hopes of putting an end to his religious movement. Although such attempts failed, it is noteworthy, by way of contrast with the Christian-Jewish religious conflict, that murderous intentions toward the founder of Islam did not play a major role in the Islamic polemic against the Jews.
26. Not surprisingly, the theme has salience in twentieth-century Arab antisemitism.
27. Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Medieval Christianity: Prophecy and Order (New York, 1968), 27-31.
29. Sura 3:65, 67, 68. In the translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran (New York, n.d.), 67. Henceforth, all English citations from the Qur’an are from this edition.
30. James Kritzeck, Sons of Abraham: Christians and Moslems (Baltimore, 1965), 29.
31. Rudi Paret, “Toleranz und Intoleranz im Islam,” Saeculum 21 (1970), 349-50.
32. Simon, Verus Israel, 80-82; Gager, Origins of Anti-Semitism, 217-20.
34. Which was modeled on the Jewish fast of the Day of Atonement at the end of the Ten Days of Repentance following Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the beginning of the Jewish New Year.
35. M. J. Kister, “Ḥaddithū 'an banī isrā’īla wa-lā ḥaraja: A Study of an Early Tradition,” Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972), 215-39. Kister interprets the word 'an to mean “about” or “concerning,” rather than “from” or “in the name of,” the more common sense of 'an when used with the verb ḥaddatha (as pointed out to me by both Michael Cook and Haggai Ben-Shammai). For the present purpose, it makes no difference. See also, Georges Vajda, “Juifs et musulmans selon le ḥadīṭ,” Journal asiatique 229 (1937), 115-20.
36. For similarities between Judaism and developed Islam, see E. I. J. Rosenthal, Judaism and Islam (London, 1961), part 1.
37. The very inappropriateness of this term speaks volumes about the difference between Islam and Christianity.
38. Be-ḥuqqoteihem lo telekhu, “do not follow their laws”; Leviticus 18:3.
39. Vajda, “Juifs et musulmans selon le ḥadīṭ,” 62-63.
40. Ibn Taymiyya, Kitāb iqtīḍā’ al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm mukhālafat aṣḥāb al-jaḥīm, ed. Ahmad Ḥamdi Imām (Jaddah, 1980), 59; English trans. based on the 1950 Cairo edition, Muhammad Umar Memon, Ibn Taimiya’s Struggle against Popular Religion (The Hague, 1976), 133.
41. Ibn Taymiyya, Kitāb iqtīḍā' al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, 206; English trans., 207.
42. According to church legislation as late as the fourteenth century, Christians sometimes attended and even assisted at Jewish celebrations, circumcisions, and funerals. Gilbert Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen age (Paris, 1990), 178-79. This phenomenon, driven by curiosity rather than syncretistic impulses, is well known from the early modern period.
CHAPTER THREE
THE LEGAL POSITION OF JEWS IN CHRISTENDOM
1. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, Conn., 1953), 75.
2. Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany: A Study of Their Legal and Social Status, 2d ed. (New York, 1970; first pub., 1949).
3. For a brief survey of law in medieval Christendom, see Norman Zacour, An Introduction to Medieval Institutions (Toronto, 1969), 136-52.
4. For pre-Christian Roman laws concerning the Jews, see Ancient Roman Statutes, trans. Alan Chester Johnson et al., ed. Clyde Pharr (Austin, Tex., 1961), index.
5. I am grateful to Amnon Linder for this clarification. See also, Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (1.-11. Jh.), 2d rev. ed., 216 (Tertullian, died after 220), 258 (Emperor Septimius Severus, r. 193-211).
6. See Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1974-84), 3:index s.v. “anti-Semitism” for this material.
7. Preserved in Josephus’ Antiquities. See Ancient Roman Statutes, 127. The edict goes on to state: “. . . their sacred offerings shall be inviolable and shall be sent to Jerusalem and shall be paid to the financial officials of Jerusalem; and . . . they shall not give sureties for appearance in court on the Sabbath or on the day of preparation before it after the ninth hour.”
8. Historians are in dispute as to whether the Hadrianic decrees preceded or followed the short-lived Bar Kokhba revolt.
9. Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History (Toronto, 1991), 94-95.
10. With reference to the Greeks, see Elias Bickerman, From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees (New York, 1962), 20.
11. The laws, which date from the time of Emperor Constantine (312-37), are arranged chronologically by subject.
12. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit, 1987; Hebrew original published in Jerusalem, 1983). In this book, I cite only the edition in English. Much of the discussion in this section follows Linder’s exhaustive presentation. Quotations from the laws are taken from Clyde Pharr’s English edition, The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton, N.J., 1952), following the book, title, and section numbers in the Codex Theodosianus (CTh).
13. Due to repetition, the forty-five laws appear in sixty-eight citations. Many of them are dispersed among books on general subjects. For instance, Book 7, devoted to military affairs, decrees that synagogues must be protected from unauthorized quartering of soldiers (CTh 7.8.2, Theodosian Code, 165). A statute on court procedure, in Book 2, states the Roman position on Jewish judicial autonomy: matters that do not pertain to “their superstition” shall be adjudicated in Roman courts (hence, purely religious matters are left to Jewish judges). In civil cases, Jews may, by mutual consent, have their suits arbitrated by Jewish judges, whose decisions would be upheld by Roman tribunals (CTh 2.1.10, Theodosian Code, 39). In a more stringent restatement of this law, the Justinianic Code omitted the Latin word non (“not”) in the clause relating to freedom of adjudication of purely religious matters, so that “tolerant” distinction was eliminated. See Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 206-7.
14. CTh 16.5.44, Theodosian Code, 458.
15. CTh 16.5.46, Theodosian Code, 458 (law of January 15, 409).
16. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 62f.
17. Title 8 is entitled “On Jews, Caelicolists, and Samaritans.” The Caelicolists (“Heaven-Fearers”) were a group associated with the Jews but referred to elsewhere in the Theodosian Code as a sect “who hold assemblies of some unknown new dogma” and whose houses of worship, like those of the heretic, are to be “vindicated to the churches” (CTh 16.5.43, Theodosian Code, 458). See also, Linder Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 226-36.
18. CTh 16.8.9, Theodosian Code, 468.
19. CTh 16.8.20, Theodosian Code, 469.
20. CTh 16.8.12, Theodosian Code, 468.
21. CTh 16.8.21, Theodosian Code, 469. Linder, in Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 283-86, clears up the matter of the date.
22. “Wherefore once again I conjure you that, on the one hand, the Alexandrians show themselves forbearing and kindly toward the Jews, who for many years have dwelt in the same city, and dishonor none of the rights observed by them in the worship of their god but allow them to observe their customs as in the time of the deified Augustus, which customs I also, after hearing both sides, have confirmed. And, on the other hand, I explicitly order the Jews not to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed.” Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, eds., Roman Civilization. Sourcebook II: The Empire (New York, 1966), 368; trans. from the Loeb Classical Library edition, Select Papyri, trans. A. S. Hunt and C. C. Edgar (Cambridge, 1934), 2:87. I owe the notion of this possible Claudian antecedent of Christian-Roman Jewry law to my teacher, the late Gerson D. Cohen. I have not seen the suggestion in print elsewhere.
23. CTh 16.8.26, Theodosian Code, 470-71. Compare Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 289-91.
24. Jeremy Cohen suggested many years ago, in anti-lachrymose, revisionist fashion, that the restrictive legislation itself was not an innovation of Christian-Roman law, but was almost wholly derived from Roman precedents. See his “Roman Imperial Policy toward the Jews from Constantine until the End of the Palestinian Patriarchate (ca. 429),” Byzantine Studies 3 (1976), 1-29. But see Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 6 and n. 19.
25. CTh 16.8.14, Theodosian Code, 468.
26. CTh 16.8.22, Theodosian Code, 470; Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 269, renders in solitudine as “in deserted places,” which differs from Pharr’s less precise “in desert places.”
27. CTh 16.8.25, Theodosian Code, 470. Compare Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 267-70.
28. Novella of Theodosius 3.1.3, Theodosian Code, 489 (emphasis added).
29. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 55ff.
30. CTh 9.7.5 and 3.7.2, Theodosian Code, 232, 70. Adultery was punishable by death perhaps as early as pre-Christian Roman law. Compare Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 181, n. 4.
31. CTh 16.8.16, 24, Theodosian Code, 469, 470.
32. CTh 16.8.24, Theodosian Code, 470.
33. Theodosius gave as justification the fear that the Jews might gain power over Christians: “For we consider it impious, that the enemies of the Supreme Majesty and of the Roman laws shall be considered as avengers of our laws by seizing stolen jurisdiction, and armed with the authority of an ill-gotten dignity shall have the power to judge and pronounce sentence against Christians, very often even against priests of the sacred religion, to the insult of our faith.” NTh 3.2, in Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 328.
34. Ben Zion Wacholder, “The Halakah and the Proselyting of Slaves during the Gaonic Era,” Historia Judaica 18 (1956), 90.
35. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 99-102, 117-20.
36. CTh 16.9.1, Theodosian Code, 471.
37. CTh 16.9.4., Theodosian Code, 472.
38. Walter Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews (Ebelsbach, 1988), 84ff., “The Jew and His Servants,” discusses the subject in detail.
39. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 48.
40. Ibid., 381-87.
41. There is still uncertainty about the meaning of deuterosis. Linder (see ref. in next note) takes it to mean Mishnah. Other suggestions include midrashic homilies or Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible.
42. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 402-11.
43. Article, “Corpus Iuris Civilis,” DMA (Dictionary of the Middle Ages) 3:609 (Kenneth Pennington); Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 46-50.
44. Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 33.
45. Ibid.
46. Under the canons, there was to be no intermarriage between Christians and Jews (Elvira, ca. 300, often repeated in Spain and elsewhere); Christians might not share feasts with Jews (Laodicea, 360); Jews were not to work on Sunday (Narbonne, 589); Christian slaves must not be sold to Jews (Toledo, 656, often reiterated in Spain and other countries); Jews might not serve as judges or tax collectors (Macon, 581); Jews “dare [not] . . . ask the Prince for any authority over Christians or to exercise it” (Paris, 614; quoted in J. N. Hillgarth, ed., Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe [Philadelphia, 1986], 115); Christians might not eat unleavened bread of Jews, nor employ Jews as physicians or bathe with them (Constantinople [Quini-Sext, or Trullan Council], 692). A law prohibiting compulsory baptism of Jews (Toledo, 633) consistent with the Catholic church’s conviction that an insincere conversion is worse than none at all, soon lost its force in Spain during the latter part of the seventh century as the intolerance of the Visigothic rulers reached fever pitch. Bernard Bachrach, “A Reassessment of Visigothic Jewish Policy, 589-711,” American Historical Review 78 (1973), 11-34, and Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (Minneapolis, 1977), 3-26, while providing food for thought about the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” goes too far in reinterpreting the evidence (or lack thereof) to document Jewish power and well-being in Visigothic Spain. See the rebuttal of Bat-Sheva Albert, “Un nouvel examen de la politique anti-juive wisigothique: A propos d’un article récent,” Révue des études juives 135 (1976), 3-29.
The “Jewish” canons of church councils from 300 to 800 are conveniently listed and briefly described by James Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, app. 1. The texts and discussions of the councils can be found in English translation or paraphrase (sometimes accompanied by the original Greek or Latin) in Charles J. Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, trans. from the German by William R. Clark, 5 vols. (1883-96; repr., New York, 1972). See also, Solomon Grayzel, “Jews and the Ecumenical Councils,” in The Seventy-fifth Anniversary Volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review, ed. A. A. Neuman and S. Zeitlin (Philadelphia, 1967), 287-91.
47. Solomon Katz, “Pope Gregory the Great and the Jews,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 24 (1933-34), 113-36; Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 40. The Latin texts are consolidated in Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404 (Toronto, 1988), 3-24 (nos. 3-28).
48. Cited in English translation in Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, rev. ed. (New York, 1966), 9. Latin text in Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 15 (no. 19, June 598, addressed to Victor, bishop of Palermo): “Sicut ludaeis non debet esse licentia quicquam in synagogis suis ultra quam permissum est lege praesumere, ita in his quae eis concessa sunt nullum debent praeiudicium sustinere”; repeated in no. 20, 16-17 (October 598, in a follow-up letter to Palermo), with somewhat different wording, but referencing the earlier formulation in the phrase “ut et ipsi prius scripsimus” (“and, as we have written earlier”). The second letter to Palermo has been translated in Bernard S. Bachrach, Jews in Barbarian Europe (Lawrence, Kans., 1977), 55 (no. 7).
49. Textual connection between Gregory the Great’s formulation and Theodosian Code 16.8.18 and 20 (or 22) has been suggested by Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1555-93 (New York, 1977), xix; idem, “The Approach of the Jews to the Papacy and the Papal Doctrine of Protection of the Jews, 1063-1147” (Hebrew), in Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel 5 (1980), 187; idem, The “1007 Anonymous” and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages (Cincinnati, 1984), 13; and most recently in Stow’s Alienated Minority, 267. The law in CTh 16.8.21, guaranteeing protection for the Jews’ persons and synagogues, seems an even closer parallel: “But just as it is Our will that the foregoing provision shall be made for the persons of the Jews, so we decree that the Jews also shall be admonished that they perchance shall not become insolent and, elated by their own security, commit any rash act in disrespect of the Christian religion (“Sed ut hoc Iudaeorum personis volumus esse provisum, ita illud quoque monendum esse censemus ne ludaei forsitan insolescant elatique sui securitae quicquam praeceps in Christianae reveraentiam cultionis admittant”); Theodosian Code, 470; Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 284. On the possible connection between Claudius’s letter to the Alexandrians and the Sicut formula, see note 22 in this chapter.
50. Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull Sicut Judeis,” in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, ed. Meir Ben-Horin et al. (Leiden, 1962), 243-80. See also, Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 42-45; the notes cross-reference the Latin texts in Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404.
51. See Robert Chazan, ed., Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York, 1980), 31-32.
52. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 274 (no. 118). Compare 261-62 (no. 111). See also, Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 52-54, and doc. no. 183 in Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 192-93.
53. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 93, 95; Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 74-75 (no. 71).
54. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 311.
55. Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 147-54; Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 221ff.
56. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 309; Guido Kisch, “The Yellow Badge in History,” in Kisch, Forschungen zur Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Juden (Sigmaringen, 1979), 2:115-64.
57. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 140-41; Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 99 (no. 94).
58. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 311.
59. Ibid., 307.
60. Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 34-35, 30.
61. This is the major theme of the posthumously published second volume of Grayzel’s The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, Vol. 2: 1254-1314, ed. Kenneth R. Stow (New York, 1989), which reprints as its introduction Grayzel’s article, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition: From ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato’” (originally published in Essays on the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of Dropsie University, ed. Abraham I. Katsh and Leon Nemoy [Philadelphia, 1979], 151-88).
62. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 137-40.
63. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 240-41; Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 172-73 (no. 163).
64. Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Canon Law and the Burning of the Talmud,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 9 (1979), 79-82; James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250-1550 (Philadelphia, 1979), 10-11, 30-31; Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 73—76.
65. Grayzel, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition: From ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato.’”
66. Edward Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York, 1965).
67. Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, Ind., 1986); see the review by G. Dahan, in the Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 79 (1989), 370-77.
68. Kenneth R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church: Papal Policy toward the Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, 71-89.
69. Kenneth R. Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century,” AJS Review 6 (1981), 161-84; The “1007 Anonymous” and Papal Sovereignty, 273-80.
70. Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 39-93.
71. John Gilchrist, “The Perception of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades,” Jewish History 3, no. 1 (Spring 1988), 9-24.
72. Ibid.
73. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews.
74. Ibid., chap. 5: “Family Law.”
75. Ibid., 321-30.
76. Ibid., chap. 4: “Jews in Public Office.”
77. Ibid., 82-83.
78. Ibid., 40-83, charts the development of canonical jurisdiction over the Jews. Compare also, Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 110.
79. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 353.
80. Kisch, “Yellow Badge,” 147-48. “Tables” means the tablets of the Law.
81. Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed., 18 vols. (New York and Philadelphia, 1952-83), 11:96ff.
82. Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982).
83. Robert J. Burns, “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism in Christian History: A Revisionist Thesis” (review article), Catholic Historical Review 70 (1984), 90-93. Cohen’s thesis is disputed by Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and the Jewish Response (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), esp. 170ff. Chazan sees an intensification of prior trends, rather than a fundamental reversal of doctrine.
84. Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 34, 38, 39; and on Cohen, specifically, 26, n. 92.
85. For example, James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community, 2d ed. (New York, 1976), 101ff.
86. Alfredo M. Rabello, He-yehudim bi-sefarad lifnei ha-kibbush ha-'aravi bi-re’i ha-ḥaqiqa [The Jews in Visigothic Spain in the Light of the Legislation] (Jerusalem, 1983), 26, 95-106.
87. Rabello, Jews in Visigothic Spain, 33; Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 44-46, noting that the relatively scant selectivity of the Breviary of Alaric concerning Jewry law should probably be attributed to a reaction of the Arian editors against the religious nature of the Theodosian Code, especially in Book 16. Sectarian Arianism is somewhat simplistically thought to be more warmly disposed toward the Jews than Roman Catholicism because it is more “monotheistic” (rejecting the divinity of Jesus). For a more nuanced explanation of the sympathetic attitude of Germanic Christianity, in general, and of the Visigothic case, in particular, where conversion from Arianism to Nicaean Catholicism more or less coincided with the onset of a harsher policy toward the Jews, see Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 75-83. For an excellent survey of the legal situation of the Jews under the Visigoths, see Jean Juster, The Legal Condition of the Jews under the Visigothic Kings, Brought up to Date by A. M. Rabello (Jerusalem, 1976; orig. published as a series of three articles in Israel Law Review 11 [1976]).
88. Rabello, Jews in Visigothic Spain, 64-67.
89. The Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum), trans. and ed. S. P. Scott (Boston, 1910), Book 12, titles 2 and 3, 362-409 (including the prohibition of observance of circumcision, Passover, the dietary regulations, and the Sabbath and other festivals: 12.2.7; 12.2.8; 12.3.4; 12.3.5; 12.3.7).
90. For general background on law in the lands conquered by Germanic tribes, here and below, I have relied in part on the succinct summary in DMA, s.v. “Law, German, Early Germanic Codes” 7:468b-477a (Theodore John Rivers).
91. Margaret Deansley, A History of Early Medieval Europe: From 476 to 911, 2d ed. (London, 1960), 62-63.
92. Compare Jacques Le Goff: “In a barbarian kingdom it was not the case that every man was subject to a single law valid for all the inhabitants of a territory: he was judged according to the judicial custom of the ethnic group to which he belonged. ...” Medieval Civilization 400-1500, trans. Julia Barrow (Oxford, 1988), 30. Also compare Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental 430-1096 (Paris, 1960), 375; and Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, 66, 137.
93. Hillgarth, Christianity and Paganism, 113.
94. These Latin charters, three of which are actually sample texts in a medieval collection of formularies (published in Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, ed. Karolus [Karl] Zeumer [Hanover, 1886], 309-11, 325) are discussed in virtually every work dealing with the status of the Jews in the early Middle Ages. They are available in English translation in Bachrach, Jews in Barbarian Europe, 68-91, along with the fourth charter, ibid., 73 (Latin text: M. Bouquet, ed., Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, rev. ed. [Paris, 1870], vol. 6, no. 232). Bachrach’s discussion of the charters is useful; see his Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, 90-94.
95. The Latin texts of the Speyer and Worms charters are printed in full and synoptically in R. Hoeniger, “Zur Geschichte der Juden Deutschlands im Mittlelater,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1 (1887), 137ff. They can be found in English translation, one after the other, in Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 60-66.
96. Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 63-66.
97. Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (repr., New York, 1970), 74-77 (no. 171); Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 138; and J. A. Watt seem to take for granted that the clause ad cameram nostram attineant was already present in the earlier Worms charter. But Stow, Alienated Minority, 275-76, makes a strong case that is consistent with the view presented here. For Watt’s article, see below, note 110.
98. Where, rather, it is the Jews named in the charter who petition Henry “that we take and hold them under our protection” (sub tuicionem nostram).
99. Parkes, Jew in the Medieval Community, 101-54.
100. See Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago, 1961) 1:256; Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 288-89.
101. I use the term feudal in awareness of the fact that some medievalists dealing with England prefer the more specific word manorial, relating to estates and fiefs.
102. Baron, Social and Religious History, 11:4-13, 18-22; and his “Medieval Nationalism and Jewish Serfdom,” in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, ed. Meir Ben-Horin et al. (Leiden, 1962), esp. 42-48.
103. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1964), 96-104.
104. William C. Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1986), 99; his critical appraisal of the revisionist “Toronto School” appears on 9-10.
105. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 106-7.
106. Ibid., 108.
107. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 129-53.
108. Compare also, Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 94-102, esp. 99, on the theological doctrine of servitude which reinforced the “special ‘Jewish status’ . . . a mixture of protection and dependency, of discrimination in favour of and against the Jews . . . that paved the way for the almost total elimination of the Jews from Christian society.”
109. Lotter, “The Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages,” Jewish History 4, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 31-58. The Salians were the Frankish dynasty that ruled Germany from 1024 to 1138.
110. This formulation needs to be modified in light of J. A. Watt, “The Jews, the Law, and the Church: The Concept of Jewish Serfdom in Thirteenth-Century England,” in The Church and Sovereignty c. 590-1918: Essays in Honour of Michael Wilks, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 1991), 153-72, who shows that the “Statute for Jewry” passed by Parliament in 1275, outlawing Jewish usury and demanding that Jews switch to more productive occupations, refers (in French) to the Jews as the king’s “serfs” three times.
111. Gavin I. Langmuir, “Tanquam servi: The Change in Jewish Status in French Law about 1200,” in Les juifs dans l’histoire de France, première Colloque international de Haifa, ed. Myriam Yardeni (Leiden, 1980), 24-54; and his earlier article, “‘Judei nostri’ and the Beginning of Capetian Legislation,” Traditio 16 (1960), 203-9 (both essays are printed in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism). See also, Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 131-33. An English translation of the French ordinance is found in Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 213-14. See also, Gilbert Dahan’s summary in Les intellectuels chrétiens, 66-68.
112. On the king’s “takings” from Jews in royal France, see Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, index, s. v. captiones. For the regime of taxation of the Jews in the feudal domain of Champagne (not absorbed into royal France until the end of the thirteenth century), see Emily Taitz, “The Jews of Champagne from the First Settlement until the Expulsion of 1306” (Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theologial Seminary of America, 1992), 149, 201-10, 227.
113. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 295.
114. On “arbitrariness” of monarchs as a principal reason for Jewish insecurity (as opposed to the supposedly consistent lawfulness of the popes), see Kenneth Stow, “The Church and Neutral Historiography” (Hebrew), in 'Iyyunim be-historiografiya (Jerusalem, 1988), 110.
115. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 235, 343-44.
116. Ibid., 191-97.
117. Parkes, Jew in the Medieval Community, 199-204.
118. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford, 1984), 184.
119. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 344-46.
120. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:15.
121. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 153.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE LEGAL POSITION OF JEWS IN ISLAM
1. Jurists sum this up in the phrase iltizām ḥukm (or aḥkām) al-islām (subjection to Islamic jurisdiction or authority). The most important secondary work on the legal position of the Christians and Jews of Islam is Le statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam, by the Christian-Arab jurist Antoine Fattal (Beirut, 1958). Fattal is not superseded by the recent book by Ḥassān al-Zayn, Al-awḍā' al-qānūniyya li’l-naṣārā wa’l-yahūd fi’l-diyār al-islāmiyya ḥattā al-fatḥ al-'uthmānī [The Legal Condition of the Christians and Jews in Islamic Lands up to the Ottoman Conquest] (Beirut, 1988), which is rather apologetic in its excessive emphasis on the toleration and freedom granted to non-Muslims.
2. The dhimmīs were also known as ahl al-dhimma, or “protected people.”
3. For the example of Hinduism, see Yohanan Friedmann, “The Temple of Multān: A Note on Early Muslim Attitudes to Idolatry,” Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972), 176—82; idem, “Medieval Muslim Views of Indian Religions, "Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975), 214-21.
4. This provision is taken from the Visigothic Council of Agde (506).
5. Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1880), 140:col. 742: “De judaeis, quomodo ante baptismum examinari debeant. Judaei quorum perfidia frequenter ad fomitem redit, si ad legem catholicam venire voluerint. ...” For the original canon, see Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, 319-20.
6. Bernhard Blumenkranz, “The Roman Church and the Jews,” in The World History of the Jewish People: The Dark Ages, Jews in Christian Europe, 711-1096, ed. Cecil Roth (Ramat Gan, 1966), 79; idem, Juifs et chrétiens, 304-6. Book 13 contains laws about theft, usury, greed, drunkenness, and other sins.
7. Sometimes broadened as “Concerning the Jews, Saracens, and Their Servants” (in Christian Spain, of course, the issue was a combined “Jewish-Muslim question”). See also, Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 34-35; Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels, 4.
8. Ed. Ṣubḥī Ṣāliḥ, Beirut, 1983. A Kitāb aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, compiled in 1087-1088 by Abū Bakr Ahmad b. 'Alī b. Badrān al-Ḥulwānī, was still known to al-Wansharīsī in the 15th century (Mi 'yār al-mu 'rib [Beirut, 1981], 2:257), but it is long lost. (I thank Michael Cook for bringing this to my attention.) Some laws of the dhimma are discussed in the administrative treatise, Sirāj al-mulūk, by al-Ṭurṭūshī (d. 1126), in the chapter that begins with the Pact of 'Umar (see below, note 16). The Shafi'ite jurist and qāḍī, Badr al-Dīn ibn Jamā'a (1241-1333), included a broader summary of the rights and obligations of the dhimmīs (including a version of the Pact of 'Umar) as the final chapter of his administrative treatise, Tahrir al-aḥkām fī tadbīr ahl al-islām, ed. and trans. into German by Hans Kofler, “Handbuch des islamischen Staats- und Verwaltungsrechtes von Badr-ad-Dīn Ibn Gamā 'ah,” Islamica 7 (1935), 27-34; the translation of the chapter appears in the final issue of Islamica, published in Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 23, no. 6 (1938), 118-28.
9. Ibn Abī Shayba, Muṣannaf fi’l-aḥādīth wa’l-āthār, ed. Sa'īd al-Laḥḥām (Beirut, 1989).
10. One of the four equally orthodox canonical Islamic law schools, or madhhabs.
11. Bāb nikāḥ ahl al-dhimma, chap. on Dhimmī Marriage. Sarakhsī, Al-mabsūṭ ([Cairo], 1906-13), 5:38-48.
12. Sarakhsī, Al-mabsūṭ, 13:130-39.
13. Ibid., 9:195.
14. F. E. Peters, Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 62.
15. Kenneth Stow (“Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church: Papal Policy toward the Jews in the Middle Ages,” 80-81) suggests that the papacy had a similar, bilateral contact with the Jews especially dating from the Bull Sicut Judeis issued by Innocent III in 1199, appending a clause, Stow claims, borrowed “almost verbatim” from the Pact of 'Umar. This hypothesis—especially the part about textual borrowing from Arabic into Latin—is, to my mind, doubtful.
16. The most characteristic version of the document is found in a “Mirror for Kings” treatise by the twelfth-century writer, al-Turtūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk (Cairo, 1872), 229-30, (Cairo, 1935), 252-53; English trans. in Bernard Lewis, Islam: From the Prophet Muhammed to the Capture of Constantinople (New York, 1974), 2:217-19; and Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 157-58.
17. Antoine Fattal draws attention to parallels between Islamic and Christian law throughout Le statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d'Islam, often in order to show that Christianity was also discriminatory toward its infidels.
18. Sura 2:256.
19. Rudi Paret, “Sura 2, 256: lā ikrāha fī d-dīni. Toleranz oder Resignation?” Der Islam 45 (1969), 299-300. Compare Lewis, Jews of Islam, 13.
21. An excellent summary of the encounter between Muhammad and the Jews is found in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 3-21.
22. Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, Kitāb al-Jihād, Arabic text with English translation (partly revised here), in Muhammad Muhsin Khān, The Translation of the Meanings of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 6th rev. ed. (Lahore, 1983), 4:182. The chapter title preceding this statement—“One Should Fight on Behalf of the Protected People and They Should Not Be Enslaved”—well expresses the position of early Islam on Jews and Christians.
23. CJ 1.9.14 (= CTh 16.8.21), Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, no. 46; CJ 1.11.6 (= CTh 16.8.27; 16.10.24), Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, no. 49.
24. The verse in full reads: “Fight against those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by his Messenger, and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya 'an yadin wa-hum ṣāghirūn” (roughly and uncertainly rendered: “Pay the jizya out of hand while being in a lowly state”).
25. 'Abd al-Razzāq al-Ṣan'ānī, Al-muṣannaf, ed. Ḥabīburraḥmān al-A'ẓamī (Beirut, 1972), 6:89-90.
26. Most modern scholars understand the linguistically problematic Qur’anic prescription to lack the element of ceremonial humiliation altogether, preferring medieval explanations that follow that more benign line of thinking. (1) One view holds that the verse simply prescribes that the dhimmī acknowledge his inferiority and submission. (2) Another scholar translates the four last words of the verse in accord with the medieval interpretation of 'an yadin, as “out of ability and sufficient means, they (nevertheless) being inferior.” (3) The explanation of a third Orientalist leads him to translate the entire expression—in keeping with pre-Islamic Arab legal conceptions and parallel linguistic usage: “reward (jizya) due for a benefaction ('an yadin) (namely, the sparing of the life of the defeated non-Muslim in battle), while they (the defeated non-Muslims) are ignominious (wa-hum ṣāghirūn) (for not having fought unto death).” The fascinating debate over the original meaning of the phrase appeared in a series of exchanges in the journal Arabica between 1962 and 1967. To the Arabic linguistic evidence summoned by Meir M. Bravmann (Arabica 10 [1963], 94-95; 13 [1966], 307-14; 14 [1967], 90-91, 326-27) in favor of the third interpretation and in opposition to the views of Claude Cahen (Arabica 9 [1962], 76-79; 10 [1963], 95); and M. J. Kister (Arabica 11 [1964], 272-78), the proponents of the first and second, respectively, we may add that, in the Hebrew Bible, yad appears in a similar sense of benefaction, for instance, in 1 Kings 10:13, “. . . in addition to what King Solomon gave [to the Queen of Sheba] out of his royal bounty [ke-yad ha-melekh],” and in Nehemiah 2:8, “. . . thanks to my God’s benevolent care [ke-yad elohay ha-tova] for me,” and elsewhere (the new JPS translation, which I have quoted here, captures the meaning that the Arabic parallel reciprocally confirms).
27. Some sort of poll tax was in effect in most of the territories annexed by Islam, where it had been collected from the populace in general, although the privileged classes were often exempted. See Daniel C. Dennett, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 5, 28, 32-33, 54, 68; and David Goodblatt, “The Poll Tax in Sassanian Babylonia: The Talmudic Evidence,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 22 (1979), 233-95.
28. Fattal, Le statut, 18-60. A sampling of conquest treaties in English translation can be conveniently found in Lewis, Islam, 1:228-41.
29. The document is discussed at length in two standard works: A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of 'Umar (1930; repr., London, 1970); and Fattal, Le statut.
30. Amān, here with the meaning, “safe conduct.”
31. “It is not usual for a conquered people to decide the terms on which they shall be admitted to alliance with the victors.” Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 8.
32. Tritton found no real resemblance between the Pact of 'Umar and the many considerably shorter and less complex conquest treaties recorded in Arabic chronicles.
33. Noth, “Abgrenzungsprobleme zwischen Muslimen und Nicht-Muslimen: Die ‘Bedingungen 'Umars (aš-šurūṭ al-'umariyya’) unter einem anderen Aspekt gelesen,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987), 290-315.
34. The most important research on the petition and the decree forms in Islam are the studies of S. M. Stern, “Three Petitions of the Fatimid Period,” Oriens 15 (1962), 172-209; “Petitions from the Ayyubid Period,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 27 (1964), 1-32; “Petitions from the Mamluk Period (Notes on the Mamluk Documents from Sinai),” ibid., 29 (1966), 233-76; and Fatimid Decrees (London, 1964).
35. Stern speculates that the petitions of the early Islamic centuries were “simply in the form of letters.” Stern, “Three Petitions of the Fatimid Period,” 189. Geoffrey Khan notes that “the earliest surviving Arabic document . . . that can be identified as a petition—from Sogdiana at the beginning of the eighth century—has a structure that corresponds closely to the usual form of Umayyad letters written in Egypt and preserved in Arabic papyrus collections.” See his “Historical Development of the Structure of Medieval Arabic Petitions,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53 (1990), 8. The argument compressed into this paragraph will be detailed in a paper I am preparing on the Pact of 'Umar.
36. Specifically, “Christians” may not build “monasteries, churches, convents, [or] monks’ cells.” See Fattal, Le statut, 174ff.
37. Fattal, Le statut, 180ff.
38. Ibid., 185ff.
39. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya devotes a long chapter to the subject in his extensive analytical commentary on the text of the Pact of 'Umar. See his Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 665—713.
40. Seth Ward, “Construction and Repair of Churches and Synagogues in Islamic Law: A Treatise by Taqī al-Dīn 'Alī b. 'Abd al-Kāfī al-Subkī” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1984); idem, “Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī on Construction, Continuance and Repair of Churches and Synagogues in Islamic Law,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions II, ed. William S. Brinner and Steven Ricks (Atlanta, Ga., 1989), 169-88.
41. Moshe Perlmann, ed. and trans., Shaykh Damanhūrī on the Churches of Cairo (1739) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), 18-23.
42. Perlmann, Shaykh Damanhūrī, 25-26.
43. Cairo was founded in 969.
44. Ward, “Construction and Repair of Churches and Synagogues.”
45. Richard Gottheil, “An Eleventh-Century Document Concerning a Cairo Synagogue,” Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 19 (1906-7), 467-539. The document is also translated in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 189-91.
46. Two died from their wounds, and one, or, possibly, two others converted to Islam.
47. Mark R. Cohen, “Jews in the Mamlūk Environment: The Crisis of 1442 (A Geniza Study),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47 (1984), 425-48.
48. “Display of the cross is like displaying idols. . . . Therefore it is not permitted to them to put crosses on the doors of their churches outside of their walls, but they should not be interfered with when they sculpt them indoors.” Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 719.
49. Fattal, Le statut, 205-11.
50. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:285. See also, Chap. 10 in this book.
51. CTh 16.8.18, Theodosian Code, 469. Haman is the antisemitic villain of the Book of Esther whose plan to kill all the Jews of Persia backfired, resulting in his death and that of his ten sons on the gallows. Christians mistook the gallows and the effigy at Purim time for “setting fire to and burning a simulated appearance of the holy cross, in contempt of the Christian faith and with sacrilegious mind.” Hence the Theodosian Code barred alleged anti-Christian abuses in the ritual.
52. Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 467.
54. CTh 16.8.5, Theodosian Code, 467.
55. Riding a horse was considered a sign of honor.
56. Canon 68.
57. In the following discussion, I have condensed the contents of a paper I have written on the distinctive dress of non-Muslims, which will be published in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East II (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam II), ed. Lawrence I. Conrad. Previous literature on the dress regulations in Islam includes Ilse Lichtenstadter, “The Distinctive Dress of Non-Muslims in Islamic Countries,” Historia Judaica 5 (1943), 35-52; Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, chap. 8; Fattal, Le statut, 96-112; and the overlooked, but important, article by Habib Zayat, “The Distinctive Signs of the Christians and Jews in Islam” (Arabic), Al-Machriq 43:2 (1949), 161-252. I am grateful to my student, Hassan Khalilieh, for bringing this article to my attention. Fattal does not seem to have referred to it.
The idea of differentiating privileged from unprivileged classes via dress already existed in ancient Rome. Augustus imposed distinctive dress on noncitizens and assigned them separate places at public spectacles, in order to distinguish them from citizens. Citizens wore a white toga (the plebs togata; also mentioned is a piece of headgear, the plebs pileata). Noncitizens wore colored garments and were referred to as pullati (“those wearing black”). Augustus also decreed a penalty for citizens who did not appear in public in their togas, whereas the wearing of the toga was forbidden to those who did not have citizenship or who had lost it through some punishment. This ordinance was reissued until the late empire. See Denis Van Berchem, Les distributions de blé et d’argent à la plèbe romaine sous l’empire (Geneva, 1939), 61.
58. Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 115.
59. Lichtenstadter’s claim that the “main reason for which 'Umar allegedly introduced the dress regulations was to render non-Muslims easily distinguishable from Muslims in order to prevent inter-marriage and free intercourse [sexual?] between Muhammedans and Unbelievers” (Lichtenstadter, “Distinctive Dress,” 43) has no basis in Muslim sources. The author seems to have been influenced by the rationale of the Fourth Lateran Council.
60. Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 116; also, Fattal, Le statut, 97-98.
61. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. and augmented by H. J. Jones (Oxford, 1968), 759. Zōnarion is a diminutive of the classical Greek word zōnē; it came into Latin as zona and is synonymous with the Latin cingulum.
62. Noth, “Abgrenzungsprobleme,” 304-5. To “turn Muslim,” a modern historian of Nestorian Christianity explains, is often expressed in medieval sources by the expression “to remove the zunnār”; J. M. Fiey, Chrétiens syriaques sous les abbasides: surtout à Bagdad (749-1258) (Louvain, 1980), 88, n. 24.
63. In Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 117; and in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed., s.v. “Zunnār.” Noth does not mention the Syriac connection.
64. Chronique de Seért (Histoire Nestorienne), in Patrologia Orientalis (Paris, 1919), 13:630: wa-kāna awwal man amara al-iskalānīyyin bi-shadd al-zanānīr fī awsāṭihim li-yatamayyazū bi-dhālika min ghairihim (the accompanying French translation glosses the last words, “from others,” “des autres jeunes gens”). According to the footnote, one source places Mar Emmeh’s consecration as Catholicos in the first year of 'Uthmān’s caliphate. Passage also cited in Zayat, “The Distinctive Signs of the Christians and Jews in Islam,” 201-2, and in Tritton’s article, “Zunnār.”
65. Iohannis Ephesini (John of Ephesus), Historiae Ecclesiasticae, Pars Tertia, ed. and trans. into Latin E. W. Brooks (1935; repr., Louvain, 1952), Syriac text, 165, Latin trans., 2:122-23 (chap. 33), English trans. by R. Payne Smith, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John Bishop of Ephesus (Oxford, 1860), 223.
66. See my article cited in note 57.
67. On the self-defensive purpose of the Pact of 'Umar stipulations, see Noth, “Abgrenzungsprobleme,” 307-13.
69. Plus the ṭaylasān (a kind of hood) and the qalansuwa (a conical cap). Fattal, Le statut, 101-2; Lewis, Islam, 2:224 (no. 77). See also Chap. 10 in this book.
70. Casual evidence comes from Saadya Gaon (d. 942), the eminent scholar and head of the Babylonian yeshiva. In his Arabic commentary on the talmudic tractate of Berakhot, in the section dealing with the morning blessings (birkhot ha-shaḥar), Saadya uses the Syriac-like form zunāra and the devised Arabic verb tazannara (yatazannarū al-zunāra) to explain the talmudic prescription that one should recite the invocation “Blessed is He who girds Israel with might” (ozer yisrael bi-gevura) when fastening one’s girdle (the Aramaic word in the talmudic passage is himyana). See Perush R. Saadya Gaon le-masekhet berakhot, in Ginzei yerushalayim (Ginzei Jerusalem), ed. Abraham J. Wertheimer (Jerusalem, 1981), 241. I am grateful to Professor Michael Sokoloff for bringing this publication to my attention.
Similarly, in his prayerbook, in the directions for reciting the morning blessings (birkhot ha-shaḥar), Saadya writes, without special comment: “At the moment of (fastening) the zunnār, say [the blessing ending with ‘God], who girds Israel with greatness.’” Siddur R. Saadja Gaon, ed. I. Davidson et al. (Jerusalem, 1970), 88, line 17. While Geniza documents apparently make little mention of the zunnār, these passages from Saadya regarding everyday liturgical practice suggest that it was fairly commonly worn by Iraqi Jewry.
71. Fattal, Le statut, 102-10. See also the chronological survey of decrees (807-1364), including repromulgation of the dress regulation, in Zayat, “The Distinctive Signs of the Christians and Jews in Islam,” 213-15.
72. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:286, 288.
73. I am grateful to Michael Cook for bringing this to my attention. See his “Magian Cheese: An Archaic Problem in Islamic Law,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47 (1984), esp. 451-54.
76. Fattal, Le statut, 38 (treaty with Hira, 633 C.E.).
77. In ḥadīth, one finds considerable discussion of slaves in dhimmī possession. For instance, an unbeliever might not enslave a Muslim. A dhimmī's slave who converted to Islam must be sold off, at a price determined by evaluating the monetary worth of the slave, even against the will of the owner. A Christian servant girl (ama) who converted to Islam after bearing the child of her Christian master must be set free unless the father followed her into Islam, in which case she might remain his slave. 'Abd al-Razzāq al-Ṣan'ānī, Al-muṣannaf 6:43ff.
78. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 730ff. The form the clause takes in one version of the Pact (the one preserved by Badr al-Dīn ibn Jamā'a; see note 8 in this chapter) incorporates this meaning: “They shall not purchase any of our captives.” Kofler, “Handbuch des islamischen Staats und Verwaltungsrechtes von Badr-ad-Dīn Ibn Ǧamā'ah,” 30.
79. 'Abd al-Razzāq al-San'ānī, Al-muṣannaf, 6:46-47.
80. It should be noted that Ibn al-Qayyim relied on a version of the Pact of 'Umar in which the slave clause comes sandwiched between two stipulations which normally come together much earlier, and with no intervening clause. One forbids dhimmīs from proselytizing, while the other forbids them from preventing a coreligionist from adopting Islam. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 657-61.
82. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 132-37.
83. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:130-37.
84. Fattal, Le statut, 240. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s long section on the prohibition of employing dhimmīs in positions of authority (wilāya) over Muslims is filled with anecdotes in which Muslims acknowledge, however regrettably, the indispensability of these infidel kātibs (government clerks). Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 208-38.
85. Fattal, Le statut, 236-37; Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, section cited in n. 84.
86. This appears several times in Ibn al-Qayyim’s chapter, already mentioned.
87. Fattal, Le statut, 240-52. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (section cited in n. 84) provides a historical survey of caliphal attempts to stamp out the practice, beginning with 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz and extending over centuries.
88. Lewis, Islam, 2:225 (no. 77). In other anthologies—e.g., Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 167-68; and Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 186.
89. Lewis, Islam 2:225 (no. 78).
90. Fattal, Le statut, 252ff.
91. The story of Jewish achievements in Muslim government in Andalusia can be followed in Ashtor’s Jews of Moslem Spain.
92. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:374-80.
93. Richard Gottheil, “Fragments from an Arabic Common-Place Book,” Bulletin de l'Institut Française d’Archéologie Orientale 34 (1934), 103-28; compare Mark R. Cohen, “Correspondence and Social Control in the Jewish Communities of the Islamic World: A Letter of the Nagid Joshua Maimonides,” Jewish History 1, no. 2 (1986), 40.
94. Often cited in books about the period and in Lewis, Islam, 2:227 (no. 80). For more on Abū Sa'd and his family, see Chap. 5 in this book.
95. Claude Cahen, “Histoires coptes d’un cadi médiéval,” Bulletin de l’Institut Française d’Archéologie Orientale 59 (1960), 141—42; other sources cited in Fattal, Le statut, 259; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:281; Mark R. Cohen, Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt: The Origins of the Office of Head of the Jews, ca. 1065-1126 (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 284-85.
96. Lewis, Islam, 2:228-29 (no. 83).
97. Ibid., 2:229-32; Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 192-94.
98. For an example of an attempt by dhimmīs to pay a sum of money to minimize the potential danger from the distinctive dress requirement, see Lichtenstadter, “Distinctive Dress,” 51.
99. Fattal, Le statut, 262. See also, Donald P. Little, “Coptic Converts to Islam during the Bahri Mamluk Period,” in Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. M. Gervers and R. J. Bikhazi (Toronto, 1990), 263-88.
100. E. Strauss (Ashtor), “L’inquisition dans l’état mamlouk,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 25 (1950), 11-26. Ashtor points out that trials of Jews were far less frequent than trials of Christians, because, he surmises, of the Jews’ perceived weakness, their small numbers, and their inability to count on support from European states—all of which made the Jews more cautious, and hence, less likely to be prosecuted than were Christians.
101. See, for instance, Claude Cahen, “Histoires coptes d’un cadi médiéval,” 133-50. Compare J. Sadan, “Some Literary Problems Concerning Judaism and Jewry in Medieval Arabic Sources,” in Studies in Islamic History and Civilization in Honour of Professor David Ayalon, ed. M. Sharon (Jerusalem, 1986), 365-70. Cahen did not publish the chapter on the Jews. Moshe Perlmann, “Asnawi’s Tract against Christian Officials,” in Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume, Part II, ed. Samuel Löwinger et al. (Jerusalem, 1958), 172-208; idem, “Notes on Anti-Christian Propaganda in the Mamlūk Empire,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 10 (1940-42), 843-61; Richard Gottheil, “An Answer to the Dhimmis,” Journal of the American Oriental Society (1921), 383-457; anon., Minhāj al-sawāb fī qabḥ istiktāb ahl al-kitāb (Beirut, 1982; a treatise against employing dhimmīs in public service, written in the fourteenth century); D. S. Richards, “The Coptic Bureaucracy under the Mamluks,” in Colloque International sur L’histoire du Caire (Cairo [ca. 1970]), 373-81.
102. Ibn Taymiyya wrote an entire book on the subject of blasphemy in Islam. See also, Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 795-96, and n. 130 in this chapter.
103. Fattal covers the jizya in his Le statut. See 264ff.
104. Abū Yūsuf lived from 731 to 798. Hārūn al-Rashīd ruled from 786 to 809.
105. Abū Yūsuf, Kitāb al-kharāj (Bulaq, 1302/1885), 122-26 (jizya), 127-28 (distinctive dress), 138-49 (houses of worship, dhimmī obligations, and further discussion of peace terms during the conquest).
106. Al-Shāfi'ī, Kitāb al-umm (Bulaq, 1903-4), 4:118-19; trans. in Lewis, Islam, 2:219-23.
107. Ibid., 4:125-26: Taḥdīd al-imām mā ya’khudh min ahl al-dhimma fi’l-amṣār; and 127: Ma yu'ṭīhum al-imām min al-man' min al-'adūw.
108. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 1.
109. Ibid., 15ff, 22ff.
110. Fattal, Le statut, 324.
111. Abū Dā’ūd, Sunan, ed. 'Aziz 'Ubayd Ri’as (Hims, 1972), 3:433-34, no. 3045; English trans. in Abū Dā’ūd, Sunan, trans. Ahmad Hasan (Lahore, 1984), 2:865. The ḥadīth occurs often elsewhere (in a variant, the victim of the torment is called nabat, “a Nabatean” [Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 34]). Compare also, Fattal, Le statut, 288.
112. Quoted from Kitāb al-kharāj, in Lewis, Islam, 2:224.
113. Quoted from A. Ben-Shemesh, Taxation in Islam (Leiden, 1969), 3:85.
114. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 155.
115. Moshe Gil, “Religion and Realities in Islamic Taxation,” Israel Oriental Studies 10 (1980), 24-26.
116. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:380ff.
117. Fattal, Le statut, 289-90.
118. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:384.
119. Fattal, Le statut, 281-83.
120. For instance, Yuzbakī, Ta’rīkh ahl al-dhimma fi’l-lrāq (12-247 A.H.), 77-80.
121. This point is made by Rabbath, Les chrétiens dans l'Islam des premiers temps: La conquête arabe sous les quatre premiers califes (11/632-40/661), 1:245, stressing jizya’s original function as tribute or ransom in return for safeguards.
122. First published by A. Harkavy, “Netira und seine Söhne: Eine angesehene jüdische Familie in Bagdad am Anfang des X. Jahrhunderts,” in Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage A. Berliner's (Hebrew part) (Frankfurt am Main, 1903), 1:34-43. The whereabouts of the Harkavy manuscript remains unknown. Another fragment—this one in the Taylor Schechter Collection of manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza (TS Misc. Box 10, fol. 252)—parallels the important passage translated below; unfortunately it is torn precisely where the text contains the greatest difficulties. See also, Walter J. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam (1937; repr., New York, 1969), 34ff.
123. Harkavy, “Netira und seine Söhne,” 36. In translating the passage I have found useful the emendations to and plausible explanation of the problematic first part of this passage by S. Friedlaender, Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 17 (1904-5), 387-88. Additional emendations: for ytqn, read yḥqn, hence yaḥqin dammahu, “spares his life” (courtesy of Professor Moshe Gil); for yṭ’lim, read yṭ’lbw, hence yuṭālabū, “will be demanded” (courtesy of Professor Joshua Blau). I lectured on this passage at the Sixth International Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies (Bar-Ilan University, June 1993) and benefited from comments on the text from colleagues. That paper will be published in the conference proceedings (in Hebrew), ed. David Doron. Compare Raphael Patai, The Seed of Abraham: Jews and Arabs in Contact and Conflict (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1986), 44; and Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture (Boulder, Colo., 1985), 88-90, who misconstrues some details of the conversation between Netira and the caliph regarding the jizya.
124. Compare Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3:153. For a gloomier interpretation of this “episode,” see Avraham Grossman, “The Economic and Social Background of Hostile Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ninth and Tenth Century Muslim Caliphate,” 175-86. The author acknowledges that “neither in this source nor in any other contemporary ones do we find evidence of violent mob outbreaks against the Jews as a result of this jealousy [of the powerful Jewish banker-courtier, Netira].”
125. S. D. Goitein, “A Report of Messianic Troubles in Baghdad in 1120-21,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 43 (1952), 75 (bottom).
126. John O. Hunwick, ed., Sharī'a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghīlī to the Questions of Askia al-Ḥājj Muhammad (Oxford, 1985), 30-37. Also, idem, “Al-Mahīlī [sic] and the Jews of Tuwāt: The Demise of a Community,” Studia Islamica 61 (1985), 155-83.
127. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 167-68.
128. I heard this idea long ago in lectures in graduate school on medieval Jewish history by my teacher, Professor Gerson D. Cohen. I have never seen it mentioned in print elsewhere. The verb form does not appear in Menahem Moreshet, Leqsiqon ha-po'al she-nitḥadesh bi-leshon ha-tannaim [A Lexicon of New Verbs in Tannaitic Hebrew] (Ramat Gan, 1980). I am grateful to Professor Moshe Greenberg for bringing this reference book to my attention. I located one attestation of the verbal usage in a Tannaitic passage in the Talmud (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 28b): R. Yohanan b. Zakkai, on his sickbed, compares an earthly king to God, only the former of whom he can appease and “bribe with money” (le-shaḥdo be-mammon).
129. In al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-bayān wa’l-tabyīn (Cairo, 1311H./1893), 1:168; quoted in Levy, The Social Structure of Islam (Cambridge, 1957), 55; and, from there, in Patai, Seed of Abraham, 51.
130. Abridged by the editor of Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma from Ibn Taymiyya’s Kitāb al-ṣārim al-maslūk 'alā shātim al-rasūl (214-15, 243-45, 252-53) and included as an appendix (Aḥkām, part 2, 891-93). Ibn al-Qayyim himself explains that 'Umar’s promulgation was incumbent upon the dhimmīs “forever” (ibid., 7-14). Compare also, ibid., 795, where Ibn al-Qayyim introduces the final part of his Aḥkām, dealing with acts by the dhimmī that cause the Pact to be canceled, especially blasphemy toward the Prophet.
131. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 154—159.
132. In 1301: al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-sulūk li-ma'rifat duwal al-mulūk, ed. M. M. Ziyāda et al. (Cairo, 1939), 1:909-13; trans. in Lewis, Islam, 2:229ff, esp. 231. In 1354: al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-a'shā’ (Cairo, 1918), 13:378-79; trans. in Lewis, Islam, 2:234-35. In ca. 1442: Cohen, “Jews in the Mamlūk Environment: The Crisis of 1442 (A Geniza Study),” 429, where the Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian community heads “professed to have no knowledge of it,” either because they wished to avoid responsibility or perhaps precisely because an actual ceremony of repromulgation had never before taken place in their time. The contents of the stipulations of 'Umar were, of course, well known to them.
133. Isma'īl ibn 'Umar ibn Kathīr, Al-bidāya wa’l-nihāya, 14 vols. (Cairo, 1932-39/40), 11:339.
134. Al-Sarakhsī, Al-mabsūṭ, 5:39. Compare, also, the statement in al-Shāfi'ī’s juristic compilation of the rights and obligations to be written by the Imam into the contract for the dhimmīs: “If one of you or any other unbeliever applies to us for judgment, we shall adjudicate according to the law of Islam. But if he does not come to us, we shall not intervene among you” (lam nu'riḍ lakum fīmā baynakum wa-baynahu)”; Kitāb al-umm, 4:118; trans. in Lewis, Islam, 2:219—23.
135. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 809.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ECONOMIC FACTOR
1. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 1959), 12, 13; monograph repr. in The Evolution of Capitalism. Pre-Capitalist Economic Thought: Three Modern Interpretations (New York, 1972).
2. “The outbursts against possession of great wealth, which occurred frequently in the writings of the Church Fathers, undoubtedly were prompted primarily by the New Testament teachings about wealth and especially by the account of the rich young ruler.” Baldwin, Medieval Theories, 13.
3. Baldwin, Medieval Theories, 15. J. Gilchrist adds: “Tertullian spoke of trade as avarice; St. John Chrysostom considered merchants to be men who ‘wish to become rich at any price. . . . 'Jerome treated trade as fraud; for Augustine it was a pursuit that turned men’s minds away from true rest. . . . [Pope] Leo I’s conclusion that ‘it is difficult for buyers and sellers not to fall into sin’ became common opinion in the Church and set the stage, for the theory, that is, for the next six centuries.” Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London, 1969), 51.
4. Zacour, Introduction to Medieval Institutions, 54-55. For a similar view, see Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), 86-87.
5. Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill., 1950), 403-4; emphasis added.
6. Gil, “The Rādhānite Merchants and the Land of Rādhān,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974), 299-328. See also the more recent article by Charles Verlinden, “Les Radaniya et Verdun: a propos de la traite des esclaves slaves vers l’Espagne musulmane aux IXe et Xe siècles,” in Estudios en homenaje a Don Claudio Sánchez Albornoz en sus 90 años (Buenos Aires, 1983), 2:105-32, which unfortunately, while surveying the earlier literature, overlooks Gil’s indispensable contribution.
7. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 26. On the prominence of Jews in long-distance international trade of early medieval Europe, see Robert-Henri Bautier, The Economic Development of Medieval Europe, trans. Heather Karolyi (London, 1971), 77-78; Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (Cambridge, 1976), 60-61; Charles Verlinden, “A propos de la place des juifs dans l’économie de l’Europe occidentale aux IXe et Xe siècles: Agobard de Lyon et l’historiographie arabe,” in Storiografia e Storia; Studi in onore de Eugenio Depré Theseider (Rome, 1974), 21—37, and the same author’s “Les Radaniya et Verdun.” The disappearance of the Syrians from the East-West trade, and its consequences for the Jews, is explained by Robert Lopez as follows: “The Arab invasion did not end all relations between East and West, but opened to Syrian merchants wider Asiatic markets toward which they turned. . . . Thus the Jews alone were left to provide a link, however tenuous, between Catholic Europe and the more advanced countries beyond it: the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, even India and China.” Lopez, Commercial Revolution, 60.
Another explanation—hypothetical, yet reasonable, and not mutually exclusive with Lopez—is that Syrian Christians would have felt, or have been made to feel, uncomfortable traversing the Muslim-Christian frontier. Muslims might have suspected them of conveying intelligence to the Christian enemy in the Domain of War. For their part, the Syrians might have risked forfeiting their dhimmī status for the less favorable status of musta’min.
8. Baldwin, Medieval Theories, 31-34.
9. Avraham Grossman, Ḥakhmei ashkenaz ha-rishonim [The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership, and Works (900-1096)] (Jerusalem, 1981), 29-35, 39-41.
10. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 12-33.
11. Jews are frequently referred to in Latin by such phrases as “mercatores, id est Judei at ceteri mercatores” [merchants, that is, Jews and other merchants]; Aronius, Regesten, 52 (no. 122, dated ca. 906); also 55 (no. 129): “ne vel Judei vel ceteri ibi [in urbe Magadaburg] manentes negotiatores” (nor Jews nor other merchants remaining [in Magdeburg]).
12. The role of medieval urbanism in Jewish fate in Christendom and in Islam is treated at some length in Chap. 7 of this book.
13. Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 58—59; Aronius, Regesten, 69—70 (no. 168).
14. Gilchrist, Church and Economic Activity, 53-56. Compare Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400—1500: “During the period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries . . . [t]he Church protected the merchant and helped him to conquer the prejudice which made the inactive seigneurial class despise him” (82).
15. Gilchrist, Church and Economic Activity, 58-62.
16. Ibid., 62-70; DMA, s.v. “Usury.” This standard was also applied to the Jews by the thirteenth-century papacy.
17. Wilhelm Roscher, a nineteenth-century historian whose theory about the role of the Jews in medieval economic life still has merit, wrote:
In those days the Jews satisfied a great economic need, something which, for a long time, could not be done by anyone else, namely, the need for carrying on a professional trade. Mediaeval policy toward the Jews may be said to have followed a direction almost inverse to the general economic trend. As soon as peoples became mature enough to perform that function themselves, they try to emancipate themselves from such guardianship over their trade, often in bitter conflict. The persecutions of the Jews in the later Middle Ages are thus, to a great extent, a product of commercial jealousy. They are connected with the rise of a national merchant class.
English translation by Guido Kisch in his tribute to Roscher, “The Jews’ Function in the Evolution of Mediaeval Economic Life,” in Kisch, Forschungen zur Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Juden, 2:109 (orig. published in Historia Judaica 6 [1944] and later in Kisch’s Jews in Medieval Germany, 316ff).
18. Judah Rosenthal, “The Law of Usury Relating to Non-Jews” (Hebrew), Talpioth 5 (1952), 479-82.
19. Ibid., 484-85.
20. Dialogue of a Philosopher, trans. P. J. Payer (Toronto, 1979), 33.
21. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 329.
22. Jordan, “Jews on Top: Women and the Availability of Consumption Loans in Northern France in the Mid-Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (1978), esp. 47, 50-52, 55-56.
23. Jenks, “Judenverschuldung und Verfolgung der Juden im 14. Jahrhundert: Franken bis 1349,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 65 (1978), 309-56.
24. William Jordan notes the essential legality of pawnbrokering in medieval times, which explains why it left “virtually no evidence." Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 87. Jenks points out that Würzburg was exceptional by virtue of the occupational differentiation of its Jews and by the atypically close and congenial contact with their Christian neighbors. Jenks, “Judenverschuldung und Verfolgung der Juden,” 348-50.
25. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1964), 18-24.
26. Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York, 1974). In York, the author argues, nobles who besieged and killed Jews acted out of resentment toward the king by taking revenge on his agents. They recognized that the Jews were pawns of the king, who supported Jewish usury in order to exact revenues from his subjects in the form of profits from oppressive Jewish moneylending.
27. DMA, s.v. “Banking, European,” col. 76a, and “Lombards”; Gilchrist, Church and Economic Activity, 110; Kurt Grunwald, “Lombards, Cahorsins, and Jews,” Journal of European Economic History 4 (1975), 393-98.
28. See Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 86-87, 132-33, for two examples among many (= Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 71 [no. 67] and 94-95 [no. 89]).
29. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 307; Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 190-95.
30. Roth, History of the Jews in England, 70-73.
31. H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (London, 1960), 213-33.
32. Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century,” 161-84.
33. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, chaps. 8-13.
34. Ibid., 45; Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Cleveland, 1961), 188-95; Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 192; Rosenthal, “Law of Usury,” 134; S. Stein, “A Disputation on Moneylending between Jews and Gentiles in Me’ir b. Simeon’s Milḥemeth Miṣwah (Narbonne, 13th century),” Journal of Jewish Studies 10 (1959), 45-61.
35. Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 46-47.
36. Ibid., 99-103 (quotation on 103).
37. “A Letter [Polemic] of R. Jacob of Venice” (Hebrew), Jeschurun: Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, ed. Joseph Kobak 6 (1868), 16; also quoted in David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati, 1981), 87, 210, n. 8. See Kenneth R. Stow, “Jacob of Venice and the Jewish Settlement in Venice in the Thirteenth Century,” in Community and Culture: Essays in Jewish Studies in Honor of the Ninetieth Anniversary of the Founding of Gratz College 1895-1985, ed. Nahum M. Waldman (Philadelphia, 1987), 221-32.
38. DMA, s.v. “Muhammad,” col. 522a.
39. Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (Austin, Tex., 1978), 13-15 (quotation on 14).
40. Cited and translated from al-Muttaqī, Kanz al-'ummāl, in Lewis, Islam, 2:125-27.
41. See the article by Goitein cited in note 45.
42. Abdul Azim Islahi, Economic Concepts of Ibn Taimiyah (London, 1988), 179.
43. Ibid., 181.
44. Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, 103, 108.
45. In an influential article by that title, published in the Journal of World History 3 (1957), 583, 604; repr. in Goitein’s Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1968), 217-41.
46. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam, 1-44.
47. Eliyahu Ashtor, “Migrations de l’Irak vers les pays méditerranéens dans le haut Moyen Age,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 27 (1972), 185-214.
48. On the wakīl tujjār, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:186-92.
49. See Mark R. Cohen and Sasson Somekh, “In the Court of Ya'qūb ibn Killis: A Fragment from the Cairo Geniza,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 80 (1989-90), 283-314.
50. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam, 68-69; Moshe Gil, Ha-tustarim: ha-mishpaḥa veha-kat [The Tustaris: The Family and the Sect] (Tel Aviv, 1981).
51. A. L. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton, N.J., 1970), esp. 256-59; and numerous articles.
52. Islahi, Economic Concepts of Ibn Taimiyah, 136-37.
53. Responsa of the Geonim (Hebrew), ed. Abraham E. Harkabi (Berlin, 1887), 216 (no. 423). For a discussion of the suftaja as it appears in the Geniza, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:242-45. On this particular Geonic responsum, see ibid., 2:328.
54. S. M. Stern, “The Constitution of the Islamic City,” in A. H. Hourani and S. M. Stern, ed., The Islamic City: A Colloquium (Oxford, 1970), 36-47.
55. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:276, 401-2.
56. Responsa of the Geonim, ed. Harkabi, 140 (no. 278); cited by Gideon Libson, “Between Jewish Law and Muslim Law: The Preference Given Neighbors of Differing Religions in Acquiring Neighboring Property” (Hebrew), Pe'amim 45 (1990), 85, n. 44, as evidence of Geonic confidence in the Muslim judiciary.
57. Ibid., 85 (text in S. Abramson, “Five Sections of Rabbi Hai Gaon’s 'Sefer Hamekach’” [Hebrew], in Jubilee Volume in Honor of Moreinu Hagaon Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. Shaul Israeli et al. [Jerusalem, 1984], 2:1350).
58. Guido Kisch, “Relations between Jewish and Christian Courts in the Middle Ages,” in Kisch’s Forschungen zur Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der Juden, 2:78-105.
59. Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages, 2d printing (New York, 1964), 150-60.
60. Gideon Libson, “The Custom to Supplement to the Ketuba Based on ‘Appropriate Mohar’ for a Wife Who Has Lost Her Ketuba” (Hebrew), Sefunot, n.s., 5 (20) (1991), 71-94 (Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies); idem, “Between Jewish Law and Muslim Law,” 71-88; and a book, tentatively titled Studies in Comparative Jewish and Islamic Law: Gaonic Practice and Islamic Law, to be published by the Faculty of Laws, Hebrew University.
61. In the Muslim world, the gentile (Hebrew: goy) par excellence was the Muslim; Christians were usually called 'arelim (uncircumcised) in Hebrew.
62. Louis Ginzberg, Geonica, vol. 2, Genizah Studies, 2d ed. (New York, 1968), 194 (cf. 186-87). Other responsa on the same theme include two in Teshuvot ha-geonim, ed. Jacob Musafia (Lyck, 1864), 25-26 (nos. 67-68).
63. Ginzberg, Geonica, vol. 2, Genizah Studies, 186-87, 194-96.
64. Responsa of Maimonides (Hebrew), ed. J. Blau (Jerusalem, 1958), 2:360 (no. 204); Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:296. Goitein translates: “the crafts exercised are in one case goldsmithing; in another the making of glass.”
65. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam, 227-29; Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 270-74 (273: “becoming partners with them leads to intermingling [mukhālaṭa], and that, in turn, to friendship [mawadda]”); part 2, 776-77.
66. Responsa of Maimonides, ed. Blau, 1:170 (no. 101); compare Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:199.
67. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam, 77-80.
68. Quoted, ibid., 79.
69. Responsa of Maimonides, ed. Blau, 1:89 (no. 53); Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:197.
70. Libson, “Between Jewish Law and Muslim Law,” 85.
71. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:256-57.
72. Responsa of Maimonides, ed. Blau, 1:122 (no. 79).
73. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam, 12-25.
74. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:258.
75. Gottheil, “An Answer to the Dhimmis,” 457 (English), 415 (Arabic).
76. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 1:362-67, 87.
77. Ibid., 116-27.
78. See above, p. 80.
79. Clifford Geertz, “Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou,” in Cliffort Geertz, Hildred Geertz, and Lawrence Rosen, Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society: Three Essays in Cultural Analysis (Cambridge, 1979), 165.
80. Ibid. 169.
81. Lawrence Rosen, Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Community (Chicago, 1984), 154-55.
82. Daniel Schroeter, “Trade as a Mediator in Muslim-Jewish Relations: Southwestern Morocco in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jews among Arabs: Contacts and Boundaries, ed. M. R. Cohen and A. L. Udovitch (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 115. Schroeter’s book, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886 (Cambridge, 1988), deals with the subject in a broader context.
83. Schroeter, “Trade as a Mediator,” 117.
84. S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 76-78.
85. Ibid., 199-200.
86. An exception to this view is that of Maurice Kriegel. In his “Un trait de psychologie sociale dans les pays méditerranéens du Bas Moyen Age: le juif comme intouchable” (Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, 31 [19761, 326-30), and more comprehensively in Les Juifs à la fin du moyen âge dans l’Europe méditerranéene (Paris, 1979), Kriegel argues—against received wisdom—that the attitude toward thejew in southern Europe was just as hostile as it was in the north. Noël Coulet has challenged this revisionist thesis in “‘Juif intouchable’ et interdits alimentaires,” in Exclus et systèmes d’exclusion dans la littérature et la civilisation médiévales (Aix-en-Provence, 1978), 207-21. See also, Coulet, “Les Juifs en Provence au bas moyen âge: Les limites d’une marginalité,” in Minorités et marginaux en Espagne et dans le Midi de la France VIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1986), 203-19.
87. Y. Dossat, “Les Juifs à Toulouse: un demi-siècle d’histoire communautaire,” in Juifs et judaïsme de Languedoc xiiie siècle-début xive siècle, ed. Marie-Humbert Vicaire and Bernhard Blumenkranz (Toulouse, 1977), 132—35.
88. Gérard Nahon, “Condition fiscale et économique des juifs,” in Juifs et judaïsme de Languedoc xiiie siècle-début xive siècle, 63-72, following Saige, Luce, Régné, among others.
89. Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered, 123.
90. See William C. Jordan’s review, Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 82 (1991), 221-23.
CHAPTER SIX
HIERARCHY, MARGINALITY, AND ETHNICITY
1. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, complete rev. Eng. edition, trans. Sainsbury, Dumont, and Galiati (Chicago, 1980). For a discussion of the controversial reception given this book, see Dumont’s “Preface to the Complete English Edition.”
2. Ibid., 66; the entire passage appears in italics in the original.
3. Ibid., 243, in the author’s “Postface: Toward a Theory of Hierarchy.”
4. Ibid., 191.
5. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London, 1980), 3-4.
6. Russell, A History of Medieval Christianity: Prophecy and Order, 86. Compare Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500: “Freedom meant a guaranteed status: it was, according to Gerd Tellenbach’s definition, ‘one’s legitimate place before God and men.’ It meant belonging to society” (280). The seminal contribution of Tellenbach to the elaboration of the related notions of hierarchy, “right order,” and “libertas” in the Middle Ages can be found in Tellenbach’s Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, trans. R. F. Bennett (Oxford, 1959). See, for instance, the chapter “The Medieval Conception of the Hierarchy”: “[Hierarchy] is one of the forms in which human thought about the problems of the world has always found expression, though it has never been so thoroughly exploited as it was during the middle ages” (38).
7. Dominique Sourdel, Medieval Islam, trans. J. Montgomery Watt (London, 1983), 135.
8. I draw upon H. F. Dickie-Clark, The Marginal Situation: A Sociological Study of a Coloured Group (London, 1966); and Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright, Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India (Leiden, 1973). The passage quoted is from Gist and Wright, Marginality, 21.
9. Dickie-Clark, Marginal Situation, 32-33.
10. Marginality, as used here, differs from the way in which it is employed in the work of Maurice Kriegel, who, in turn, was influenced by the model of the caste system of India. Writing about the Jews of Mediterranean Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, Kriegel uses marginality more or less synonymously with exclusion. He views the various moves to segregate Christians from Jews as acts to avoid contamination by Jewish “impurity,” as in a caste system requiring strict avoidance of those considered “untouchable.” Kriegel, Les Juifs à la fin du moyen âge, esp. chap. 2. This approach has the disadvantage of obscuring the search for a subtler understanding of majority-minority relations regarding the Jews, one that makes it possible to account for or partially explain the differences between Christian-Jewish and Muslim-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages and to steer away from the polarity of “marginality-integration” that seems to underlie the critique of Kriegel by Noël Coulet, “Les Juifs en Provence au bas moyen-âge: Les limites d’une marginalité.”
11. Dickie-Clark, Marginal Situation, 21-22.
12. Ibid., 37-38, where this is referred to as “status inconsistency.”
13. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens. In English, Blumenkranz condensed his book into a pair of essays appearing in Roth, ed., Dark Ages, 69-99, 162-74. In the chapter “The Roman Church and the Jews,” Blumenkranz writes: “The Jews were part of medieval society, and not merely a group on the fringes” (98). But, like Kriegel, he equates “on the fringes” with the shift to “exclusion” that began, he says, in the eleventh century.
14. Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, 33 (no. 34). See also, Roth, ed., Dark Ages, 74-75, 81, 118, 167.
15. Aronius, Regesten, 61 (no. 144).
16. On the expulsion of 1012 and Wecelin’s conversion to Judaism and his postconversion polemical treatise in defense of Judaism against Christianity, see Aronius’s discussion, Regesten; Roth, ed., Dark Ages, 84, 87-88, 93, 96, 149, 172-74; and Robert Chazan, “1007-1012: Initial Crisis for Northern European Jewry,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 38-39 (1970-71), 101-18.
17. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 47 (emphasis added). Paul’s statement, in I Corinthians 5:12, was aimed at immoral Christians.
18. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 246.
19. Ibid., 248-49.
20. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 316, 320-21.
21. Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 174.
22. Robert I. Moore, “Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Europe,” in Christianity and Judaism, vol. 29 of Studies in Church History, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford, 1992), 49-50, citing Noël Coulet, “De l’intégration à l’exclusion: la place des juifs dan les cérémonies d’entrée solonnelle au Moyen Age,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 34 (1979), 672-83.
23. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 152, 261-64.
24. Amān; the person becomes a musta’min.
25. Khoury, Toleranz im Islam, 116.
26. Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Sarakhsī, Sharḥ kitāb al-siyar al-kabīr, ed. 'Abd al-'Azīz Ahmad (n.p., 1972), 5:2045 (the book is a commentary on the work of Shaybānī [d. 803], a student of Abū Ḥanīfa [d. 767], the founder of the Hanafite school). See also, 2163: “li’annahu min ahli dārinā wa-yajrī'alayhi ḥukmunā fa-kāna bi-manzilat al-muslim [for he belongs to our Domain and our law applies to him, and (in this matter) he has the status of a Muslim].” Compare the editor’s introduction to Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 12-13.
27. Sarakhsī, Al-mabsūṭ, 9:195.
28. The line of thinking in the following discussion of ṣaghār and ghiyār partly owes its inspiration to an unpublished paper on the dhimma system by A. L. Udovitch.
29. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 23—24.
30. Ibn Ḥazm, Kitāb al-muḥallā (Cairo, 1349 H.), 7:346.
31. Also taghyīr, from the root, gh-y-r, meaning “to be or make dissimilar.”
32. Zayat, “Distinctive Signs,” 235-40, esp. 235-36.
33. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 108-15.
34. Shaun E. Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), chap. 3: “The word ṭā’ifa is one of the most common designations in medieval Arabic for any kind of human category or sub-category.”
35. Mottahadeh, Loyalty and Leadership, 149, 150, 159, 165.
36. See David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002-1086 (Princeton, N.J., 1985), chap. 4.
37. Richard Gottheil, “An Eleventh-Century Document Concerning a Cairo Synagogue,” 474; English, 485. A new English translation is in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 189.
38. Siddur R. Saadja Gaon, ed. I. Davidson et al. (Jerusalem, 1970). Sharī'a: 2, line 1, while a few lines above, page 1, line 6, he writes tawrīya and elsewhere (13, line 9) tawrāt, using the Qur’anic (perhaps pre-Islamic Jewish-Arabic) form of the Hebrew torah; qibla: 20, lines 10-11; imam: 41, lines 10, 15; and frequently elsewhere in the Siddur. Similarly, in Saadya’s commentary on the Bible, see Yehuda Ratzaby, ed., Otzar ha-lashon ha-'aravit be-tafsir R. Saadya Gaon [A Dictionary of Judaeo-Arabic in R. Saadya’s Tafsir] (Ramat-Gan, 1985), s.v. “imām” (translating the word kohen, “priest”), qibla, qur’ān.
39. Rippin, “Sa'adya Gaon and Genesis 22: Aspects of Jewish-Muslim Interaction and Polemic,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions, ed. Brinner and Ricks, 36-38, 42.
40. I. Goldziher, “Über eine Formel in der jüdischen Responsen-litteratur und in den muhammedanischen Fetwâs,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 53 (1899), 645-52. A random inspection of Blau’s edition of Maimonides’ responsa (3 vols., Jerusalem, 1958-61) illustrates this phenomenon.
41. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:325-26.
42. Coon, Caravan: The Story of the Middle East, rev. ed. (New York, 1958).
43. Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1981), 49-51; Daniel G. Bates and Amal Rassam, Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1983), 83-84.
44. Coon, Caravan, 153, 167.
45. Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Bergen-Oslo, 1969), 9-10, 16, 18.
46. A. L. Udovitch and Lucette Valensi, The Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia (Chur, Switzerland, 1984), 3.
47. Ibid., 101.
48. Ibid., 118 (emphasis added).
49. Geertz, “Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou,” 141.
50. Ibid., 164.
51. Langmuir puts it differently, emphasizing the role of religion: “Germanic monotheistic religiosity seems to have preserved some of the polytheistic tolerance that expected each people to have its own gods and rituals.” Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 78.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE JEW AS TOWNSMAN
1. Edith Ennen, The Medieval Town, trans. Natalie Fryde (Amsterdam, 1979), 33, 45.
2. Kathryn L. Reyerson gives a concise, up-to-date summary of urban history in this area: “Urbanism, Western European,” DMA, 12:311-20.
3. This process is described, mainly with reference to Germany, in Fritz Rörig, The Medieval Town (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 22-29, 48ff.
4. Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford, 1977), esp. chap. “The Growth of Independence,” 91-117.
5. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 293, 295.
6. Ennen, Medieval Town, 111, 113.
7. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:206.
8. Kisch, Jews of Medieval Germany, 345; Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:14ff.; Pirenne, Medieval Cities, 143.
9. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 318.
10. Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 176-78; Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 139-41.
11. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:21.
12. Ibid., 76 (emphasis in original).
13. Stow, “The Jewish Community in the Middle Ages Was Not a Corporation” (Hebrew) in Kehuna u-melukha (Jerusalem, 1987), 146-48.
14. Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 348-49.
15. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 20-23.
16. On the perseverance of collective responsibility in medieval Christendom, see Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400-1500, 174. Here is one example from England: In a Pipe Roll (no. 31) from the reign of Henry I, for the year 1130, we read, “The Jews of London render account of £2000 for the infirm man whom they slew.” Excerpt with the relevant passage in Carl Stephenson and Frederick George Marcham, eds., Sources of English Constitutional History (New York), 1:54. I am grateful to William Jordan for directing me to this reference.
17. See the assemblage of examples of English “tallages levied on the Jewish communities at large.” Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 22.
18. Reynolds writes about the contrast between southern Europe—where “a good many people lived in towns although they worked in the country”—and the English case, where the separation of town and country was more marked. Introduction, 87.
19. Y. Dossat, “Les Juifs à Toulouse: un demisiècle d’histoire communautaire,” 127-28.
20. Coulet, “Les Juifs en Provence au bas moyen-âge: Les limites d’une marginalité,” 203-6.
21. Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, 20-25. Among reasons historians give for “the relative tolerance of southern society in respect to the Jews,” as summarized by William Jordan, is the fact that “the Jewish communities of the Midi were an organic part of the cities and towns of the south. Jews had lived here since the period of Roman domination, and they had never lost the semblance of protection under Roman law.” Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 110-11.
22. Gerard Nahon, “Condition fiscale et économique des juifs,” 63-72.
23. Recent scholarship on Islamic urbanism is summed up in “Urbanism, Islamic,” DMA, 12:307-11 (A. L. Udovitch).
24. Ira M. Lapidus, “Muslim Cities and Islamic Societies,” in Middle Eastern Cities: A Symposium on Ancient, Islamic, and Contemporary Middle Eastern Urbanism, ed. Lapidus (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), 51.
25. Salo Baron writes: “Of course there was a difference between self-imposed or incidental segregation, particularly characteristic of all ethnically and religiously mixed regions in the ancient and medieval Near East, and a Jewish quarter in a Western land within an otherwise more or less homogeneous population. . . . Certainly, a Jewish quarter in ancient Alexandria or Sardes, a medieval Cairo or Cordova, carried no connotation of second-class citizenship.” Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:88. “The fact of the existence of special Jewish or Christian quarters all over the Arab Muslim world had nothing humiliating in it,” writes Goitein, Jews and Arabs, 74.
26. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:289-93.
27. Yuzbakī, Ta’rīkh ahl al-dhimma fi’l-'Irāq (12-247 A.H.), 92.
28. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 284f.
29. This is the main reason why ethnic and religious groups preferred segregated living.
30. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:295.
31. Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford, 1961), 55—63; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:297.
32. Stern, “Constitution of the Islamic City,” 25-50.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOCIABILITY
1. An example from the Carolingian period was the Council of Metz, in 888; see Aronius, Regesten, 51-52 (no. 119).
2. Agobardi Lugdunensis Archiepiscopi Epistolae, ed. E. Duemmler, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Karolina Aevi (Berlin, 1899), 3:182-85, 190ff. An abridged English translation of Agobard’s letters was published by Kenneth R. Stow, in Conservative Judaism 29, no. 1 (Fall 1974), esp. 63, 65.
3. Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 309.
4. Possibly as early as 339 C.E., by Emperor Constantius in connection with a specific circumstance. In 388, it was stated explicitly by Emperor Theodosius I. CTh 16.8.6, Theodosian Code, 467; and CTh 3.7.2, Theodosian Code, 70; Linder, Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, 149-50, nn. 9-10, 178-82.
5. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:77 ff.
6. Brundage, “Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in Medieval Canon Law,” Jewish History 3, no.1 (Spring 1988), 29, 31.
7. In the words of the compiler of a recent critical edition, translation, and commentary on the chapter devoted to Jewish-Christian relations (part 7, chap. 24). Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De los judios” (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 104.
8. See article by Kenneth Pennington, “Law Codes: 1000-1500,” DMA, 7:430.
9. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews, 34.
10. Ibid., 85-87. The prohibition against communal bathing was incorporated into Gratian’s Decretum, ca. 1140; ibid., 126, n. 15. The source seems to be a conciliar decree of the Quini-Sext, or Trullan Council, in Constantinople, in 692; see A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, ed. Schaff and Wace (repr., Edinburgh, 1988), 14:370 (canon no. 11). See also, Chap. 3, n. 46.
11. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews, 36.
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 253-57; and Moore, “Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Europe,” 45.
14. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 191, 199.
15. Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, trans. 'Abdul Ḥamid Ṣiddīqī (Lahore, 1973), 3:1183-85. Vajda, “Juifs et musulmans selon le ḥadīṭ,” 87-89.
16. In addition to the examples cited below, see Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 137-54.
17. Fattal, Le statut, 97: Ghāzī al-Wāsiṭī reports this as the doing of Caliph 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz; Richard Gottheil, “An Answer to the Dhimmis,” 392 (Arabic), 424 (English).
18. Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 168-69. In one version of Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil’s severe anti-dhimmī decree of 850, he is said to have required that non-Muslims be provided with separate baths “whose attendants are dhimmīs" (Ibn al-Qayyim, part 1, 222); but no rationale beyond physical separation is given for this measure.
19. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 200-201.
20. Ibid., 205-6. Mishnah Avodah Zarah (“Idolatry”), esp. chap. 1, which can be read in English in the translation by Herbert Danby (The Mishnah [Oxford, 1933]), beginning on 437. For medieval understandings of this tractate and its application to Christians, see the north European commentaries of Rashi and the Tosafists in the standard printed editions of the Babylonian Talmud; and Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 26-31.
21. The Islamic marketplace did not just serve “as a place for economic exchange. ... It was also the place of meeting and interaction for individuals from the different quarters of the city and for people of varying ethnic, religious, and geographic backgrounds.” Article, “Urbanism, Islamic,” DMA, 12:310 (A. L. Udovitch).
22. Especially the taking of interest or the purchase of wine or pork.
23. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 270-74; the passage is found on 273.
24. Ibn Taymiyya, Kitāb iqtiḍā’ al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm mukhālafat aṣḥāb al-jaḥīm, 122; English trans. (based on the 1950 Cairo edition) in Ibn Taimiya’s Struggle against Popular Religion, 169.
25. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 244—45, 270.
26. Sura 5:50. See Ibn al-'Aṭṭār, Kitāb al-wathā’iq wa’l-sijillāt, ed. P. Chalmeta and F. Corriente (Madrid, 1983), 410. In the discussion of the formulary for a document attesting to the conversion of a Jew to Islam, he records that the convert is permitted to keep his Jewish (or Christian) wife, since a Muslim is allowed to marry a Jewish or Christian woman.
27. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 441.
28. Ibid., 437-39.
29. Ibid., 436-37.
30. Vera B. Moreen, Iranian Jewry’s Hour of Peril and Heroism: A Study of Bābāī Ibn Lutf's Chronicle (1617-1662) (New York, 1987), 66.
31. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Ind., 1964), 149-72; Roth, ed., Dark Ages, 168-69; Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, esp. part 3, “La rencontre.”
32. Ibn 'Aqnīn in Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 226-28; Avicenna, in Lewis, Islam, 2:177-81.
33. Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 311-22.
34. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden, 1986), includes a section on the involvement of the non-Muslim minority groups in Baghdad’s intellectual life (75-86).
35. Gardet, Les hommes de l'Islam: Approche des mentalités (Paris, 1977), 130, 134-36.
36. 'Uyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ (Beirut, 1965), 583. See also, the praise of Jewish savants by Ṣā'id al-Andalusī (11th c.), rendered into English in Patai, Seed of Abraham, 101-4. On the medical profession as reflected in the Geniza, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:240-61.
37. See Mark R. Cohen, “The Burdensome Life of a Jewish Physician and Communal Leader: A Geniza Fragment from the Alliance Israelite Universelle Collection,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 16 (1993), 125-36 (Joshua Blau Festschrift).
38. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:288. On Europe, see Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, 93-95, 97-98; Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, 169-72. For an example from late antiquity, see the sixth-century La vie ancienne de Saint Syméon Stylite le jeune (521-592), ed. and trans. Paul Van den Ven (Brussels, 1970), 2:205 (sec. 208).
39. Harvey Goldberg, “The Mimuna and the Minority Status of Moroccan Jews,” Ethnology 17 (1978), 75-87.
40. Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 108-9.
41. Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. and trans. Marcus N. Adler (London, 1907), 43-45 (Hebrew), 43-45 (English, slightly altered here).
42. Ibid., 48-49 (Hebrew), 51 (English).
43. Sibbuv R. Petachiah [The Tour of Rabbi Petahiah of Regensburg], ed. L. Grünhut (Frankfurt am Main, 1905), 13-15.
44. Ibid., 17f., 20.
45. Meshullam of Volterra, Massa' Meshullam mi-voltera, ed. A. Yaari (Jerusalem, 1948), 69 (tomb of the Patriarchs at Hebron), 71 (Rachel’s tomb), 73 (Absalom’s tomb), 75 (burial caves of mishnaic sages around Jerusalem); English trans. in Elkan Nathan Adler, Jewish Travellers (repr., New York, 1966), 185, 188-89, 191-92, 193f.
CHAPTER NINE
INTERRELIGIOUS POLEMICS
1. Blumenkranz, “Augustin et les juifs, Augustin et le judaïsme,” 231-32; Amos Funkenstein, “Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Pagan, Christian and Modern,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 19 (Spring 1981), 63—64; and the sources cited in Chap. 2, n. 17 of this book.
2. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 58; Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 181.
3. Williams, Adversus Judaeos. For a survey of the most important themes of this polemic, see Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 117-65.
4. Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (1.-11. Jh.); Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos Texte (11.-13. Jh.), mit einer Ikonographie des Judenthums bis zum 4. Laterankonzil (Frankfurt am Main, 1988).
5. Williams, Adversus Judaeos, 3-13.
6. St. Augustine, “In Answer to the Jews,” 392-93.
7. David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1979), 11.
8. On this subject, see Gerson D. Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 19-48.
9. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 167-69, gives examples from the early period of Christian-Jewish conflict.
10. Shlomo Eidelberg, trans. and ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison, Wis., 1977), 99. On Christianity as idolatry, see Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 33, 37.
11. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 169-71, 258-59.
12. Ch. Merchavia, Ha-talmud bi-re'i ha-natzrut [The Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature (500-1248)] (Jerusalem, 1970).
13. Erwin I. J. Rosenthal, “Anti-Christian Polemic in Medieval Bible Commentaries,” Journal of Jewish Studies 11 (1960), 115, 134; and most recently, Avraham Grossman, “The Jewish-Christian Polemic and Jewish Biblical Exegesis in Twelfth-Century France (On the Attitude of R. Joseph Qara to Polemic)” (Hebrew), Zion 51 (1986), 29-60, which cites other important studies (aside from that of Rosenthal), including E. Touitou, “The Exegetical Method of Rashbam in the Light of the Historical Reality of His Time” (Hebrew), in 'Iyyunim be-sifrut ḥazal ba-miqra uve-toledot yisrael [Studies in Rabbinic Literature, Bible, and Jewish History], ed. Y. D. Gilat et al. (Ramat-Gan, 1982), 48-74; Sarah Kamin, “The Polemic against Allegory in the Commentary of R. Joseph Bekhor Shor” (Hebrew), in Meḥqerei yerushalayim be-maḥshevet yisrael [Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought] 3 (1983-84), 367-92; and, idem, “Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and Jewish-Christian Polemic” (Hebrew), in Shenaton la-miqra ule-ḥeqer ha-mizraḥ ha-qadmon 7-8 (1983-84), 218-48.
14. Judah Rosenthal, “Anti-Christian Polemic in Rashi’s Bible Commentary” (Hebrew), in Meḥqarim u-meqorot (Jerusalem, 1967), 1:106, 108; and the second article by Sarah Kamin cited in the preceding note.
15. Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York, 1977), 13-20.
16. Joseph Kimḥi, The Book of the Covenant, trans. Frank Talmage (Toronto, 1972), 43-45.
17. Ibid., 36-37.
18. Ibid., 33-35.
19. Jacob ben Reuven, Milḥamot ha-shem, ed. J. Rosenthal (Jerusalem, 1963), 141. Jacob singled out the Gospel of Matthew.
20. Berger, Jewish-Christian Debate, 36.
21. Ibid., 89-90.
22. This is a goal of both the Christian and the Jew in the Latin disputation written by Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster, at the end of the eleventh century. Gisleberti Crispini disputatio iudei et christiani, ed. B. Blumenkranz, Stromata Patristica et Mediaevalia (Utrecht, 1956), vol. 3; compare Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, index s.v.; and his English essay, “The Roman Church and the Jews,” in Roth, ed., Dark Ages, 89-94, 97.
23. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, esp. part 3, “La polémique judéo-chrétienne.”
24. Ibid., 239.
25. Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, esp. part 3, “La rencontre.”
26. Ibid., part 4, “L’affrontement”; Cohen, The Friars and the Jews; Chazan, Daggers of Faith. Although Chazan disagrees with Cohen on the latter’s fundamental thesis (that the thirteenth century brought a reversal of the Augustinian recognition of the legitimacy of Judaism’s existence within Christendom), he is consistent with Cohen in seeing an escalation of Christian assault on Judaism in the thirteenth century.
27. Amos Funkenstein, “Changes in the Pattern of Christian anti-Jewish Polemic in the Twelfth Century” (Hebrew), Zion 33 (1968), 137-41; idem, “Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics,” Viator 2 (1971), 379-81; Jeremy Cohen, “Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom,” American Historical Review 91 (1986), 599-613 (Cohen’s article repr. in his Essential Papers, 310ff); Merchavia, Ha-talmud bi-re’i ha-natzrut.
28. For an introduction to, and translated excerpts from, the three, see Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans., Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (East Rutherford, N.J., 1982).
29. Moshe Perlmann, “The Medieval Polemics between Islam and Judaism,” in Religion in a Religious Age, ed. S. D. Goitein (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 103-38, contains a survey of Islamic polemics against Judaism. An older study, focusing on Islamic treatment of the Bible, is Hartwig Hirchfeld, “Mohammedan Criticism of the Bible, Jewish Quarterly Revew, o.s., 13 (1900-1901), 222-40. The still standard bibliographical introduction to the subject is Moritz Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer Sprache zwischen Muslimen, Christen und Juden (Leipzig, 1877). See also, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1992).
These works do not present the comparative perspective attempted in the present chapter. An essay that does so, concisely and suggestively, is Amos Funkenstein’s “Juden, Christen und Muslime: Religiöse Polemik im Mittelalter,” in Die Juden in der europäischen Geschichte (Munich, 1992), 33-49, which came into my hands while I was working on the copyedited manuscript of my book. Funkenstein makes observations that are consistent with ideas that I had developed when researching and writing Chap. 9.
30. Sura 5:82. The verse is treated variously by different scholars, reflecting the myth-countermyth debate. For instance, Norman Stillman writes regarding the first part of the verse: “The Jews had come to be considered the number-one opponents of the early Muslim community along with the pagans who until now had been the sole enemy. The adversary relationship was, so to speak, enshrined for all time in holy writ”; Norman A. Stillman, “Traditional Islamic Attitudes toward Jews and Judaism,” in The Solomon Goldman Lectures, ed. Nathaniel Stampfer (Chicago, 1985), 4:78. Tawfīq Sulṭān Yuzbakī adduces the second part of Sura 5:82 to show Islam’s friendship toward the Christians, but he conveniently omits the first, condemning the Jews; Yuzbakī, Ta’rīkh ahl al-dhimma fi’l-'Irāq (12-247 A.H.), 110. James Kritzeck observes that the Christians’ initial advantage over Judaism, expressed in Sura 5:82, “was short-lived. No symbiosis of the Jewish-Moslem type was possible so long as the most powerful resistance on the frontiers of what the Moslems termed the ‘territory of warfare’ . . . came from Christians, and that situation was never to change. Moreover, the Islamic conquest had been more disastrous to Christendom than to Judaism in that immense numbers of Christians had become Moslems. Indeed the lines following the passage [i.e., verse 83] . . . suggest that Christians were viewed more kindly than Jews or pagans because so many of them apostatized more readily”; Kritzeck, Sons of Abraham: Jews, Christians and Moslems, 57-58. Verse 83 of Sura 5 continues: “When they listen to that which hath been revealed unto the messenger, thou seest their eyes overflow with tears because of their recognition of the Truth. They say: Our Lord, we believe. Inscribe us among the witnesses.” For some twentieth-century Islamic fundamentalists, Sura 5:82 serves as a favorite prooftext of allegedly eternal Jewish (and Zionist) enmity toward Islam, which, in turn, is considered part of a general, Western anti-Islamic antipathy; Reuven Paz, “The Stance of the Radical Islamic Movement on the Jews and Zionism in Our Time” (Hebrew), in Islam ve-shalom: gishot islamiyyot le-shalom ba-'olam ha-'aravi ben zemaneinu [Islam and Peace: Islamic Approaches to Peace in the Contemporary Arab World] (Givat Haviva, 1992), 48.
31. “And lo! there is a party of them who distort the Scripture with their tongues, that ye may think what they say is from the Scripture, when it is not from the Scripture. And they say: It is from Allah, when it is not from Allah; and they speak a lie concerning Allah knowingly.”
32. The largely interchangeable Arabic terms are taḥrīf taghyīr, and tabdīl.
33. See Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, chap. 3, on the metamorphosis of the polemical motif regarding Ezra.
34. Ibid., 19-35.
35. The very term Old Testament is inappropriate in the Muslim context.
36. William Adler, “The Jews as Falsifiers: Charges of Tendentious Emendation in Anti-Jewish Christian Polemic,” in Translation of Scripture, Proceedings of a Conference at the Annenberg Research Institute, May 15-16, 1989 (Jewish Quarterly Review suppl.) (Philadelphia, 1990), 1-27. I am grateful to Martha Himmelfarb for bringing this article to my attention.
37. Ibid., 16f.
38. Despite its promising title, the article, “Forgery and Abrogation of the Torah: A Theme in Muslim and Christian Polemic in Spain” by Norman Roth (Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 54 [1987], 203-36) does not delve deeply into the comparison.
39. The theme continues in 15:26: “But when your Advocate has come, whom I will send you from the Father ... he will bear witness to me.” The translation “Advocate” for the enigmatic word paraklētos is in The New English Bible.
40. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā fī ajwibat al-yahūd wa’l-naṣārā, ed. Ahmad Ḥijāzī Ahmad Al-Saqqā (Cairo, 1979), 118, 119. Compare Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 77-78.
41. 'Alī ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī, The Book of Religion and Empire, trans. A. Mingana (Manchester, 1922), 3; Arabic: Kitāb al-dīn wa’l-dawla (Tunis, [1973]), 12-13.
42. Book of Religion and Empire, 15-18; Kitāb al-dīn wa’l-dawla, 23.
43. Wadi Z. Haddad, “Continuity and Change in Religious Adherence: Ninth-Century Baghdad,” in Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Gervers and Bikhazi, 47-48.
44. “It would seem that to a very great, decisive measure, Islamic polemic directed against Jews and Judaism originated from and was fed by Christian sources, partly pre-Islamic, flowing into the Islamic milieu with the mass conversion of Christians.” Perlmann, “Medieval Polemics,” 106; compare Lewis, Jews of Islam, p. 86. For a discussion of other pre- and non-Islamic sources of Islamic polemics against Judaism and Christianity, see Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 130-35.
45. Ibn al-Qayyim, Hidayāt al-ḥayārā, 114.
46. Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany, N.Y., 1990), 76-79. Compare Aviva Schussman, “Abraham’s Visits to Ishmael: The Jewish Origin and Orientation” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 49 (1980), 325-45. A close parallel appears in chap. 30 of the eighth-century midrash Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer. See Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, trans. Gerald Friedlander (1916; repr., New York, 1970), 218-19.
47. 'Alī Ṭabarī, Book of Religion and Empire, 80-83 (excerpt found on 82-83); Kitāb al-dīn wa’l-dawla, 76-77.
48. Ibn al-Qayyim, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, 115.
49. Samau’al al-Maghribī, Ifḥām al-yahūd, ed. and trans. Moshe Perlmann, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 32 (1964), 46-47.
50. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, “The Contribution of a Jewish Convert from Morocco to the Muslim Polemic against the Jews and Judaism” (Hebrew), Pe'amim 42 (1990), 86-87; E. Strauss, “Methods of Islamic Polemics” (Hebrew), in Sefer ha-zikkaron le-veit ha-midrash la-rabbanim be-vina [Memorial Volume for the Vienna Rabbinical Seminary] (Jerusalem, 1946), 189ff.
51. 'Alī Ṭabarī, Book of Religion and Empire, 140-41; Kitāb al-dīn wa’l-dawla, 125.
52. Ibn al-Qayyim, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, 109-12.
53. Ahmad ibn Idris al-Qarāfī, Al-ajwiba al-fākhira 'an al-as’ila al-fājira, printed in the margins of 'Abd al-Raḥman Bachajī Zādeh, Al-fāriq bayn al-makhlūq wa’l-khāliq (Cairo, n.d.), 238-39.
54. 'Alī Ṭabarī, Book of Religion and Empire, 86-87; Kitāb al-dīn wa’l-dawla, 81.
55. Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands.
56. The same fourteenth-century scholar whose Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma is frequently cited in this book.
57. Ibn al-Qayyim, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, 249-59 (Judaism), 260-99 (Christianity).
58. Moshe Perlmann, “Ibn Qayyim and Samau’al al-Maghribī," Journal of Jewish Bibliography 3 (1942), 71-74.
59. Ibn al-Qayyim, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, 260.
60. Ibid., 263.
61. See Sidney H. Griffith, “Anastasios of Sinai, the Hodegos, and the Muslims,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 32 (1987), 341-58, apparently the first Christian writer—about a half-century before the better-known Christian apologist against Islam, John of Damascus (d. 749?)—to respond polemically (albeit in passing) to Muslim critique of Christianity. See also, Anti-Christian Polemic in Early Islam: Abū 'Īsā al-Warrāq’s “Against the Trinity,” ed. and trans. David Thomas (Cambridge, 1992), a text by an early ninth-century Shiite scholar. On John of Damascus and his critique of Islam, see Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus: The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites” (Leiden, 1972).
62. Sidney H. Griffith, “Theodore Abū Qurrah’s Arabic Tract on the Christian Practice of Venerating Images,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 105 (1985), 53-73; idem, “Theodore Abū Qurrah: The Intellectual Profile of an Arab Christian Writer of the First Abbasid Century,” Annual Lecture of the Irene Halmos Chair of Arabic Literature, Tel Aviv University (Tel Aviv, 1992), with much useful bibliography on the general subject of Muslim-Christian interreligious polemics.
63. Wadi Z. Haddad, “Continuity and Change in Religious Adherence: Ninth-Century Baghdad,” 35-47.
64. Thomas F. Michel, ed. and trans., A Muslim Theologian's Response to Christianity: Ibn Taymiyya’s Al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ, 143 in the translation.
65. A fragment from a previously unknown Judaeo-Arabic apologetic work found in the Geniza tells of a tense encounter between Jews and Muslims at one of the weekly majlises (interconfessional discussions of religion) at the court of the ex-Jewish Fatimid Vizier, Ya'qūb ibn Killis (d. 991). See Cohen and Somekh, “In the Court of Ya'qūb ibn Killis: A Fragment from the Cairo Geniza.” If and when additional folios from this book are found, it may be possible to reconstruct a relatively early exemplum of Jewish-Muslim disputation. For now, see Sasson Somekh, “Fragments of a Polemical Work from the Cairo Geniza” (Hebrew), in Sefer Shivtiel: Mehqarim ba-lashon ha-'ivrit uve-masorot ha-'edot [Shivtiel Book: Studies in the Hebrew Language and in the Linguistic Traditions of the Jewish Communities], ed. Isaac Gluska and Tzemah Kessar (Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv, 1992), 141-59, which appends a fragment unknown to us when the above-mentioned article was written.
66. “Timothy’s Apology for Christianity,” trans. A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies (Cambridge, 1928), 2:27-29; compare Hans Putman, L’Église et l'Islam sous Timothée I (780-823) (Beirut, 1975), 231-32.
67. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 85-86.
68. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam, 55-60.
69. Aryeh Grabois, “The Hebraica Veritas and Jewish-Christian Intellectual Relations in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 50 (1975), 613-34.
70. Compare Ivan G. Marcus, “Hierarchies, Religious Boundaries and Jewish Spirituality in Medieval Germany,” Jewish History 1 (1986), 7. Marcus applies the work of Natalie Zemon Davis to the Jewish case. See Davis, “The Rites of Violence,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975), 152-87.
71. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 90.
72. Daniel J. Lasker, “The Jewish Critique of Christianity under Islam in the Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 57 (1990-91), 121-49.
73. Ora Limor, “Religious Disputation in Mediterranean Ports” (Hebrew), Pe'amim 45 (Autumn 1990), 32-44. Limor’s evidence is for the twelfth century and afterward.
74. Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur, 302-3.
75. Jews punned on the word Qur’an, calling it in Hebrew “the book of qalon [disgrace].”
76. In the “shorter commentary” (perush qatzar) on Exodus, Sefer Ibn Ezra . . . le-sefer shemot, ed. Judah Fleischer (Vienna, 1926), 2. “As for those who say, concerning the king of Ishmael, that the numerical value of bi-me’od me'od is the same as his name, what do they have to say about the current verse, which refers to Israel? Moreover, far be it for the prophet [Moses] to speak in numerical code [gemaṭron] or in allusions [remizot].” I am grateful to Hava Lazarus-Yafeh for bringing this reference to my attention. The comment of Ibn Ezra on Exodus 1:7 does not appear in the standard editions of the Miqra’ot gedolot, nor in A. Weiser’s edition of Ibn Ezra’s Torah commentary (Jerusalem, 1974).
77. “The Lord came from Sinai, He shone upon them from Seir, He appeared from Mount Paran.”
78. They were disqualified from accepting the Torah when God offered it, for the Torah commands, “Thou shall not steal.” Sifre on Deuteronomy, para. 343, ed. L. Finkelstein (repr., New York, 1969), 395-96.
79. It is noteworthy that the treatment of Ishmael in rabbinic literature is not entirely negative, unlike the rabbis’ hostile stance against “evil” Edom/Rome/Christendom. See David J. Zucker, “Conflicting Conclusions: The Hatred of Isaac and Ishmael,” Judaism 39, no. 1 (Winter 1990), 37-46.
80. See Saadya Gaon’s and Ibn Ezra’s commentaries on Daniel 7 in the standard Hebrew Bible with commentaries [Miqra’ot gedolot]. Compare also, Yisrael Levin, Avraham ibn Ezra: ḥayyav ve-shirato [Abraham ibn Ezra: His Life and Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1969), 33-34.
81. “From Sinai” is exactly like “at Sinai,” as is “from Seir.”
82. Hebrew (Sinai), Latin (Seir, another name for Edom or for Rome), Arabic (Paran), and Aramaic (Ribeboth Qodesh).
83. Genesis 21:12. Moshe Zucker, ed., Saadya’s Commentary on Genesis (Hebrew) (New York, 1984), 156 (Arabic), 412-22 (Hebrew trans.).
84. Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York, 1950), 177-82.
85. “Saadya Gaon on Islam and Christianity,” paper presented at “The Jews of Medieval Islam,” a conference at University College, London, June 24-25, 1992. Lasker takes issue with Eliezer Schlossberg, “Concepts and Methods in the Commentary of R. Saadya Gaon on the Book of Daniel” (Hebrew) (Ph.D. diss., Bar-Ilan University, 1988), which deals with the polemic against Islam in Saadya’s writings (see idem, “R. Saadia Gaon’s Attitude toward Islam” [Hebrew], Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah 25 [1990], 21-51). Schlossberg finds polemical pronouncements on Islam in many of the Gaon’s writings but principally in Beliefs and Opinions, and not in the Book of Daniel itself. Lasker proposes three possible reasons for Saadya’s prioritization: (1) circumspection—fear that Jewish apostates to Islam might inform on him; (2) the differentiation between Judaism and Christianity was greater than that between Judaism and Islam; (3) Jewish feeling of “being at home” among Muslims removed the motive to attack Islam.
86. Hava Lazarus-Yafeh takes this for granted. Intertwined Worlds, 37.
87. Saadia Gaon, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, Conn., 1948), 157-73; Haggai Ben-Shammai, “The Attitude of Some Early Karaites towards Islam,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature II, ed. I. Twersky (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 7-8; Rippin, “Sa’adya Gaon and Genesis 22: Aspects of Jewish-Muslim Interaction and Polemic,” 40-42; Schlossberg, “Concepts and Methods in the Commentary of R. Saadia Gaon on the Book of Daniel,” chap. 6.
88. Ben-Shammai, “Attitude of Some Early Karaites,” 3-40.
89. For instance, determining the date of the new moon by actual sighting, barefooted ambulation of the synagogue, and Islamic-like prostrations during prayer.
90. Kuzari, part 2, sec. 14. Critical edition of the Judaeo-Arabic text, Kitāb al-radd wa’l-dalīl fī’l-dīn al-dhalīl, ed. D. S. Baneth and H. Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem, 1977); English trans. by Hartwig Hirschfeld, Book of Kuzari (New York, 1946).
91. The ninth of the thirteen articles, which appear in the introduction to the chapter known as Ḥeleq, chap. 10 of tractate Sanhedrin. Compare Eliezer Schlossberg, “The Attitude of Maimonides toward Islam” (Hebrew), Pe'amim 42 (1990), 50ff. I leave aside the subject of Maimonides as first formulator of a Jewish dogma, about which there are good studies—for instance, by Arthur Hyman, “Maimonides’ ‘Thirteen Principles,’” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 119-44; and by Menachem Kellner, Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought from Maimonides to Abravanel (Oxford, 1986), chap. 1.
92. See Reuben Ahroni, “From Bustān al-'uqūl to Qiṣat al-baṭūl: Some Aspects of Jewish-Muslim Religious Polemics in Yemen,” Hebrew Union College Annual 52 (1981), 311-30. For discussion of Maimonides’ work and its context, see Chap. 10 in this book.
93. Moses ben Maimon, Iggerot, ed. and trans. into Hebrew by Kafiḥ, 32, 36-37; English trans., Halkin, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, 107, 110-12. The Halkin translation (111) spells the name, “Omar.” Michael Cook called to my attention that it must be 'Amr (comprised of the same three consonants as 'Umar), the name traditionally paired with Zeid (Zayd) in Islamic fatwās. They are analogous to “Reuben and Simeon,” who, in Jewish responsa, replace the real names of the parties (like “A and B” in English legal texts). See also the note of Kafiḥ, p. 36, n. 92. In Arabic, 'Umar and 'Amr are distinguished orthographically by an enclitic waw at the end of the consonants '-m-r, but in a Judaeo-Arabic manuscript, as Michael Cook observes, this could easily have been omitted or dropped.
94. Moses ben Maimon, Iggerot, ed. and trans. into Hebrew by Kafiḥ, 53; English trans. by Halkin, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, 126. On the marginal role of messianism in Islam, see Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Some Religious Aspects of Islam (Leiden, 1981), chap. 4, “Is There a Concept of Redemption in Islam?” Maimonides singles out for ridicule the Christian trinitarian reading of Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one,” at the beginning of his “Essay on Resurrection,” written in 1191 (Halkin trans., 211).
95. Abraham’s discussion of the birth of Ishmael (chap. 17) is not available, since that section of his commentary on Genesis has not been found.
96. Abraham ben Moses ben Maimon, Commentary on Genesis and Exodus, ed. and trans. into Hebrew by E. Wiesenberg (London, 1959), 42-43.
97. Ibid., 42-45.
98. Ibid., 64-65.
99. Ibid., 202-5.
100. See Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 5:275-83; Gerson D. Cohen, ed. and trans., Sefer ha-Qabbalah [The Book of Tradition] (Philadelphia, 1967), xliii-1 (in twelfth-century Spain); Samuel A. Poznanski, “The Anti-Karaite Writings of Saadiah Gaon,” repr. in Philip Birnbaum, ed., Karaite Studies (New York, 1971), 89-127 (orig. pub. 1898 in Jewish Quarterly Review); Jacob Mann, “A Polemical Work against Karaite and Other Sectaries,” Jewish Quarterly Review 12 (1921-22), 123-50.
101. Discovered in a manuscript and given the title Ma’amar 'al yishma'el by Joseph Perles when publishing it in the appendix to his R. Salomo b. Abraham h. Adereth: Sein Leben und seine Schriften (Breslau, 1863).
102. Simon b. Tzemah Duran, Qeshet u-magen (photographic reproduction of Livorno, 1763 ed.; Jerusalem, 1970), fols. 2a-3b.
103. Ibid., fols. 13b-14a.
104. Ibid., fol. 19a.
105. For other explanations of the comparative lack of Jewish response to Islamic polemics, see Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, 7-8.
CHAPTER TEN
PERSECUTION, RESPONSE, AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY
1. Elton, in Persecution and Toleration: Papers Read at the Twenty-Second Summer Meeting and the Twenty-Third Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, xiii.
2. For instance, the Christian ritual murder accusation and related blood libel.
3. The literature on Jewish persecution in Christendom is vast. In this chapter, I will devote more attention to the less well-known story of persecution of Jews in Islamic lands—and response to persecution—comparing these to the situation in Christian lands.
4. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed., s.v. “Dhimma,” 229.
5. A chapter of Tritton’s Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 127-36.
6. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:278-83 (quotation appears on 283).
7. They were:
When a pious ruler enforced the “proper subordination of the unbeliever” as part of a general effort to restore orthodoxy in the Islamic community.
When a messianic, zealous Muslim regime, such as the Almohads, during a time of upheaval, extended its campaign against deviation to forcing the dhimmīs, against the rule of the sharī'a, to choose between Islam and the sword.
When a ruler, in need of money, tightened the regimen of “humiliation” in expectation that the non-Muslims would pay to have it relaxed.
When non-Muslims were oppressed on suspicion of colluding with some external enemy of Islam, especially in the period beginning with the Crusades and the Mongol invasions.
When, particularly in the late Middle Ages, one non-Muslim minority tried to turn an Ottoman ruler against another non-Muslim group.
See Lewis, Jews of Islam, 45-57.
8. Ibid., 53. This is well expressed in an anecdote included in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s compilation of the laws of the dhimma, in the chapter on the exclusion of dhimmīs from positions of authority over Muslims. Caliph 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz (717-20) writes to his provincial governors: “Put them into the place of lowliness [dhull] and humiliation [ṣaghār] assigned to them by God.” Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 213.
9. This passage from Arabic chronicles is cited in many anthologies, for example, Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 167-68, from which the present citation is taken. See also, Lewis, Jews of Islam, 2:224-26.
10. The ban on holding office, not in the Pact of 'Umar, as noted in Chap. 4, is thought to have been introduced by Caliph 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Azīz.
11. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 49. Some Christian sources relate Mutawakkil’s stern decree and other persecutory acts against the Christians of the time to the fall from grace of the caliph’s Christian court physician, Bukhtīshū'. See Fiey, Chrétiens syriaques sous les abbasides, 93-94, who notes, however, that Muslim sources date Bukhtīshū''s fall somewhat later than 850.
12. Raoul (Radulphus) Glaber (ca. 985-ca. 1047), a contemporaneous Latin historian, reports that, in France and Italy, Jews were blamed for instigating al-Ḥākim’s anti-Christian act and that many were expelled, killed, or forcibly converted, and some committed suicide. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 380-81.
13. A representative account by a medieval chronicler is translated in Lewis, Islam, 1:46-59: “It is said that he was afflicted with a dryness in his brain and that this was the cause of his many contradictions” (59). On the al-Ḥākim episode, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, index s. v. “al-Ḥākim,” and Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge, 1992), 370-81 (hereafter, Gil, Palestine [English]).
14. Joseph ibn Nagrela was accused of betraying the state.
15. An English translation of the long passage appears in Lewis, Islam, 1:123-34. The passage cited here is found on 133-34.
16. Bernard Lewis, “An Anti-Jewish Ode: The Qasida of Abu Ishaq against Joseph ibn Nagrella,” in Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume, ed. Saul Lieberman in association with Arthur Hyman (Jerusalem, 1975), English section, 657-68; Moshe Perlmann, “Eleventh-Century Andalusian Authors on the Jews of Granada,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 19 (1948-49), 269-90; Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 214-16, repr. trans. by Bernard Lewis.
17. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 45: “[I]n striking contrast to the anti-Semitism of Christendom, Abū Isḥāq [the poet’s name] even in his outrage does not refuse Jews the right to life, livelihood, and the practice of their religion. As a jurist he is aware that these rights are guaranteed by the Holy Law and incorporated in the dhimma, which is a binding legal contract.”
18. H. Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa (Leiden, 1974), 1:108; also cited in Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 61.
19. Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 56. See also, Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3:136 (with some inaccuracies, inc. date, given by Tritton as 573 A.H./1177-78).
20. An anti-Jewish riot that I have not seen mentioned in the secondary literature about the Jews of Islam occurred in the year 1135, in Cordova, during the Almoravid period in Spain, when warfare between Islam and militant, crusading Christendom raised fears and passions in the beleagured Muslim population. The sentence is in Ibn al-Qaṭṭān’s (mid-thirteenth-century) historical account of the Almoravid-Almohade period, in an entry for the year 529 (1134-35): “A Jew killed a Muslim, whereupon the Muslims overcame the Jews, plundering their possessions and destroying their residences.” Ibn al-Qaṭṭān, Juz'min kitāb naẓm al-jumān, ed. Mahmūd 'Alī Makkī (Rabat, n.d.), 217. A parallel elaborates somewhat: “In that year, during Rajab [April 17-May 16, 1135], also in Cordova, a mob attacked the Jews—God curse them—when a dead body was found in their midst. They stormed their houses, plundered their possessions, and killed a number of them.” Ibn 'Idhārī [d. ca. 1312], Al-bayān al-mughrib fī akhbār al-andalus wa’l-maghrib. A. Huici-Miranda, “Un fragmento inédito de Ibn 'Iḍārī sobre los almorávides,” Hespéris Tamuda 2 (1961), 101.
21. The Almohad persecution is covered in detail in Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 1:123-39.
22. The Almohads professed, for example, the absolute unity of God and a morality based on scriptural sources of Islamic law.
23. David Corcos-Abulafia, “The Attitude of the Almohade Rulers toward the Jews” (Hebrew), Zion 32 (1967), 137-60; repr. in his Studies in the History of the Jews of Morocco (Jerusalem, 1976), 319-42. Also see the comments of Menahem Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts: A Study of Forced Conversion in the Almohad Period” (Hebrew), Pe'amim 42 (1990), 19, n. 5.
24. Another wave of persecution and forced conversion in Yemen at the end of the twelfth century—this time under the dominant Shiite rulers—evidently is described in certain Geniza letters discovered by Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, 212, although Goitein was inclined to connect the persecution with the events that underlay Maimonides’ “Epistle to Yemen.”
25. “You write of the affair of the rebel leader in Yemen, who decreed forced apostasy of the Jews, and compelled all the Jewish inhabitants in all the places he had subdued to desert their religion, just as the Berbers had obliged them to do in the Maghreb [North Africa]. This report has broken our backs. . . . Indeed our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused, and our strength wanes because of the dire misfortunes that have come upon us in the form of the religious persecution in the two ends of the world, East and West.” Moses ben Maimon, Iggerot, ed. and trans. into Hebrew by Kafiḥ, 17-18; English trans. by Halkin, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, 95.
26. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 102-3.
27. Shalom b. Sa'adya Gamliel, Pequdei teiman [The Jizya-Poll Tax in Yemen], ed. Mishael Maswari Caspi (Jerusalem, 1982), 34.
28. Sometimes stated in the secondary literature, this is unfounded. Ibn Daud’s statement that Jews were “compelled to wander from their homes” does not refer to expulsion. Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 87-88 (English). The Hebrew, ve-yatze’u be-galut mi-mekomotam (literally, “they went into exile from their homes [or localities]”), misrepresented in the English edition of Hirschberg’s A History of the Jews in North Africa 1:125 (“they were exiled from their localities”), clearly means voluntary departure to escape death or forced conversion. This is precisely what Maimonides urges as the desirable strategy for besieged Jews in his “Epistle on Apostasy,” a recommendation that is incomprehensible if the Jews had been expelled by decree.
29. Fattal, Le statut, 83. See also, Seth Ward, “A Fragment from an Unknown Work by al-Ṭabarī on the Tradition ‘Expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula [and the Lands of Islam],”’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 53 (1990), 407-20. (Ward notes that the ascription to al-Ṭabarī is uncertain.) And the section in Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 175-91, on “places which the dhimmīs are forbidden to enter or remain therein,” including the extravagant view of Abū Ḥanīfa that they are permitted to enter the holy shrine of the Ka'ba in Mecca (188).
30. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 11:chap. 50; and Baron’s “Medieval Nationalism and Jewish Serfdom.”
31. Especially in the case of the Norman and Anglo-Saxon populations of England.
32. “Attempts by European rulers to develop homogeneous populations have resulted in the persecution and the mass expulsion of minority groups.” Tamotsu Shibutani and Kian M. Kwan, Ethnic Stratification: A Comparative Approach (New York, 1965), 325-26.
33. Vociferously, for example, by Guido Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 307-16, 335-41. Kisch prefers to explain the deterioration of Jewish life in Christendom primarily in terms of religious hostility. On the other hand, independently of Baron, Robert S. Lopez, referring to the repression of “nonconformists” in medieval society—namely, heretics and Jews—writes: “[T]he most basic cause of intolerance is probably the one of which people are least conscious—incipient nationalism. It is less strong with the intellectuals, but it asserts itself both at the top of the social hierarchy and at the bottom of the scale.” The Birth of Europe (New York, 1967), 353.
34. Although, by “nationalism,” Baron does not mean the nationalism characteristic of the nineteenth century.
35. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 121-25; Joseph Hacker, “Ottoman Policy toward the Jews and Jewish Attitudes toward the Ottomans during the Fifteenth Century, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York, 1982), 1:120-21.
36. Moreen, Iranian Jewry’s Hour of Peril and Heroism, 108—14.
37. Gamliel, Pequdei teiman, 45; Yehuda Ratzaby, “The Exile of Mawza': A Chapter of Yemenite Jewish History” (Hebrew), Sefunot 5 (1961), 337-95; idem, “An Expulsion of Jews in the Yemen” (Hebrew), Zion 37 (1972), 197-215. Reuben Ahroni, Yemenite Jewry: Origins, Culture and Literature (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 121-35.
38. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York, 1969), 96-109; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. expanded ed. (New York, 1970), 138-39.
39. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J., 1977), 293-301. The quotation is from 300.
40. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, 17:169.
41. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford, 1987); the quotation is from 88. Moore adds: “Since Jews were in fact better educated, more cultivated and more skillful than their Christian counterparts legend must reduce them below the level of common humanity, filthy in their person and debased in their passions, menacing Christian society from below, requiring the help of the powers of darkness to work evil far beyond their own contemptible capacities” (Formation, 151-52). He reiterates this argument in his “Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Europe.” I am not persuaded that this is a satisfactory explanation, especially for northern Europe; for the thesis requires evidence of close-knit relationships between Christians and of highly skilled Jews in the bureaucracies of the state and the church. As Moore concedes, the evidence for Jewish involvement in government in northern Europe is sparse (“Anti-Semitism and the Birth of Europe,” 51-52).
42. See Carlo Ginzburg’s study, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, ed. Gregory Elliott (London, 1990), 33-62.
43. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 53-54; idem, “Some Observations on the Significance of Heresy in the History of Islam,” Studia Islamica 1 (1953), 43-63; rev. version, idem, Islam in History (New York, 1973), 217-36.
44. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 103-4.
45. Louis I. Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements (New York, 1925), 303-59.
46. See, for instance, Hillgarth, Christianity and Paganism, 12-14, passim.
47. Robert Bonfil, “The Devil and the Jews in the Christian Consciousness of the Middle Ages,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, 91-92.
48. Quoted in Simon, Verus Israel, 216.
49. Quoted in Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue, 299-300.
50. Bishop Caesarius of Arles, later a saint, lived from 470 to 543. Hillgarth, Christianity and Paganism, 37-38 (on the Life and the bishop, see 20-21).
51. Agobardi Lugdunensis Archiepiscopi Epistolae, ed. E. Duemmler, 185, 196. For the second reference, compare Kenneth Stow, “Agobard of Lyons and the Medieval Concept of the Jew,” Conservative Judaism 29, no. 1 (1974), 65.
52. Such as the belief that Jews stabbed the eucharistic Host in order to reenact the crucifixion of Christ, or that they murdered Christian children, to withdraw their blood for magical and medicinal purposes. Characteristically, southern France saw little of the blood libel. See Gavin 1. Langmuir, “L’absence d’accusation de meurte rituel à l’ouest du Rhône,” in Juifs et judaïsme de Languedoc xiiie-début xive siècle, 235-49.
53. Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, 170-87.
54. Roth, “The Mediaeval Conception of the Jew: A New Interpretation,” in Essays and Studies in Memory of Linda R. Miller, ed. Israel Davidson (New York, 1938), 171-90; the quotation is from 188-89. This essay was selected by Jeremy Cohen for his collection, Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, 298-309.
55. Most recently, in his History, Religion, and Antisemitism and Toward a Definition of Antisemitism.
56. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, 302-3.
57. Langmuir, “Doubt in Christendom,” in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 100—133; and History, Religion, and Antisemitism, chaps. 12, 13. The conviction that the Jews constitute “the great symbol of hidden menaces of all kinds within Christendom” (History, Religion, and Antisemitism, 303) did not die out with the massive de-Christianization of Europe that occurred in the nineteenth century. It exhibited itself especially in what Langmuir calls “physiocentric” (as distinguished from “psychocentric”) religions. Historically, the worst manifestation of this phenomenon is Nazism, with its irrational Aryan myth ascribing to the Jews hidden evil characteristics, biological inferiority, and a conspiracy to destroy Western non-Jewish civilization, necessitating and justifying the “Final Solution” (345-46).
58. Called Shayṭān or Iblīs in Arabic.
59. A Qur’anic passage (58:19) refers to an unnamed people who are the object of God’s anger as “the party of Satan” (ḥizb al-shayṭān)—taken by commentators as meaning the Jews. The passage says in Arabic: qaum ghaḍaba allāh 'alayhim, “a people with whom God is angry.” Jews are regularly called al-maghḍūb 'alayhim, “those who earn God’s anger” (based on the first Sura of the Qur’an). Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, 32-33.
60. Lewis, Islam, 2:165; and Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 212.
61. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 2, 744-46. The purpose—consistent with the distinctive dress regulation of the Pact of ‘Umar—was, Ibn al-Qayyim states, to distinguish the inferior non-Muslims from their Muslim superiors. Along the same lines, some versions of the harsh anti-dhimmī decree of al-Mutawakkil (850) stipulate that the non-Muslims must affix wooden images of the devil (Shayṭān) to their doors “in order,” so explains the tenth-century historian al-Ṭabarī, “to distinguish their houses from those of the Muslims” (Lewis, Islam, 2:225 [no. 77]).
62. This, notwithstanding the presence of a Qur’anic motif, that of the “accursed ape” (Sura 2:65 et al.)—apparently derived from pre-Islamic folklore and merged in Christian iconography with the figure of the Devil—which, in post-Qur’anic commentary, became associated with the Jews (and so appears in the inflammatory anti-Jewish poem of 1066 cited above). See Ilse Lichtenstadter, “‘And Become Ye Accursed Apes,’” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 14 (1991), 153-75. Another folkloric theme in Arabic sources depicts the Jews as engaging in witchcraft to harm the Prophet or other members of the nascent Muslim community. Michael Lecker, “The Bewitching of the Prophet Muhammad by the Jews: A Note a propos ‘Abd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb’s Mukhtaṣar fīl-ṭibb,” Al-Qanṭara 13 (1992), 561—68. But this theme did not have the damaging consequences for Muslim-Jewish relations that its counterpart had in Christendom.
63. Ibn al-Qayyim, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, 242-43.
64. The argument by Cutler and Cutler, that Christianity persecuted the Jews of Europe principally because they believed the Jews were allies of the Muslims, fails to convince. See their Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism.
65. Martyrdom is rendered qiddush ha-shem, “sanctification of the divine name.” Suicide might, on occasion, include taking the lives of other family members, lest they fall victim to forced baptism.
66. From the English translation by Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, 32. The Hebrew text is available in A. M. Habermann, ed., Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-tzarfat [Persecution of the Jews in Germany and France] ([1945], repr., Jerusalem, 1971), 31.
67. Such as the story of ten martyrs executed by the Romans after the abortive Bar Kokhba rebellion. Alan Mintz, Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York, 1984), 84-105.
68. Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. with intro. by Judah Goldin (New York, 1967); Ivan Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms of the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982), 40-52; Mintz, Hurban, 95-97.
69. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 22-23.
70. Ibid., 92.
71. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Prior to Sabbethai Zevi),” in Studies of the Leo Baeck Institute, ed. Max Kreutzberger (New York, 1967), 115-56, reprinted in Cohen’s Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia, 1991), esp. 289ff.
72. Simonsohn, Apostolic See and the Jews: History, 257-62.
73. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” in Studies, esp. 289ff. See also, Haym Soloveitchik, “Between Islam and Christendom” (Hebrew), in Qedushat ha-ḥayyim ve-ḥeruf ha-nefesh [Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel], ed. Isaiah M. Gafni and Aviezer Ravitzky (Jerusalem, 1992), 149-52.
74. Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts: A Study of Forced Conversion in the Almohade Period,” 20.
75. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:276.
76. Lewis, Jews of Islam, 82-84; Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, “Queen Esther: A Forced Convert?” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 57 (1988), 121-22. On the possible role of Shiite taqiyya in influencing Jews to prefer conversion to martyrdom in late medieval Iran, see Moreen, Iranian Jewry's Hour of Peril and Heroism, 163.
77. Novak, “The Treatment of Islam and Muslims in the Legal Writings of Maimonides,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions, ed. Brinner and Ricks, 233-50 (quotation from 240). Eliezer Schlossberg finds a distinction in Maimonides’ views as between his halakhic judgment and his theoretical assessment, which was more negative. See his “Attitude of Maimonides towards Islam.”
78. Novak, “Treatment of Islam and Muslims,” 237.
79. Yaakov Lev, “Conversion and Converts in Medieval Egypt” (Hebrew), Pe'amim 42 (1990), 79. See also, Lev, “Persecutions and Conversions to Islam in Eleventh-Century Egypt,” Asian and African Studies 22 (1988), 87.
80. Ibn al-'Aṭṭār, Kitāb al-wathā’iq wa’l-sijillāt, 407-8. Compare Monserrat Abumalham, “La conversión segun formularios notariales andalusies: valoración de la legalidad de la conversion de Maimónides,” Miscelanea de estudios arabes y hebraicos (Universidad de Granada), 24 (1985), 71-84.
81. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:299-300.
82. Ibid., 300. I do not touch here on the well-documented phenomenon of voluntary conversion, out of apparent religious or intellectual conviction, among Jews in the medieval Islamic world, some attracted through philosophy, others through Sufism (Islamic mysticism). For a recent contribution to this subject, see Joel L. Kraemer, “The Andalusian Mystic Ibn Hūd and the Conversion of the Jews,” Israel Oriental Studies 12 (1992), 59-73.
83. Collective memory also reflects, even if on an unconscious level, the actual historical experience of their ancestors. The study of Jewish collective memory is still in its infancy. Yerushalmi’s eloquent Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory is the best-known work on this subject, although Bernard Lewis’s History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented, which examines Jewish evidence as part of a broader, comparative inquiry using Middle Eastern examples, preceded it and anticipated many of its conclusions. Two smaller studies applying anthropology to history, one by Lucette Valensi and the other by Nathan Wachtel, bear on this subject as well, as does their joint effort, Mémoires juives (English, Jewish Memories). In a major essay, Ivan G. Marcus brings the anthropological approach to bear on medieval Jewish history and collective memory with respect to Ashkenazic culture.
In his classic work on collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs, speaking of the tension between history and collective memory, writes: “Collective memory . . . retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive.” Unlike history, which deals with change—which, in turn, is unitary and which means to be “objective and impartial”—collective memory is not universal but selective. The selection is determined by the self-perception of the group in the present. “History is a record of changes. . . . The collective memory is a record of resemblances and, naturally, is convinced that the group remains the same, because it focuses attention on the group, whereas what has changed are the group’s relations or contacts with other groups.” Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York, 1980; orig. in French [Paris, 1950]), 78-87. I have found this formulation helpful in organizing my own approach to the subject. But I feel that the dichotomy between history (written) and memory, as far as medieval Jewry is concerned, may not be so absolute. For instance, I believe there exists somewhat more “history” from the Ashkenazic Middle Ages than usually is recognized, and that these texts convey the same kind of thematics of Jewish collective memory that Yerushalmi’s Zakhor finds in the premodern period only in nonhistoriographical formats. Said another way, historical texts themselves are inexorably intertwined with the commemorative acts of ritual and liturgy that mark the principal vehicles of Jewish collective memory in the premodern Jewish world.
Other citations above are: Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, Wash., 1983); Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Valensi, “From Sacred History to Historical Memory and Back: the Jewish Past,” History and Anthropology 2 (1986), 283-305; Wachtel, “Remember and Never Forget,” ibid., 307-35; Valensi and Wachtel, Mémoires juives (Paris, 1986), Jewish Memories, trans. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991); Marcus, “History, Story, and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture,” Prooftexts 10 (1990), 365-88 (see also his “Medieval Jewish Studies: Toward an Anthropological History of the Jews,” in The State of Jewish Studies, ed. Shaye Cohen and Edward Greenstein [Detroit, 1990], 113-27).
84. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 8ff.
85. Lewis, History, 14ff.
86. The most recent book on this subject, Reuven Michael, Ha-ketiva ha-historit ha-yehudit meha-renasans 'ad ha-'et ha-ḥadasha [Jewish Historiography: From the Renaissance to the Modern Time] (Jerusalem, 1993), echoes the conviction that no significant Jewish historical writing existed in the Middle Ages (see the Introduction to the book).
87. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 40-52; Lewis, History, 23, 45-48.
88. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 46-48. Zvi Malachi discusses, and republishes some of, the medieval megilla literature in Sugyot ba-sifrut ha-'ivrit shel yemei ha-beinaym [Studies in Medieval Hebrew Literature] (Tel Aviv, 1971), vol. 1.
89. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 53-75. Compare Lewis, History, 26-28. On the issue of how “new” the historical outlook of the sixteenth-century chroniclers was, see Robert Bonfil, “How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?” History and Theory 27 (1988), 78-102. For a critique of Yerushalmi’s assumption that the expulsion of 1492 was a watershed in Jewish history, and thus giving rise to the histories of the sixteenth century, see Ivan G. Marcus, “Beyond the Sephardic Mystique.”
90. See Marcus, “History, Story, and Collective Memory,” 365-88.
91. Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Intercommunal Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968), 17-21.
92. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 34, 37-39. Yerushalmi observes that the “single most important religious and literary response to historical catastrophe in the Middle Ages was not a chronicle of the event but the composition of seliḥot, penitential prayers, and their insertion in the liturgy of the synagogue”; ibid., 45.
93. Text in Habermann, Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-tzarfat, 11-15. Compare Robert Chazan, “The Persecution of 992,” Revue des études juives 129 (1970), 217-21; idem, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore, 1973), 10-12.
94. Text in Habermann, Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-tzarfat, 19-21. Compare Chazan, “1007-1012: Initial Crisis for Northern-European Jewry”; idem, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, 12-15. See also note 100 below.
95. Ephraim of Bonn’s chronicle, Sefer zekhira, in Habermann, Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-tzarfat, 115-32. The first part of Ephraim’s chronicle, dealing with the persecutions during the Second Crusade, is translated in Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, 121-33. The part about Blois is translated in Jacob R. Marcus, The Jews in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315-1791 (Cincinnati, 1938), 127-30. On the Blois persecution, see Chazan, “Blois Incident of 1171,” 13-31. On the “chronicle” as a work of historiography, see idem, “R. Ephraim of Bonn’s Sefer Zechirah,” Revue des études juives 132 (1973), 119-26.
96. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 48-52.
97. Ephraim took material from letters contemporary with the event in Blois. The text of the letters has been published in Habermann, Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-tzarfat, 142-46. A partial English translation appears in Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 300-304; idem, “Blois Incident of 1171,” 17-21. At some time (probably not long after the event), the text of the letters was tacked onto the end of the longest of the three Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade.
98. Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet yehuda, ed. A. Shohat and Y. Baer (Jerusalem, 1947), 146-49. Joseph Shatzmiller, “Provencal Chronography in the Lost Pamphlet by Shemtov Schanzolo” (Hebrew), Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 52 (1985), 43-61.
99. A. David, “Stories Concerning Persecutions in Germany in the Middle Ages” (Hebrew), in Papers on Medieval Hebrew Literature Presented to A. M. Habermann, ed. Zvi Malachi (Jerusalem, 1977), 69-83. The account was copied in 1485, at the end of a manuscript containing astronomical and astrological texts.
100. Mentioned in Fritz (Yitzhak) Baer, Untersuchungen über Quellen und Komposition des Schebet Jehuda (Berlin, 1936), 2. In his monograph, The “1007 Anonymous” and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages, Kenneth Stow argues that the Hebrew account of an episode of persecution at Rouen in 1007, during the reign of King Robert of France, assumes background that makes it necessary to date its composition in the thirteenth century, rather than in the eleventh. It fits with what Stow calls a realistic Jewish awareness that the papacy was their most dependable protector, a conviction, he says, that first emerged in the post-Gregorian reform period, grew during the period of the Crusades, and became firm during the thirteenth century. If this revisionist interpretation gains acceptance, it will mean that the “chronicle” constitutes yet another exception to Yerushalmi’s rule that medieval Hebrew chronicles “dwell either on the distant, ancient past, up to the destruction of the Second Temple [i.e., Yossipon], or they describe something in the most recent past, be it the latest persecution or the latest deliverance.”
101. On the liturgical poetry, see, for instance, Mintz, Hurban, 89-105; and, for numerous examples in the original Hebrew, Bernfeld, Sefer ha-dema'ot, vols. 1-2.
102. The latter, Nathan Wachtel observes, “recount, basically the same trials: uprooting, migrations, persecutions, impossibility of mourning”; Wachtel, “Remember and Never Forget,” 333.
103. The best edition is Moshe Gil, Eretz yisrael ba-tequfa ha-muslimit ha-rishona (634-1099) [Palestine during the First Muslim Period (634-1099)] (Tel Aviv, 1983), 2:41-43 (no. 26) [hereafter, Gil, Palestine (Hebrew)]; compare Gil, Palestine (English), 377. The Babylonian Gaon Samuel b. Ḥofni (d. 1013), learning about the suffering of the Jews of Fez, Morocco, during some local disturbance, wrote to them: “When we heard the news from you, our heart trembled. . . . Our eyes and hearts wept over the destruction of our sanctuary [probably: synagogues] and over the deaths of our people and the evil done to our young men. We ask God to kill those who killed them, and afflict and smite with pestilence those who smote them.” Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, 1:106 (my English translation differs slightly from Hirschberg’s); the editor of this text, A. Cowley, “Bodleian Geniza Fragments,” Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 18 (1905-6), 403-4, incorrectly surmised (ibid., 400) that the Gaon was referring to the al-Ḥākim persecutions.
104. Gil, Palestine (English), 378.
105. A dirge by the Spanish-Hebrew poet, Joseph b. Isaac ibn Abitur, begins, “Weep, my brothers, and lament / over Zion with great commotion.” The dirge originally was taken to have been composed on the occasion of the persecutions by Caliph al-Ḥākim in 1012. See Hayyim Schirmann, “Elegies on Persecutions in Palestine, Africa, Spain, Germany, and France” (Hebrew), Kobez al Jad, 3 (13) (1939), 27-29; idem, Ha-shira ha-'ivrit bi-sefarad uve-provans [Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence] (Jerusalem, 1954), 1:64-65.
As Goitein argues in an article first published in 1964, Ibn Abitur mourns Jews who died as a result of the atrocities committed against the populace when rebellious Bedouin tribes overran Fatimid Palestine in 1024 and 1025. (Geniza letters, similarly, depict Jewish suffering during this time of troubles in Palestine.) See Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 5:58-59. On the events, see Gil, Palestine (English), 385-97. Goitein’s theory has been confirmed by Ezra Fleischer’s discovery of a Hebrew quasi-liturgical poem from about the same time by an otherwise unknown poet, who, however, dwells on the general depredations, not on Jewish suffering. See “A Historical Poem Describing Some Military Events in Syria and Erez Israel in the Early 11th Century” (Hebrew), Zion 52 (1987), 417-26.
106. Moses ibn Ezra, Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa’l-mudhākara, ed. A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem, 1975), 66-67.
107. Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 75-76 (English).
108. Yonah David, ed., Shirei Yitzḥak ibn Giyyat 1038-1089 [The Poems of Rabbi Isaac Ibn Ghiyyat Lucena 1038-Cordoba 1089] (Jerusalem, 1987), 165 (no. 84) and 219-20 (no. 120).
109. Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 87-88 (English). On the possibly symbolic meaning of the incorrect date of 4873 (1112-13), see Cohen’s supplementary note, ibid., 141ff. A few pages later in the book, Ibn Daud returns to the Almohad persecutions in order to describe how God, “who prepares the remedy before afflictions,” had previously arranged for the installation of the Jewish notable, Judah b. Ezra, in the good graces of King Alfonso, so that the Jews fleeing Almohad terror could find refuge in the Christian North (Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 96-97).
110. Ibn Daud, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 219-20.
111. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 5:59-61.
112. L. M. Simmons, “The Letter of Consolation of Maimun ben Joseph,” Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 2 (1890), 62-101 (the Arabic text lies between pages 335 and 369). See also, Eliezer Schlossberg, “The Attitude of R. Maimon, the Father of Maimonides, to Islam and Muslim Persecutions” (Hebrew), Sefunot, n.s., 5 (20), 95-107 [Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies].
113. Moses ben Maimon, Iggerot, ed. and trans. into Hebrew by Kafih, 107-20; English trans. by Halkin, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, 13-45.
114. In thinking through the next section, I consulted several scholars of medieval Hebrew poetry and would like to thank them for their bibliographical assistance and comments. They are Professors Ross Brann, Ezra Fleischer, Ephraim Hazzan, Raymond Scheindlin, Yosef Yahalom, and Masha Yitzhaki. I am also grateful to Professor Sasson Somekh for his helpful criticism of the argument.
115. Discussed, among other places, in Hirschberg, A History' of the Jews in North Africa, 1:123-25 (compare also, the Hebrew edition, Toledot ha-yehudim be-afriqa ha-tzefonit [Jerusalem, 1965], 1:90-91); and in Yisrael Levin, Avraham ibn Ezra: ḥayyav ve-shirato, 18-20, 344, n. 58, where Levin discusses evidence for the single authorship of both “Aha yarad 'al sefarad” and another, imitative eulogy beginning “Eikh neḥerav ha-ma'arav” (“O how the Maghreb has been destroyed”), found in the Geniza among some leaves containing lamentations on the destruction of the Temple (Dropsie College, now Annenberg Institute MS 316), and excerpted by Schirmann for his article, “Elegies on Persecutions in Palestine, Africa, Spain, Germany, and France,” 31-35. See also, Dan Pagis, “Dirges on the Persecutions of 1391 in Spain” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 37 (1968), 357 and n. 19, where Pagis expresses his opinion that the Geniza version is from the pen of Ibn Ezra.
116. I am grateful to Professor Ross Brann for allowing me to read his article, “Power and Poetry: Constructions of Exile in Hispano-Hebrew and Hispano-Arabic Elegies,” and to use his translation of parts of Ibn Ezra’s poem. The article will appear in the Yisrael Levin Festschrift, ed. R. Tsur and T. Rosen, Tel Aviv University Press.
117. The tradition developed in Italy and passed to the Ashkenazic lands of northern Europe, as Professor Fleischer commented.
118. Or when the questions raised by the present analysis are asked of the known material in a systematic fashion.
Professor Fleischer kindly showed me several piyyuṭim from the Cairo Geniza by Shlomo Sulaymān ibn 'Amr al-Sinjārī (whose floruit Fleischer has convincingly dated to the second half of the ninth century), which Fleischer is planning to publish in a forthcoming article in Zion. Extremely hostile toward Muslims (called meshugga'im [on this polemical term, see Chap. 9 in this book]), these poems contain allusions to specific acts of oppression (being forced to wear “colored” items; plundering of “tents and dwellings”; taxes). Possibly the verses allude to the oppressive decree of Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 (see above) and/or to some other general violence during the ninth century from which Jews suffered. On the poet Shlomo Sulaymān al-Sinjārī, see Ezra Fleischer, Ha-yotzerot be-hithavutam ve-hitpatḥutam (The Yoẓer: Its Emergence and Development] (Jerusalem, 1984), 191—93; and, idem, “Piyyuṭ and Prayer in Mahzor Eretz Israel” (Hebrew), Kiryat Sefer 63 (1990-91), 257. For some Jewish reactions to the early Islamic conquests in poetry and prose, see Yosef Yahalom, “The Transition of Kingdom in Eretz Israel (Palestine) as Conceived by Poets and Homilists” (Hebrew), Shalem 6 (1992), 1-22.
119. Regarding the dirge of Joseph ibn Abitur, once thought to have been dedicated to the al-Ḥākim persecution, see above, note 105.
A dirge by Judah ha-Levi, included in Sephardic and Yemenite collections of lamentations for the Ninth of Av (also published in Schirmann Ha-shira ha-'ivrit bi-sefarad uve-provans, 2:325-26) and formerly incorrectly ascribed to Isaac ibn Giyyat and believed to refer to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, actually relates atrocities suffered by the Jewish community of Majorca when it was ruled by or in the name of the Muslim Almoravides. See Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings, 89. The historical background of this elegy has not yet been investigated. See also, Fleischer, “Materials and Observations towards a Future Edition of the Poems of R. Judah ha-Levi” (Hebrew), Asufot: Annual for Jewish Studies 5 (1991), 111.
120. The eleventh-century Hebrew poet of Muslim Spain, Solomon ibn Gabirol, penned two elegies, each about the brutal murder by Christians (“Edomites”) of possibly one and the same friend (the method of death, by stabbing, and other details occur in both poems). H. Brody and H. Schirmann, eds., Shlomo ibn Gevirol: shirei ḥol [Solomon ibn Gabirol: Secular Poems] (Jerusalem, 1974), 122-24 (no. 198), 164-66 (no. 248). Two lamentations by an unidentified poet, found in the Geniza, bemoan the murder of a Jew that took place in Guadalajara, in Christian Spain. H. Schirmann, Shirim ḥadashim min ha-geniza [New Hebrew Poems from the Genizah] (Jerusalem, 1965), 446-50.
A seliḥa (penitential poem) for the Day of Atonement by the Saragossan Hebrew poet Levi ibn al-Tabbān describes anti-Jewish persecutions thought to have occurred at the time of the sacking of the city by King Alfonso VI of Castille and Leon (ca. 1090) or on the Christian reconquest of the city from the Muslims by King Alfonso I of Aragon, in 1118; Dan Pagis, ed., Shirei Levi ibn Tabban (Jerusalem, 1968), 68-72 and 6 in the editor’s introduction.
Two elegies on a local persecution written by Judah ha-Levi pertain, it seems, to an outbreak of violence in Christian Toledo (one of the poems mentions Toledo in the rubric, and E. Fleischer assumes that the other refers to the same event); Fleischer, “Materials and Observations towards a Future Edition of the Poems of R. Judah ha-Levi,” 121-30. See also, Y. Levin, “Suffering in the Poetry of Judah ha-Levi from the Time of the Crisis of the Reconquista” (Hebrew), Otzar yehudei sefarad (Tesoro de los judios sefardies) 7 (1964), 49-64.
121. Dr. Masha Yitzhaki kindly informed me that “Aha yarad 'al sefarad” is contained in a Yemenite collection of lamentations (qinot) for the Ninth of Av, dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century (MS Paris Heb. 1332, fol. 60a) as well as in a manuscript of diverse Hebrew poems copied at the end of the eighteenth century by a certain Rabbi Abraham Ḥalfon, who lived in Tripoli, Libya (D. Cazés, “Antiquités judaïques en Tripolitaine,” Revue des études juives 20 [1890], 83-87). The version “Eikh neḥerav ha-ma'arav” found in the Geniza is contained among poems of lamentation by Ibn Ezra on the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Possibly some Jews used these pages during the qinot of the Ninth of Av. Many other liturgical poems (piyyuṭim) by Ibn Ezra can be found in the good company of those by other famous Andalusian poets in Sephardic prayerbooks. For instance, the Sefardi Maḥzor for Yom Kippur from the Year 1481, MS Parma De Rossi 1377, facsimile edition by Makor (Jerusalem, 1973), folios 24a, 77b, 96b, 102a. Hirschberg writes regarding the main phase of Almohad oppression in North Africa during the reign of 'Abd al-Mu’min, that “Moroccan-Jewish popular tradition preserves no memory of these events”; A History of the Jews in North Africa, 1:138.
122. Simon Bernstein, ed., 'Al naharot sefarad (Tel Aviv, 1956), 243-44 (as truncated in the manuscript), 114-19 (repr. according to the full version in the Diwan of Abraham ibn Ezra, ed. Jacob Egers in 1886). Egers’s Yemenite manuscript places the poem in a section on dirges “for the Ninth of Av, the Exile, the Destruction [namely, of the Jerusalem Temple], and for the persecution [literally, ‘forced apostasy,’ Hebrew shemad] in North Africa and Andalusia” (66-69 in the Egers edition).
Bernstein also reprints (112-13, 241-43), from the Sephardic Mahzor printed in Venice in 1524, another dirge ascribed to “Abraham [ibn Ezra],” beginning Yom nilhetnu vi yaḥad shekhenai, “On the day my [gentile] neighbors did battle against me.” This poem does not, however, appear in the Lisbon Manuscript nor in any of the printed editions of Abraham ibn Ezra’s works. Professor Fleischer kindly gave me his opinion (private communication, February 11, 1992) that, despite the poem’s inclusion in Y. Levin’s critical edition of the sacred poetry of Ibn Ezra, Shirei ha-qodesh shel Avraham ibn Ezra (Jerusalem, 1980), 2:297-99, the authorship of the poem remains doubtful.
123. Jacob Mann, The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fāṭimid Caliphs, 2 vols. (1920-22; repr. as 2 vols, in 1, New York, 1970), 1:30-32; 2:31-37; idem, “A Second Supplement to ‘The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fāṭimid Caliphs,’” Hebrew Union College Annual 3 (1926), 258—63 (passage quoted on 261); Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:28-29; Gil, Palestine (English), 376-77. Yerushalmi says (imprecisely; Zakhor 119, n. 37) that the Scroll “refers to deliverance from the persecution of the Caliph Al-Hakim in 1012.” The text is also discussed briefly in Malalchi, Sugyot, 25-26 and reprinted there, 34-39.
124. Some years earlier, Samuel composed a similar prose/poetic account of deliverance from a different “persecution.” Two individuals, one in Palestine and the other in Egypt, had attempted to harm the Jews by leveling accusations against them before Christian clerks in the Fatimid government, but were seized and punished by the authorities before they could effectuate their evil designs. This occurred under the rule of the same Caliph al-Ḥākim of the infamous persecutions. See Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Notes on the History of the Jews of Palestine in the Middle Ages” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 42 (1972-73), 401-5. Kedar gives this text the nickname “Megillat Shenei Ha-Soṭenim,” or “The Scroll of the Two Fiends.”
125. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:285; Tritton, Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects, 109.
126. M. Zulay, “Liturgical Poems on Various Historical Events” (Hebrew), Yedi'ot ha-makhon le-ḥeqer ha-shira ha-'ivrit 3 (1936), 163-75.
127. Sāwīrūs ibn al-Muqaffa', Ta’rīkh baṭārikat al-kanīsa al-miṣriyya, 2:part 2, ed. and trans. Aziz Suryal Atiya et al., 183-209 (English trans.), quote from 204.
128. Mann, Jews in Egypt, 1:34.
129. Samuel the Nagid ibn Nagrela’s call for a “Second Purim” at the end of his triumphal poem, “Eloha 'oz” (Mighty God), celebrating the victory of his Granadan troops over the army of the “party kingdom” of Almeria in 1038, memorializes a deliverance from harm that Samuel feared would have come to himself and his Jewish community had he lost the battle. Fascinating in the poem are: (1) the application of the typology of the Book of Esther to what was essentially a “cover” for a human victory; (2) the poet’s prideful command that his (and God’s) local victory be commemorated throughout the Arabic-speaking Jewish communities of Ifriqiya (Tunisia), Egypt, Palestine, and Babylonia (Iraq) with a special Purim; and (3) his call that it be recorded “in their books” so that the event would be “remembered forever after and by generation after generation.” Unlike the instance of the “Egyptian Purim” of 1524 (discussed below), however, I know of no evidence that the anticipated deliverance from danger in 1038 entered the collective historical memory of the Jews, even in Spain itself. See Divan Shmuel Hanagid, ed. Dov Jarden (Jerusalem, 1966), 1:4-14; and the discussion by Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 46-47.
130. See Malachi, Sugyot, 61-97.
131. Joseph b. Judah ibn 'Aqnin was a crypto-Jew of the early Almohad period who lived in Fez, Morocco, where he met Maimonides.
132. Dhimmi, 346-51. It comes from Part 6 of Ibn 'Aqnīn’s unpublished Judaeo-Arabic ethical treatise, Ṭibb al-nufūs [Therapy of the Soul]. See Oxford MS Huntington 517 (Neubauer Catalogue, 1273), beginning at fol. 138v, lines 27-28. I consulted the manuscript on microfilm at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Bodleian Library. Compare Abraham S. Halkin, “On the History of the Almohad Persecution” (Hebrew), in The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York, 1953), 101-10. I am grateful to Saul Zucker for sharing some of his knowledge of the book with me.
133. “Trials and tribulations” is rendered al-imtiḥānāt wa’l-ḍayqāt.
134. In Part 3 of the manuscript of Ṭibb al-nufūs, Ibn 'Aqnīn mentions the Jews of the “community of Fez, of Sijilmasa, of Dar'a, and of other places, all of which, together, have singular standing in that they martyred themselves [in Hebrew, qiddeshu et ha-shem].” Compare Joseph ben Judah ibn 'Aqnīn, Inkishāf al-asrār wa-ẓuhūr al-anwār [The Divulgence of Mysteries and the Appearance of Lights], ed. and trans. into Hebrew by A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem, 1964), 308, referring to forced conversion and qiddush ha-shem (martyrdom).
135. The following excerpts from “Therapy of the Soul” are taken from Bat Ye’or’s anthology:
Our hearts are disquieted and our souls are affrighted at every moment that passes, for we have no security or stability. On account of our numerous sins it was said of us, “And among these notations shalt thou find no ease” (Deuteronomy 28:65). . . . Past persecutions and former decrees were directed against those who remained faithful to the law of Israel. . . . But in the present persecutions, on the contrary, however much we appear to obey their instructions to embrace their religion and forsake our own, they burden our yoke and render our travail more arduous.
If we were to consider the persecutions that have befallen us in recent years, we would not find anything comparable recorded by our ancestors in their annals.
Then a new decree was issued, more bitter than the first, which annulled our right to inheritance and to the custody of our children, placing them in the hands of the Muslims.
We were prohibited to practice commerce, which is our livelihood.
Then they imposed upon us distinctive garments. . . . The purpose of these distinctive garments is to differentiate us from among them so that we should be recognized in our dealings with them without any doubt, in order that they might treat us with disparagement and humiliation. . . . Moreover it allows our blood to be spilled with impunity.
It is clear from what I have explained that we have deserved all these persecutions that we have suffered, for they bare [reveal] not even a fraction of the sins that we have committed against God and the great punishment we deserve for having sinned whether deliberately or unwittingly when we were forced to forsake our faith. For of a truth, we should have suffered martyrdom rather than convert, since our law requires that if the sin demanded of us is not for the benefit of our enemy . . . but only to convert us, then we must die rather than transgress.
136. Nor, certainly, was this true of the apostasies in Egypt and Palestine under al-Ḥākim, or in the Yemen.
137. “Mordecai of Our Time” = mordechai ha-zeman, alluding to Mordecai, the Jew who defeated Haman. Mann, Jews in Egypt, 1:212-14, 2:257-63; Cohen, Jewish Self-Government, 279-80.
138. See my review of Goitein’s collected Hebrew essays, Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times, in Tarbiz 53 (1983-84), 153-54.
139. The best edition is Gil, Palestine (Hebrew), 3:391-413 (no. 559). Compare Gil, Palestine (English), 750-74. The megilla and the episode are also treated in my Jewish Self-Government, 178-226.
140. See the edition by A. Kahana, “The Scroll of Zuta the Evil-doer” (Hebrew), Haschiloach 15 (1905), 175-184; repr. in Malachi, Sugyot, 41-51.
141. My Jewish Self-Government is devoted to the subjects of administration, politics, and political conflict within a Jewish community of the Islamic High Middle Ages.
142. Ahmad Pasha is called the “well-known Satan” in several Hebrew versions of the story. Muslim sources called him al-khā’in, or “the traitor.”
143. See the study, with edited texts, linguistic analysis, and English translation, by Benjamin Hary, Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic (Leiden, 1992), with discussion of all earlier bibliography on this source. For a literary discussion, see Malachi, Sugyot, 53-60. Compare also, Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 48.
144. The work has been described and translated into French by Georges Vajda and later published in the original by David Ovadia. Georges Vajda, Un recueil de textes historiques judéo-marocains (Paris, 1951). See also David Ovadia, ed., Fas va-ḥakhameha [Fez and Its Scholars] (Jerusalem, 1979), 1:1—63, and Vajda's translation, included as an appendix.
145. Vajda reorders the episodes chronologically.
146. Two other “chronicles,” from late medieval Iran, written in Judeo-Persian, recite the disastrous persecution and forced conversion of Jews by the Shiite regime of the Safavids. One of them, composed by Bābāī ibn Lutf, covers periodic persecutions between 1617 and 1662. The other, by Bābāī ibn Farhād, the grandson of Bābāī ibn Lutf, relates the oppression that led to the mass conversion of the Jewish community of Kāshān around 1729. Moreen’s publications on these two sources have made it feasible for students of Jewish collective memory in Europe to compare the well-known Ashkenazic and Sephardic chronicles with Oriental counterparts from a period of great oppression. Moreen, Iranian Jewry's Hour of Peril and Heroism; and Iranian Jewry during the Afghan Invasion: The Kitāb-i Sar Guzasht-i Kāshan of Bābāī b. Farhād (Stuttgart, 1990).
147. Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, trans. Martin A. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1964), 163.
148. Benjamin of Tudela, Itinerary, 54-56 (English trans.).
149. Book of Genealogies, first published in 1566, in Constantinople by the Egyptian Jew, Samuel Shulam.
150. I consulted the Cracow edition of 1600, fol. 146v. Dinur, Yisrael ba-gola, 2d ed. (Tel Aviv, n.d.), 1:102, excerpts the passage from the first edition (1566; part 5, fol. 148r). On Zacuto, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 57. A longer account—which begins in the same way as that in Sefer yuḥasin and which reproduces additional elements found in Arab chronicles—appears in the seventeenth-century Egyptian Jewish historian Joseph Sambari’s Divrei yosef MS Paris Alliance Israélite Universelle Collection H 130 A, facsimile ed. by S. Shtober (Jerusalem, 1981), fols. 26v-27r. Sambari borrowed heavily from Muslim Arabic sources through the medium of Shulam’s “additions” to Zacuto’s Sefer yuhasin (see Shtober, “The Chronologies of the Muslim Kingdoms in Sambari’s Chronicle, Divrei Yoseph,” 424-29). For the passage on al-Ḥākim in Sambari, see also, Mann, Jews in Egypt, 1:33-34, n. 3. Al-Ḥākim is characterized as “fickle-minded and malicious” (hafakhpakh ve-ish tekhakhim) and credited with the forced conversion of 10,000 Jews and Christians, whom he, a week later, allowed to return to their original faiths, as well as with the “burning” of 12,000 Jews in their quarter in Fustat.
151. Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet yehuda, 63-66. Baer has little to say about this story in his Untersuchungen über Quellen und Komposition des Schebet Jehuda, beyond confirming Isidore Loeb’s observation that the story is factually impossible. See Baer’s work, 63; for Loeb’s, see “Le folk-lore juif dans la chronique du Schébet lehuda d’Ibn Verga,” Revue des études juives 24 (1892), 27. See also M. Wiener, Das Buch Schevet Jehuda (Hannover, 1856), 78-84. I have not found the passage discussed at any significant length in the literature on Shevet yehuda.
152. Sar ehad mi-sarei yishma'el asher ba’ 'im sheliḥut.
153. The Muslim ambassador finds this quite unbelievable.
154. Perhaps a veiled jab at Christianity, which professes to love its enemies but persecutes the Jews.
155. Al-Qarāfī, Al-ajwiba al-fākhira 'an al-as’ila al-fājira, 4.
156. Yitzhak F. Baer, Galut, trans. Robert Warshow (New York, 1947), 9.
157. See S. D. Goitein, “A Report on Messianic Troubles in Baghdad in 1120-21,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 43 (1952), 57-76 (text begins on 73). Here, galut means something like “state of persecution or oppression.”
158. Passages from letters from three European Jewish visitors to the Middle East in the late Middle Ages, characterizing the local Jewish condition for Jews “back home,” are offered below. Provisionally, I shall leave the word galut untranslated in each case.
159. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 75. Compare Eli Strauss (Ashtor), “The Social Isolation of Ahl Adh-Dhimma,” in Essais orientaliques: Livre d’hommage à la mémoire de P. Hirschler, ed. O. Komlós (Budapest, 1950), 73—94.
160. Ve-omnam min ha-yishma'elim ein galut la-yehudim klal ba-maqom ha-ze.
161. A. Yaari, ed., Letters from the Land of Israel (Hebrew) (repr., Ramat-Gan, 1971), 128.
162. The word used for “upheaval” is hafekha; compare Genesis 19:29.
163. Ein lanu koi kakh galut daḥuq be-kha’n af'al pi shelo yittakhen bilti galut. Yaari, ed. Letters from Israel, 181.
164. Ibid., 186-87 (po ein galut kemo be-artzenu veha-togarmim mekhabbedim ha-yehudim ha-nikhbadim). The second part means, “and the Turks hold the respectable Jews in esteem.”
165. Kobler, Letters of Jews through the Ages, 2:339; Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 291.
166. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton, N.J., 1973), chap. 3: “The Movement in Palestine (1665).”
167. Jews were more excluded in Morocco, where, since late Almohad times, they constituted the sole dhimmī community. In Fez, in 1438, for example, the first more or less compulsory Jewish quarter in the Muslim world was established, although initially for the Jews’ own protection, and not as punishment. This soon came to be called mellah, a word often rendered imprecisely as “ghetto.” See Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 79-80; and his “Moroccan Jewish Experience: A Revisionist View,” 116.
Noteworthy in the present context is the text Stillman cites from Jacob Toledano, Ner ha-ma'arav: hu toledot yisrael be-morocco [The Western Lamp: History of the Jews in Morocco] (Jerusalem, 1911), 44. Citing unnamed chroniclers (kotevei zikhronot [literally, “writers of remembrances”; the reader will recall Ephraim of Bonn’s Sefer zekhira, or Book of Remembrance]), Toledano explains that the Jews themselves viewed their confinement as a “sudden and bitter exile” [galut mar ve-nimhar], indeed, an “expulsion” [gerush, from the Old City of Fez, where they had long lived, to a location outside, reserved for the Jews].
CONCLUSION
1. “Second-class citizenship, though second-class, is a kind of citizenship,” writes Bernard Lewis, Jews of Islam, 62.
2. Jews rarely held the position of chief minister. The Andalusians Samuel the Nagid ibn Nagrela and his son Joseph, and the Egyptian merchant Abū Sa'd al-Tustarī are notable exceptions.
3. Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kama, 58a, s.v. “inammi” (near the bottom), trans. Salo Baron, in Social and Religious History of the Jews, 4:63-64 (emphasis added). Baron interprets Rabbi Isaac’s statement as an early Jewish protest against the rescindment of former liberties of movement. See also, Baron, Social and Religious History, 11:18ff., where the author shows how Rabbi Isaac’s doctrine caught on among later rabbis.
4. See H. Schirmann, “The Life ofjehuda ha-Levi” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 9 (1938), 239.
5. See the discussion of collective memory in Chap. 10.
6. Moses ben Maimon, The Epistle to Yemen, trans. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 241-42 (slightly altered here). Stillman’s rendition is somewhat closer to the Arabic text than the translation in Halkin and Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides, 126-27, as is the Hebrew translation of J. Kafiḥ, in his Iggerot, 54.
7. In a recent study of the Jews in medieval Champagne, Emily Taitz builds on the statement of Rabbi Isaac of Dampierre, arguing that some Jews of northern Christendom maintained a pretense of noble status and that this persisted even as their legal and social position declined in the thirteenth century. Taitz, “The Jews of Champagne from the First Settlement until the Expulsion of 1306” (Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 154, 318-19. I am grateful to Dr. Taitz for allowing me to obtain a copy of her thesis, which stimulated me to think comparatively about the equally celebrated Maimonidean passage.
8. Bernard Septimus, “Better under Edom than under Ishmael: The History of a Saying” (Hebrew), Zion 47 (1962), 103—11; compare the source quoted in Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, 352-54.