On 7 August 2003, Amrozi bin Nurhasin, one of the ‘Bali bombers,’ entered a courtroom in Bali, Indonesia. He was appearing for sentencing, having been found guilty of causing the deaths of more than two hundred people, none of them Jews. With the world’s media attention focused on him, in front of the judges and the cameras, he shouted out in Arabic: ‘Jews: remember Khaibar. The army of Mohammed is coming back to defeat you.’1
1,375 years before this outburst in court, the Prophet Mohammed, leader of the new faith of Islam, achieved one of his first military victories. It was a victory, in the year 628, against a Jewish tribe living in the oasis of Khaibar, in the Arabian Peninsula. Historical Arab sources report that between six and nine hundred Jews were killed in the battle. The few Jews who remember this defeat today, do so when recalling what is for them their distant history. But for some Muslims, the battle at Khaibar resonates with meaning even today, as Amrozi bin Nurhasin made clear.
The modern resonance of Khaibar has often echoed with hostile attitudes towards the Jewish State of Israel. The historian Gideon Kressel witnessed this first–hand in Israel in the autumn of 1989, when a group of Bedouin explained to him over breakfast, ‘in a calm and friendly manner,’ that Israel would soon cease to exist; it was because ‘that is God’s will – nothing can change it.’ The Bedouin also told Kressel that the Battle of Khaibar was a frequent talking point among them, as a result of radio broadcasts from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.2 During the course of his work among the Bedouin, Kressel often heard words similar to those later used by Amrozi in the Bali courtroom: ‘Khaybar – Khaybar ya Yahud, Jaysh Muhammad sa ya’ud!’ (‘Khaybar–Khaybar you Jews, Mohammed’s army is about to return’).3
On 16 October 2003, two months after the sentencing in Bali, a similar hope was expressed by the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad. The Prime Minister – who in 1986 had inaugurated an ‘Anti–Jews Day’4 – told the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference that ‘1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews…. Surely the twenty–three years’ struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do.’5
Within three years, on 25 January 2006, the same sentiment received a boost on the West Bank and in Gaza, when Palestinian Arab voters cast a majority of their votes to Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.6 (Hamas received forty–four per cent of the vote, as against forty–one per cent for their nearest rival, Fatah.) The Hamas Charter, promulgated in 1988, looks forward to the implementation of ‘Allah’s promise,’ however long it might take. It reads: ‘The Prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Moslems, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”’7
What does this age–old schism between Jews and Muslims mean for the modern world? What did it mean during the 1,400 years in which Jews lived in many lands under Muslim rule? In the Twelfth Century, six hundred years after the death of Mohammed, the Jewish sage Maimonides, known to Muslims as Musa ibn Maymun, gave his own answer to that question. Describing the situation of the Jews after five centuries of Muslim rule, he 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.’8 He was referring to the consequences of Islam’s military expansion, which occurred rapidly from the time of Mohammed in the Seventh Century onwards.
The conquests of Islam made Jews the subjects of Arab and Muslim rulers in a wide swathe of land, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.9 Being nonMuslims, these Jews held the inferior status of dhimmi, which, despite giving them protection to worship according to their own faith, subjected them to many vexatious and humiliating restrictions in their daily lives. The same conditions were imposed on all Christians under Muslim rule, and when Islam’s conquests reached the Indian subcontinent, Hindus too were forced to accept dhimmi status.10
Yet there has also been another side to this tale of debasement and humiliation. At the end of the Twentieth Century, Bernard Lewis, a lifelong student of Jews and Islam and himself a Jew, reflected on the fourteen centuries of Jewish life under Islamic rule, eight centuries after Maimonides’ damning verdict. Lewis wrote: ‘The Jews were never free from discrimination, but only rarely subject to persecution.’ He noted that the situation of Jews living under Islamic rulers was ‘never as bad as in Christendom at its worst, nor ever as good as in Christendom at its best.’ Lewis observed that ‘there is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust.’ But he also commented that, on the other hand, there was nothing in the history of Jews under Islam ‘to compare with the progressive emancipation and acceptance accorded to Jews in the democratic West during the last three centuries.’11
These two perspectives on the situation of Jews living under Muslim rule in the Dar al–Islam (the ‘World of Islam’) will be examined in this book from a historical point of view. The focus will be the Jews themselves: men and women who strived to become an integral, productive and accepted part of the countries in which they lived, and whose loyalty was to the local power, which, sadly, often turned against them. The narrative begins with the rise of Islam in the Seventh Century and continues until the present day. It includes the fateful impact of Zionism from 1897 onwards, the emergence of the State of Israel in 1948, and the experiences of Jews who were living in Arab and Muslim lands when Israel came into being; 850,000 of these Jews were forced to leave their homes and countries, driven out by persecution and hatred. The United Nations’ offer of statehood to Jews and Arabs in Palestine caused a violent reaction in the Arab world, which in turn prompted a mass Jewish exodus, spread over nearly two decades. The migration was later intensified by the Arab–Israeli war of 1948–9, Israel’s War of Independence, during which 726,000 Palestinian Arabs also became refugees.12
I am an Ashkenazi Jew with my family roots in the Russian Empire of the Tsars. I have always tried to make the story of Jews living under Muslim rule an integral part of my writings on Jewish history. In my Atlas of the Holocaust, I mapped the birthplaces of several thousand Jews born in the wide sweep of land from Morocco to Iraq who, because they were living in western Europe in 1939, were caught up in the destruction of the Second World War, deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.13 In 1976, I outlined the story of Jews from Arab lands in a fifteen–map illustrated atlas, The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps.14 In my letters on Jewish history to my adopted aunt in India, published as Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000–Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith, I included seven letters about Jews of Muslim lands.15
This book tells the story of the Jews who lived at different times in fourteen Muslim–ruled countries. Those countries are Afghanistan, Algeria, the Bukharan Khanate in Central Asia (now Uzbekistan), Egypt, Iraq (formerly Babylonia and then Mesopotamia, and including Kurdistan), Iran (formerly Persia), Lebanon, Libya (Tripolitania and Cyrenaica), Morocco, Ottoman Turkey, Palestine (when under Muslim rule), Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, including Aden.
Three aspects of the story are interwoven, and I have given them equal weight. The first is the historical narrative, with its chronological sweep and wide range of countries, cities and personalities. The second is the documentary evidence as preserved over the centuries: the archival record of governments and institutions. The third is the human voice of those individuals whose stories make up the narrative: the actual words of participants and eyewitnesses, as preserved in letters, poems, memoirs and oral testimony. History is the collective story of myriad individuals.
With its successes and achievements, its moments of pain and persecution, the 1,400–year story of Jews living under the rule of Islam is an integral part of the history of every Arab and Muslim nation concerned. It is also a part of the wider Jewish historical narrative, and of Jewish heritage. It is a story of communities and individuals often under stress and facing difficult restrictions. It is the story of the Jewish contribution to the welfare and well–being of Arab and Muslim countries. And it is the story of a sometimes unstable and frequently changing relationship between Jews and Muslims that held the prospect of fear and terror as well as hope and opportunity for many millions of Jews.
According to both Jewish and Muslim traditions, Jews and Arabs were descended from Abraham, whose elder son Ishmael was sent out into the desert, and whose younger son Isaac remained with his father. It was Isaac’s son Jacob who was given the name Israel. According to the Book of Genesis, when Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael together buried him in the Cave of Machpelah. The descendants of Ishmael are named in Genesis, where they are described as twelve chieftains. Isaac’s son Jacob had twelve sons, the twelve tribes of Israel, who are also named. The descendants of Isaac and of Ishmael who lived a thousand years later in the lands ruled by Ishmael’s descendants–in Ishmael’s house–were Semites with a common ancient ancestry.
Martin Gilbert
7 March 2010
1 Quoted by Martin Chulov in: ‘The Plot to Blast Bali–The Verdict,’ The Australian, 8 August 2003. Of the 202 people killed by the Bali bombers on 12 October 2002, the largest group was Australians (88), followed by Indonesians (38) and British (24).
2 Gideon M. Kressel, ‘What Actually Happened at Khaybar?’ in A. Paul Hare and Gideon M. Kressel, Israel As Centre Stage: A Setting for Social and Religious Enactments, 2001.
3 Gideon M. Kressel, letter to the author, 20 June 2009.
4 Barbara Crossette, ‘Malaysia Tightens Secrecy on Official Documents,’ New York Times, 8 December 1986.
5 ‘Speech by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia to the Tenth Islamic Summit Conference, Putrajaya, Malaysia, 16 October 2003’: Prime Minister’s Office, Malaysia.
6 Hamas is an acronym for the Arabic words Harakat al–Muqawama al–Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement).
7 MidEast Web Historical Documents, ‘Hamas Charter, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) 18 August 1988.’ The quotation goes on to say that there is one tree that will not call out to reveal that Jews are hiding there, the Gharkad tree, ‘because it is one of the trees of the Jews.’ www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm
8 ‘Maimonides’ Epistle to the Jews of Yemen,’ in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: History and Source Book, page 241.
9 For a map of the conquests of Islam by AD 750, and some of the towns within that area with large Jewish communities, see Map 1, page 356.
10 Elliott A. Green, ‘The Forgotten Oppression of Jews Under Islam and in the Land of Israel,’ Midstream, September/October 2008.
11 Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti–Semites, pages 121–22.
12 The Palestine Conciliation Committee (supported by the United Nations) gave the figure of 711,000 Arab refugees. The figure given by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East), confirmed by the United Nations Economic Survey Mission in 1949, was 726,000. As of 30 June 2008, UNRWA gave the figure of 1,373,732 Palestinian refugees (the original refugees and their descendants) in UNRWA–administered camps and a total of 4,671,811 Palestinian Arabs registered with UNRWA as refugees (the original refugees and their descendants born outside Israel).
13 Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust, Maps 159, 226 and 245.
14 Martin Gilbert, The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps. London: Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1976.
15 Martin Gilbert, Letters to Auntie Fori: The 5,000–Year History of the Jewish People and Their Faith, Letters 47–50, 57, 72 and 97.