The Jewish Experience in the Muslim World

Abstract

Until the mid-twentieth century, there were more than one million Jews living in the Muslim countries stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. Some of these communities had roots going back to antiquity. There were Jews in many of what we now identify as Arab countries, long before the arrival of the Arabs, and in what is now Turkey long before the arrival of the Turks. Until the seventeenth century, Muslim lands were home to the majority of world Jewry, and during the Middle Ages, it was there that some of the greatest works of the Jewish intellectual and artistic spirit were created. Today only vestiges of these historic Jewish communities remain, and their number is diminishing. This chapter surveys the history of this important branch of the Jewish people from the earliest beginnings of Islam to the present. THE FOUNDING OF ISLAM AND THE EARLIEST JUDEO-MUSLIM ENCOUNTERS There were Jewish communities in early seventh-century Arabia, when a merchant in Mecca named Muhammad began preaching a new monotheistic religion to his pagan fellow Arabs. The Jews who lived in Arabia spoke Arabic, were organized into clans and tribes like their Arab neighbors, and were generally assimilated into the surrounding culture. In spite of their overall acculturation, they were regarded as a separate group with their own distinctive religion and customs. Not only were the pagan Arabs familiar with Jews and their religious practices, but also Jewish ideas, ethical concepts, and homiletic lore, and even some Hebrew and Aramaic terms were absorbed by those Arabs who came into close contact with Jews.