At the end of the Eleventh Century, Christian rulers in Europe considered it a religious imperative to recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and to restore to Christian rule the many other lands that had been conquered by Islam in the preceding five centuries. The resulting wars of Christians against Muslims–the Crusades–were fought for almost two hundred years. Occasionally the Crusaders forced the armies of Islam to make considerable retreats from areas previously ruled without hindrance. When the Crusaders marched through Christian and Muslim lands, in Europe or the Levant, Jews were murdered in their path.
On 6 June 1099, at the climax of the First Crusade, Jerusalem itself lay open to Christian reconquest. Upon arriving from northern Europe, the Crusaders began their siege of the Holy City. For thirty–eight days, Muslim soldiers held the walls. In the northeastern sector, Jews and Muslims joined together to keep the battlements secure. But on July 15, after four hundred years of Muslim rule, the walls of Jerusalem were breached. The Crusaders swept through the city, massacring Muslims and Jews alike. Many Jews sought sanctuary in the synagogues, but the Crusaders set these on fire. Those Jews who were trapped inside were burned alive. Other Jews were seized and taken to Europe, where they were sold as slaves. Still others were taken to the coastal city of Ashkelon, where their Christian captors ransomed them to the Jewish community of Egypt. Jerusalem was then resettled by European Christians and Arab converts to Christianity; Muslims and Jews were refused permission to live in the city.1
The First Crusade heralded a period of extreme tumult and religious intolerance, and yet within the confines of the Muslim world, great Jewish thinkers, scholars and poets continued to live and work. Many Jews held positions of considerable influence at Muslim courts, and under all but the most fanatical caliphates, Jews were highly prized in Muslim societies as doctors, linguists and writers. A number of Jewish scholars in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries made great contributions to Jewish culture, including Yehouda ben David Hayouj, who, living in Morocco, laid the foundations of the study of Hebrew grammar.
One renowned Jewish poet of this period was Yehuda ben Samuel ibn Abbas al–Maghribi, known best as Judah Halevi. His work survives to this day in the synagogue services of both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi High Holy Days. Born in Muslim Spain in about 1070, Halevi became a physician as well as a poet. His most influential work, Sefer Ha–Kuzari, was a ‘Book of Responses to Allegations Against the Downtrodden Faith.’ Halevi’s poem Yedidi Hashachachta (‘My friend, have you forgotten?’) also became significant, notably in the Babylonian and Moroccan traditions, as a poem for the seventh day of Passover that is filled with both yearning for redemption and longing for Zion.2
The greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages was Maimonides. Known as Musa ibn Maymun in Arabic and as Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon in Hebrew, Maimonides was commonly referred to by Jews with his Hebrew acronym, the Rambam. He was conversant with Arab thought and culture, spoke and wrote in Arabic, and held positions close to power in Muslim society.
In 1159, having fled the ferocious persecution of Jews by the Almohads in Muslim Spain, Maimonides settled for five years in Fez.3 There he was forced to convert to Islam under an obligation introduced for all Jews living in the city. Later he was arrested by Muslim authorities on the charge of relapsing into Judaism–an accusation that he escaped only because a Muslim friend attested to his good Muslim character. In his Epistle on Martyrdom, Maimonides justified this formal conversion to Islam as an acceptable alternative to torture and death under the rule of fanatical Muslim rulers. He advised his fellow Jews: ‘Utter the formula’–of conversion–‘and live.’4
After leaving Fez, Maimonides settled in Egypt under the more tolerant rule of the Shiite Fatimids, where he was allowed to practise Judaism once again. It was here that he wrote his much–quoted Epistle to the Jews of Yemen. The head of the Yemeni Jews had appealed to Maimonides for advice on how to face the threat of persecution and forced conversions under Muslim rule. In his response, Maimonides told the Jews that ‘on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us. This is as the Exalted had warned us: “Even our enemies themselves beingjudges.”’5 Maimonides went on to note: ‘We have done as our sages of blessed memory instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ishmael. We listen but we remain silent.’ In spite of this silence, ‘we are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness, and their outburst at any time. On the contrary, the more we suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose to act belligerently towards us.’6
It was in his letter to the Jews of Yemen that Maimonides wrote, ‘No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.’ For Maimonides, who knew about the Crusader attacks on the Jews of Europe, these words about Islam were a considered historical judgment. His own family had witnessed the persecution of Jews in Muslim Spain–then under the oppressive rule of the Almohads–and had also faced death threats in Fez. His teacher in Fez, Judah ibn Sussan, had been martyred in 1165 after refusing conversion to Islam.
In Muslim–ruled Cairo, however, Maimonides had found an environment that encouraged his learning and creativity. That he saw the authorities in Egypt as different in nature was clear when he urged them to help alleviate the Yemeni Jews’ political and economic disabilities.7 Maimonides served as Chief Rabbi of the Jewish community in Cairo, and after losing his family fortune–following the death of his brother David, a successful merchant, in a shipwreck on the way to India–Maimonides turned to practicing medicine as a livelihood. His fame as a physician was such that Saladin, as Sultan of Egypt, appointed him court physician. Saladin’s two previous court physicians were both Jews: one was the Grand Rabbi of Egypt, Hibet Allah ibn al Jami; the other was Abdul–Ma’ali al Yahudi, Maimonides’ brother–in–law.8
Among Maimonides’ contributions to good health was his emphasis on a clean environment. ‘City air is stagnant, turbid and thick,’ he wrote, ‘the natural result of its big buildings, narrow streets and refuse of its inhabitants…. The concern for clean air is the foremost rule in preserving the health of one’s body and soul.’9 In his writings on food and diet, Maimonides advocated a ‘shared convivial meal’ as a way to conquer anxiety and tension and also to overcome ‘suspicion between ethnic groups.’ His other medical writings included a treatise on sex and aphrodisiacs, Fi ‘l–Jima’ (‘On Sexual Intercourse’), which concentrated heavily on nutrition–a branch of medicine in which Maimonides was a pioneer. The treatise was commissioned by Sultan Omar, the nephew of Saladin, and was written in Arabic and intended for a non–Jewish reader. But Maimonides’ draft, which survives, was written in Judaeo–Arabic–Arabic words written in Hebrew characters–then the written vernacular of medieval Egyptian Jews.10
Maimonides also acted as physician to Saladin’s eldest son, Sultan al–Malik al–Afdal, who ruled for only two years, and who suffered from depression and melancholia. Maimonides’ advice to him–translated into Latin as Regimen Sanitatis–became one of his most widely used medical writings. In addition to his advice on personal hygiene, diet, sexual hygiene and the effects of heat and cold, it included a discussion of the strength that philosophy and ethics could give to an individual’s attitude towards the problems met with in life. These two disciplines, Maimonides asserted, taught the real value of life’s realities and pressures.11
Maimonides described his life and work in Muslim Egypt in a letter he wrote to his friend, disciple and translator, Rabbi Samuel ibn Tibbon. First he explained his duties as court physician: ‘I live in Fustat and the Sultan resides in Cairo; these two places are two Sabbath limits distant from each other. My duties to the Sultan are very heavy. I am obliged to visit him every day, early in the morning, and when he, any of his children or any one of his concubines are indisposed, I cannot leave Cairo but must stay during most of the day in the palace…. Hence, as a rule, every day, in the morning I go to Cairo. Even if nothing unusual happens there, I do not return to Fustat until the afternoon.’
Returning to Fustat, Maimonides would find other patients awaiting him: ‘I am famished, but I find the antechambers filled with people, both Jews and Gentiles, nobles and common people, judges and policemen, friends and enemies–a mixed multitude who await the time of my return. I dismount from my animal, wash my hands, go forth to my patients and entreat them to bear with me while I partake of some light refreshment, the only meal I eat in twenty–four hours. Then I go to attend to my patients and write prescriptions and directions for their ailments. Patients go in and out until nightfall, and sometimes even, as the Torah is my faith, until two hours or more into the night. I converse with them and prescribe for them even while lying down from sheer fatigue.’
Maimonides also described his not–inconsiderable religious life: ‘When night falls, I am so exhausted that I can hardly speak. In consequence of this, no Israelite can converse with or befriend me’–on religious or community matters–‘except on the Sabbath. On that day, the whole congregation, or at least the majority, comes to me after the morning service, when I instruct them as to their proceedings during the whole week. We study a little together until noon, when they depart. Some of them return and read with me following the afternoon service until evening prayers.’12
In recognition of his importance to Egypt’s Jewish community, Maimonides was declared Ra’is al–Yahud, ‘Head of the Jews.’ The holder of this post was chosen by the Jewish notables of Fustat and was recognised by the Muslim authorities as the official representative of the Jewish community. Maimonides held the position twice: in the years 1171–2 and from 1196 until 1204.13
On 13 December 1204, while dictating to a scribe the last chapter of a book on his aphorisms, Maimonides died. He was sixty–six years old. Muslims as well as Jews mourned his passing.14
During the first period of Crusader rule in Jerusalem, which lasted eighty–eight years, Jewish communities in the Holy Land did not fare well. In 1119, Jews were expelled from their homes in Hebron, a city twenty miles south of Jerusalem, after Christian clerics decided to take over the Tombs of the Patriarchs–Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A large number of those expelled Jews found sanctuary in Muslim–ruled Egypt.15 It was not until some time towards the end of Crusader rule that Jews were allowed to resume trading inside Jerusalem. The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela wrote of how he met a fewJewish dyers working in the city when visited Jerusalem in 1170.16
The situation in the Holy Land improved considerably seventeen years after Benjamin’s visit. Saladin, the Muslim warrior, and a Kurd, reached the walls of Jerusalem and laid siege to the city for five months. When the Christians surrendered and Muslim rule was restored in 1187, Saladin encouraged the Jews to return to their former homes. Some Jews came from Ashkelon, others from as far as Yemen, and others from North Africa. Between 1209 and 1211, three hundred rabbis also reached the Holy Land from England, northern France and Provence. They settled in Jerusalem, Ramla and Acre, intent on reviving the Jewish communities there after the Crusader persecutions.
Then came a period of joint Muslim–Christian rule over Jerusalem, from 1229 to 1244, followed by a prolonged economic decline after it was conquered by the Khwarizm Turks, a Tatar tribe from Central Asia. The Tatars were driven out after six years, when Jerusalem became part of the Muslim Mamluk kingdom of Egypt. Although the city remained in decline economically, Jews continued to settle there. This was partly a result of efforts made by individuals like Nahmanides (Rabbi Moses ben Nahman), a Spanish rabbi and scholar known by his Hebrew acronym as the Ramban. After arriving in Jerusalem, Nahmanides helped to organise the local Jewish community, founding a religious academy and establishing a synagogue in a derelict house. He later moved to the coastal city of Acre, another town ruled by the Mamluks, where he served briefly as the spiritual leader of the Jewish community until his death in 1270.17
In the year of Nahmanides’ death, an Italian–Jewish merchant, Jacob d’Ancona, arrived at the port of Acre en route from Italy to India and China. His comments about what he saw provide a valuable insight into the relationship between Jews and Muslims after the first Crusades. In his diary, Jacob wrote of Acre that ‘between the Jew and the Mahometan there is more love than between the Jew and the Christian, for the Mahometan declares himself to be the son of Abraham our ancestor and reveres our teacher Moses.’
Continuing on his journey, Jacob d’Ancona reached the Babylonian city of Basra, where he observed the long–standing divisions between Jews and Muslims. ‘They wear dark–coloured garments,’ he wrote of the Jews, ‘a vermilion cap bound around with silk cloth which is striped, and on their feet are permitted only dark shoes, by which to distinguish them from others.’18 Yet Jacob also noted the diversity of Jewish economic life in Basra, stating that there were ‘not only traders among the Jews, but also tailors, workers in wood, leather and iron, makers of shoes and saddles as well as many apothecaries and physicians.’ He also observed significant prosperity among the Jewish population. ‘Many Jews act as agents,’ he wrote, ‘and by that acquire great wealth, as also in exchanging gold and silver of different countries, in which they make great profits.’
This familiar picture of cooperation and segregation, of protection and exclusion, continued to characterise Jewish life in the lands conquered by Islam as it had before the Crusades. Outside the Holy Land, many Jewish communities under Muslim rule remained untouched by the advance of the Crusaders. After more than a thousand years of resettlement and migration, these communities were spread widely across the Muslim–ruled regions that make up the modern–day Middle East.
In Afghanistan, Jews lived in the towns of Balkh and Ghazni during the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.19 One Ghazni ruler, Sultan Mahmud (998–1030), assigned a Jew named Isaac to administer his lead mines and melt ore for him. Another Afghan Jewish community lived in Firoz Koh, in the central mountain district. The town and its inhabitants–both Muslims and Jews–were later wiped out during the Mongol invasion of Afghanistan in 1222, but some twenty tablets with Hebrew writing were discovered there in the 1920s. Jews also lived under Muslim rule in the Afghan cities of Kabul and Kandahar. A tombstone near Kabul, dated 1365, was erected in memory of a Jewish man named Moses ben Ephraim Bezalel, apparently a senior official.20
A large number of Jewish communities lived under Muslim rule in Kurdistan (the northern region of modern–day Iraq). On a visit there in 1170, Benjamin of Tudela came across more than a hundred Jewish communities.21 It is known that many of the Jews of Kurdistan lived at times in poverty. It is therefore unsurprising that two messianic movements–which often arose from economic distress–emerged among the Jews there in the Twelfth Century.22 Yet there is evidence that the Jews of Kurdistan also prospered. There were no Jewish bankers, since that role was reserved for Muslim landowners, but Jewish tradesmen ranged from shopkeepers to peddlers, while Jewish craftsmen included weavers, dyers, gold and silversmiths, tanners and cobblers, as well as unskilled labourers. In rural areas, Jewish farmers owned orchards, vineyards, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. They cultivated wheat, barley, rice, sesame, lentils and tobacco.23
One of the most prominent of all Jewish communities lived in the Babylonian city of Baghdad. Visiting the city shortly before 1170, Benjamin of Tudela noted that it was home to ‘about one thousand Jews, who enjoy peace, comfort and much honour under the government of the great king.’ Among them were ‘very wise men and presidents of the colleges, whose occupation is the study of the Mosaic Law.’ Benjamin also mentioned the city’s two rabbinical schools and twenty–eight synagogues, the chief one richly ornamented with marble, gold and silver. He praised the Caliph for being versed in the Torah and able to speak and write in Hebrew–highlighting further the acceptance afforded to the Jews in Baghdad.
The head of Baghdad’s Jewish community, the Exilarch, played an integral role in the city’s political life. Each Thursday, as Benjamin observed, ‘when the Exilarch goes to pay a visit to the great Caliph, horsemen–non–Jews as well as Jews–escort him, and heralds proclaim in advance: “Make way before our lord, the son of David, as is due unto him.”’ Benjamin described the pomp of this procession in great detail, noting that the Exilarch ‘is mounted on a horse, and is attired in robes of silk and embroidery, with a large turban on his head, and from the turban is suspended a large white cloth adorned with a chain upon which the seal of Mohammed is engraved. Then he appears before the Caliph and kisses his hand, and the Caliph rises and places him on a throne which Mohammed had ordered to be made in honour of him.’ All the Muslim princes attending the Caliph’s court were commanded to stand up and salute the Exilarch, ‘respectfully under penalty of one hundred stripes.’24
The integration of Jews in Baghdad society had developed over four centuries of Jewish–Muslim coexistence. When the city was founded by the Abbasid Caliph Abu Ja’far al–Mansur in 762, Jews had assisted in its construction. They were then given their own quarter, the Dar al–Yahud, where the Exilarch set up his residence. By the end of the Ninth Century, the two Jewish religious academies of Sura and Pumbeditha were moved to Baghdad, which then became the source of rabbinical judgments that were highly regarded throughout the Jewish world. By the end of the Tenth Century two leadingJewish families, Netira and Aaron, were powerful influences in the royal court and strong supporters of the welfare of the Jewish community. During the reign of Caliph al–Muqtafi (902–908) and his successors, the Jewish community in Baghdad flourished; its leader, the Exilarch Daniel ben Hasdai, was respected by both the Jews and the royal court alike.
Life under Muslim rule could prove beneficial for some Jews, but it still held the prospect of persecution as well as protection. In the Twelfth Century a new period of Islamic persecution had begun under the rule of the Almohads (al–Mowahhidun, ‘Unitarians’).25 Originating among the Berber tribes of the High Atlas Mountains on the edge of the Sahara, the Almohads launched a Muslim religious movement designed to restore by force the ‘pure faith’ of Islam. The movement spread throughout North Africa–the Maghreb–and into Muslim Spain. Led by Muhammad ibn Tumart, who died in 1130, the Almohads were initially tolerant towards non–Muslims. But as they extended their control under Ibn Tumart’s successor, Abd al–Mu’min, they began to demand that Jews and Christians accept conversion to Islam, or else face death.
Many Jews from Muslim Spain and North Africa fled for safety to the more tolerant Muslim rulers in Egypt and Palestine. And as the Almohads imposed their rule throughout Muslim Spain, Spanish Jews also fled to the Christian regions of both Spain and southern France. Other Jews, like Maimonides and his family, sought refuge in the Moroccan city of Fez, where the Almohads had not initially demanded conversion to Islam. But when the Moroccan town of Sijilmassa was captured by the Almohads in 1146, the Jews living there were given the same stark choice: conversion to Islam or death. As many as 150 Jews chose death rather than become Muslims. Others, led by their religious leader, Joseph ben Amram, converted to Islam. An identical choice was given to the Jews of neighbouring Dar’a. From the chief Moroccan city, Marrakech, Jews were expelled altogether.
The Jewish poet Abraham ibn Ezra wrote an elegy on the destruction of the Jewish communities of Andalucia and the Maghreb, voicing a cry of pain that echoed throughout the tormented world of the Jews under Muslim rule:
Woe, misfortune from heaven, has befallen Andalucía,
And a great mourning overtaken the Maghreb.
Therefore am I helpless;
My eyes overflow with weeping….
The houses of prayer and praise
have been transformed into houses of impiety.
For a fierce and foreign people
has torn asunder the faithful creed of God….
How has the city of Cordova become utterly forsaken,
reduced to an ocean of ruins!
Its sages and magnates perished through hunger and thirst;
No Jew, no single one, survives in Jaén nor Almeria….
How was the Maghreb helplessly devastated?
Woe misfortune from heaven has befallen Andalucia;
My eyes overflow with weeping….
Woe I cry as a woman in distress,
for the congregation of Sijilmassa;
City of scholars and sages,
Whose brilliance was engulfed by darkness.26
Under the Almohad ruler Sultan Abu Yaqub (who died in 1184), spurious conversions to Islam were common. But under Sultan Yaqub’s successor, Yaqub al–Mansur (1184–1199), severe restrictions were imposed on Jewish converts. They could not marry Muslims; they could not possess slaves; they could not act as guardians; they could not wear Muslim headdress; and they could not engage in large–scale trading, hitherto a Jewish speciality. Realising that most of the Jewish converts were not sincere in their conversion to Islam, al–Mansur devised a particularly visible and degrading costume for all Jewish men who claimed to have converted: a long blue tunic with absurdly large, wide sleeves that reached to a person’s feet, and a blue skull cap in the shape of a donkey’s saddle that fell below the ears. Jewish converts were also made to wear a piece of yellow cloth sewn onto their outer garment.27
Among those who witnessed the plight of Jews under Sultan al–Mansur was the Jewish philosopher Ibn ‘Aqnin. From his hometown of Barcelona, where he was born in 1150, Ibn ‘Aqnin saw first–hand the forced conversions that followed the Almohad conquest of Spain. He moved to Fez, where he wrote a lament for the fate of those who–like himself–had submitted to Islam but found they were still not free from persecution. Referring to the situation during the reign of al–Mansur, Ibn ‘Aqnin declared that, ‘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.’
Ibn ‘Aqnin also wrote of how the Jews who abandoned their faith and wore Muslim clothes were still ‘subjected to the same vexations as those who have remained faithful to their creed.’ Even the descendants of Jewish converts fared badly, Ibn Aqnin wrote, for ‘the conversion of their fathers and grandfathers a hundred years ago has been of no advantage to them.’ He continued: ‘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. We are made the object of inquisitions; great and small testify against us and judgments are pronounced, the least of which render lawful the spilling of our blood, the confiscation of our property, the dishonour of our wives.’
There were brief glimmers of light whenever Muslim nobles intervened on behalf of the Jews, which occurred ‘two or three times,’ when, as Ibn Aqnin recalled, ‘the nobles pleaded in our favour while the common folk testified against us, and the custom of the land would not allow the testimony of the vulgar to supersede that of the gentry.’ But Ibn Aqnin also wrote of how the situation grew even worse when a second decree ‘annulled our right to inheritance and to the custody of our children, placing them in the hands of the Muslims.’ This transfer of Jewish children to Muslim custodians enabled authorities to take advantage of a particular Islamic theological position–fitra–that maintained that all males were born Muslims, and that they became Jews or Christians only because of the education received from their non–Muslim parents. In the words of Ibn Aqnin, it was believed that Muslims who took children from Jewish or Christian parents would ‘obtain considerable reward from Allah.’
Jews were also ‘prohibited to practice commerce, which is our livelihood,’ Ibn Aqnin wrote. ‘Then we were obliged to dismiss our servants and were forbidden to employ others.’ Moreover, the clothes prescribed for converts made Jewish men ‘resemble the inferior status of women’ and ‘were intended by their length to make us unsightly, whereas their colour was to make us loathsome.’ The ‘ugly bonnets’ that Jewish men wore on their heads were supposed to ‘differentiate us from them … in order that they might treat us with disparagement and humiliation.’ Unfortunately, such distinctive clothing had the added effect of making Jews vulnerable to attack. Ibn Aqnin noted how the clothing ‘allows our blood to be spilled with impunity. For whenever we travel on the wayside from town to town, we are waylaid by robbers and brigands and are murdered secretly at night or killed in broad daylight.’
Ibn Aqnin sought to explain the purpose of the Muslim decrees–what he called ‘the persecution of Ishmael.’ His answer was clear: ‘whether they require us to renounce our religion in public or in private is only to annihilate the faith of Israel.’ For that reason, he felt that the Jew was ‘bound to accept death rather than commit the slightest sin.’ Referring to those who–like him–had converted to Islam, he wrote: ‘Since we have remained sinful, having taken pity on ourselves, and profaned the Name of the Lord, though not willfully … these terrible calamities have befallen us.’28
Soon after Ibn Aqnin’s death in 1220, al–Mansur’s son and eventual successor, Abu Mohammed Abd Allah al–Adil (1224–1227)–‘The Just’–allowed the Jews to return to normal robes and turbans, with yellow as their distinguishing mark. Jews were also allowed to return to Marrakech. But by that time the Almohads’ power was already in decline. Following their defeat in battle by rival Muslim warriors in Spain in 1212, the Almohads were gradually replaced by a number of independent Muslim kingdoms. Jewish life and worship continued henceforth without the threat of conversion, or the extreme humiliations of exaggerated dhimmi rules.
Muslim rule in Spain ended after the conquest of Cordova in 1236 by King Ferdinand III of Castile, and the conquest of Granada in 1492 by Ferdinand II of Aragon and his Queen Isabella. For the Jews of Spain, the indignities of dhimmi status under Islam were replaced by the cruelties of Christian persecution and expulsion.
In Baghdad, the true complexity of Muslim–Jewish relations emerged after the pagan Mongols conquered the city in 1258, bringing Muslim rule there to a temporary but bloody end. While the Muslims of Baghdad were ill–treated by the Mongols, the Jews were not: dhimmi status was abolished and neither Christians nor Jews were forced to wear distinguishing clothes or pay the jizya tax. In 1289 the Mongol emperor Arghun Khan appointed his Jewish physician, Sa’d ad–Daula, to be Vizier throughout the Mongol Empire. The appointment of a Jew to such a senior post roused extreme anger in the Muslim population of Baghdad. Sa’d al–Daula was accused by the Muslims of having ‘impounded the wealth of Islam, raised the condition of the Jews, and brought Islam into disrepute.’29 He was also accused of plotting to murder Arghun with poison–a frequent accusation levelled against Jews, without any basis in fact. As Arghun lay dying, Sa’d ad–Daula was murdered by a Muslim mob; his death was followed by a widespread massacre of Jews throughout Persia and Babylonia, as well as the looting of Jewish homes and workshops.30
During the same period, however, another Jew faced a similar danger but with different results. In 1280 the Jewish philosopher Sa’d ben Mansur ibn Kammuna wrote a compendium of inter–faith polemics, in which he examined the strengths and weaknesses of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the book, he rebutted arguments against Judaism and improved what he considered was a weak case then being made for Christianity. His longest chapter, on Islam, was not entirely favourable. Yet when a Muslim mob, incited by a Friday sermon against his book, tried to kill ibn Kammuna, high Muslim officials smuggled him out of Baghdad in a cask.31
Muslim rule eventually returned to Baghdad when the Mongol Emperor Ghazzan (1295–1304) converted to Islam. This momentous change signified a return to favour for the majority of the Mongols’ subjects, but for the Jews it meant a return to dhimmi status, and with it the jizya tax and distinctive clothing. During a number of hostile Muslim attacks, churches and synagogues were destroyed throughout Ghazzan’s Empire. Under his successor, Uljaytu Khan (1305–1316), Jews were forbidden to make their annual pilgrimage to the Tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel. This tomb, located in Kifl, a hundred miles south of Baghdad, was entrusted to the care of a Muslim. Soon the site was covered over by a mosque, from whose minaret the faithful of Islam were called forth to prayer.32
A Jewish physician, Rashid ad–Daula, was able to achieve political success despite these adverse conditions. He was appointed Vizier in 1299, after converting to Islam and changing his name to Rashid ad–Din. In deference to his origins, he employed many Jews and Jewish converts. But his Jewish origins ultimately proved to be his undoing. In 1318, when he was seventy years old, Rashid’s enemies at court accused him of poisoning Uljaytu Khan. He was then executed, together with his son, Ibrahim. Rashid’s head was sent from Baghdad to Tabriz, where it was dragged through the town while a proclamation was read, declaring: ‘This is the head of the Jew who dishonoured the word of God, may God’s curse be upon him.’ As a convert to Islam, Rashid ad–Din was buried in the Muslim cemetery in Tabriz. But a century later, the ruler of Tabriz ordered his bones exhumed and reinterred in the local Jewish cemetery.33
A similar slide into uncertainty occurred for Jews living in Egypt, the former refuge for those seeking an escape from persecution. The Mamluks, who ruled Egypt from 1250 to 1516, enforced dhimmi regulations with rigour. They laid particular emphasis on the rules that imposed distinctive dress and forbade the riding of horses. Because the employment of Jews in skilled administrative positions gave rise to jealousy, a law was instituted in 1290 forbidding Jews to serve as public officials. Then, eleven years later, synagogues were closed down throughout the Mamluk Empire; they remained shut for nine years, until 1310. The buildings were only spared from demolition because the Jews were able to prove–by judicious use of bribery–that these synagogues predated the Muslim era.
The mid–Fourteenth Century saw an upsurge in Mamluk fanaticism. In 1327 the synagogue in Aleppo was turned into a mosque with the approval of the Mamluk Sultan in Cairo.34 In 1354, throughout the Mamluk dominions, some of the more onerous of the dhimmi restrictions were extended to Jewish converts to Islam. Converts were not allowed to serve as government officials or to work as physicians in the Muslim community. They were also forced to cut off all contact with relatives who had not converted to Islam. In addition, Jewish converts to Islam were placed under strict supervision, in order to ensure that they carried out their obligatory five daily visits to the mosque.35
The varied nature of Jewish life under Islam allowed Jews to prosper in some places, while their brethren elsewhere suffered. In the Persian city of Shiraz, for example, the Fourteenth–Century Jewish poet Maulana Shahin became famous and admired in this period for his Judaeo–Persian verses.36 The interaction between Jewish and Muslim cultures continued throughout Muslim lands, where Jewish poets frequently took Arabic poetic forms and used them in their work; Judah Halevi was a master of this craft. The qasida, a type of epic poem, was used and embellished by both Arabs and Jews. The muwashshah song form, or ode, was developed by both Arabic and Jewish poets and musicians. One of the first poets to model the strophic form of the muwashshah was a Spanish–born Jew, Ibrahim ibn Sahl al–Andalusi al–Isra’ili. The linguist Dr. Shmuel Moreh has observed that ‘Arab poets tend to explain Ibn Sahl’s delicacy, lyricism, tenderness and emotional depths–unequalled by his successors–on the basis of his humility inspired by his Jewish origins and his love.’37
Jewish and Muslim intellectual life remained closely interlinked, so that both Hebrew and Arabic were used as the languages of scholarship and study. In Yemen, between 1484 and 1493, the scholar Daud Lawani (David Levi) wrote a commentary called the Adequate Summary of the Pentateuch–the five books of Moses–in both Arabic and Hebrew.38 The work of Muslim musicologist, mathematician and scientist Ibn Abi al–Salt (born in Andalucia in 1068, died in Tunisia in 1134) much influenced The Jews of Muslim Spain. Some of his work survives in Hebrew translations made in the Fourteenth Century by a Jewish musicologist, Nathan ben Solomon.
The two extremes of exclusion and cooperation defined the Muslim–Jewish relationship, inspiring a range of conflicting loyalties among Jewish communities living under Muslim rule. Although Jews and Muslims had both suffered at the hands of Christian Crusaders, Jews are known to have come to the aid of Christians persecuted by Muslim rulers. In Cairo in 1343, during a massacre of Christian Copts, the Jews lent the Christians their own discriminatory garments, with the result that the Copts were able to leave their houses in safety, ‘protected’ as Jews.39 At other times, however, when Jews were forced to choose between Islam and Christianity, they sometimes chose Islam, fighting as companions–i n–arms with Muslim soldiers against the Christians. In 1431 they formed an integral part of the army of Muhammed IX, Sultan of Granada, when he was defeated at the Battle of Higueruela by the army of the King of Castile.40
Caught between Muslim and Christian rulers, the Jews walked a fine line between acceptance and rejection, not always protected by Islam even as a protected people, but always striving to make their contribution to Muslim societies in whose midst they had been living for so many centuries.
1 Encyclopaedia Hebraica, ‘Jerusalem, Crusader Period,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 9, column 1415.
2 Another leading Jewish poet was Isaac ibn Ezra, who lived during the Twelfth Century. He was the grandson of one of the most respected and widely travelled Jewish poets, grammarians and philosophers, Abraham ibn Ezra. Isaac served for some years as the court poet in Baghdad. In one of his poems, he confessed that he had become a Muslim some years earlier, much to his grandfather’s distress, but that he remained in his heart a loyal Jew and continued to keep the commandments. Born in Tudela, Abraham ibn Ezra visited Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, Egypt, Italy and France. He also lived in London for three years (1158–61), where he wrote two books. J.H. Steinschneider, ‘Ibn Ezra, Isaac (12th century),’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 8, column 1170.
3 See pages 64–8 for the story of the Almohads.
4 Sherwin B. Nuland, Maimonides, page 85. Maimonides was echoing Deuteronomy 31:19: ‘I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’
5 Deuteronomy 32:31.
6 ‘Maimonides’ Epistle to the Jews of Yemen,’ in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: History and Source Booh, page 241.
7 Maimonides also predicted that the inequalities imposed on the Jews would end with the coming of the Messiah, which he believed would take place in the year 1216–the year 4976 in the Jewish calendar.
8 Harry Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine: Essays, pages 197–8. Abdul–Ma’ali al Yahudi was married to Maimonides’ sister. Maimonides’ wife was Abdul–Ma’ali al Yahudi’s sister.
9 Frank Heynick, Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga, page 111. The filth and stench of medieval Cairo was notorious; Maimonides’ baby daughter may well have died of a miasmic illness emanating from the Nile.
10 Cairo Genizah manuscript, Cambridge University Library, T–S Ar.44.79.
11 Harry Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine: Essays, pages 210–11. Regimen Sanitatis was to become the first medical book published in Florence (in 1477). Between 1501 and 1535 it was published in Pavia, Venice, Augsburg and Lyon.
12 Quoted in Letters of Moses Maimonides, pages xii–xiv. The letter was written in 1199.
13 Cairo Genizah manuscript, Cambridge University Library, T–S J2.78. A draft proclamation declaring Maimonides Ra’is al–Yahud is in the Cambridge University Genizah manuscripts.
14 Sherwin B. Nuland, Maimonides, page 152.
15 S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, page 447.
16 A. Asher (editor and translator), The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, pages 75–7.
17 Joseph Kaplan, ‘Nahmanides,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 12, columns 774–7.
18 Jacob d’Ancona, The City of Light, pages 49–50.
19 See Map 18, page 372.
20 W.J. Fischel, ‘Afghanistan,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 2, columns 326–7.
21 Thirty–eight of those hundred communities claimed descent from the tribe of Benjamin. The traveller also estimated that the town of Amadiya had a Jewish population of about two thousand, all of whom spoke biblical Aramaic as their daily language, including a number of biblical scholars. Abraham Ben–Jacob, ‘Kurdistan,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 10, column 1297. Curiously, there were 1,820 Jews in Amadiya in 1933, all of whom later left for Israel.
22 One movement was headed by Menahem ben Solomon ibn Ruhi, the other by David Alroy. Some scholars think these two men were one and the same. Abraham Ben–Jacob, ‘Kurdistan,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 10, column 1297.
23 Abraham Ben–Yaacob, ‘Kurdistan.’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 10, column 1297.
24 A. Asher (editor and translator), The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, pages 100–2.
25 ‘The People of Unity’ or ‘The Unitarians,’ from tawhid–unity (of God).
26 Abraham ibn Ezra, translated by Professor Paul Fenton from the text in H.Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, Volume I, Jerusalem, 1965, pages 90–1 (in Hebrew).
27 David Corcos, ‘Almohads,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 2, columns 662–3.
28 Ibn Aqnin, ‘Tibb an–nufus’ (‘Therapy of the Soul’), Judaeo–Arabic manuscript, 1273, Bodleian Library, Oxford: quoted in Bat Yeo’r, The Dhimmi, pages 346–7 and 349–51.
29 Ghazi al–Wasiti (alive in 1292), quoted in R. Gottheil, ‘An Answer to the Dhimmis,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society, New York, issue 41, 1921.
30 Walter J. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Medieval Islam, page 117.
31 Moshe Perlmann, ‘Ibn Kammuna, S’ad Ibn Mansur (c.1215–1285),’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 8, columns 1186–7.
32 Today, Ezekiel’s tomb is a holy place for both Muslims and Jews. Above the tomb is a Hebrew inscription dating back to late medieval times.
33 Walter J. Fischel, Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Medieval Islam, page 122–4.
34 The building still functioned as a mosque in the first decade of the Twenty–First Century, more than six hundred and eighty years later. Rabbi David Sutton, Aleppo, City of Scholars, page 14.
35 Eliezer Bashan (Sternberg), ‘Omar, Covenant of,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 12, columns 1380–81.
36 Judaeo–Persian or Jidi (also spelled Dzhidi) was the language spoken by Jews living in Persia (Iran). It uses Persian (Farsi) grammar and structure, but it is written in the Hebrew alphabet and contains many words borrowed from Hebrew.
37 Shmuel Moreh, ‘Ibrahim ibn Sahl al–Andalusi al–Isra’ili (Abu Ishaq, 1208–1260?),’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 8, columns 1213–4.
38 Yehuda Ratzaby, ‘Lawani, Daud (Levi, David),’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 10, columns 1484–5. Some scholars have identified Daud Lawani with Daud al–Lawani, a Yemeni Jewish poet who lived in the city of Sanaa.
39 Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, page 88.
40 There is a painting of these Jewish soldiers in action in the Gallery of Battles at the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, in Spain.