Baer notes that at one point 90 per cent of the world’s Jews lived within an Islamic environment, which left its trace in terms of liturgical developments and early Jewish philosophy. Judah Halevi, the 12th-century poet whose yearning for Zion led him to leave Spain for Palestine, was also known as Abu Al-Hassan.
In 10th-century Baghdad intellectuals from different faiths could engage in respectful dialogue, where they were expected to use reason rather than the authority of faith to bolster their arguments. In al-Andalus in Muslim-ruled Spain, Jewish scholars were even able to make critiques of the Qur’an, attesting to “a level of tolerance unusual in the pre-modern world”.
In various places Jews were able to rise to positions of prominence, such as Samuel Pallache, the Moroccan diplomat who was the inspiration for Rembrandt’s painting, Man in Oriental Costume. Meir Macnin, the Sultan of Morocco’s envoy, procured arms and ships from England, where he settled, becoming presidente of Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1815.
In the early 20th century, Jews in the Land of Israel would join the crowds sprinkling rosewater on the Muslim pilgrims to Nebi Musa (the reputed tomb of Moses). Even after the upheaval following the birth of the state of Israel, there were signs of the good relations that had existed. In 1951 in the exodus from Iraq, hundreds of Muslims in Zakho, Kurdistan, lined the streets to bid farewell to their Jewish neighbours.
In 1978, when the Chief Rabbi of Morocco left for Israel, King Hassan II – who as a prince had come to synagogue in Casablanca on Yom Kippur to receive a blessing – accompanied him to the airport.
Relations between Muhammad and Jews were “mixed”, reflected in some negative verses about the latter in the Qur’an. But while Islamic scripture, for instance, warns Muslims against taking Jews and Christians as allies, this was “political and not social”, Baer comments, “and has hardly ever been observed in history”. Generally, “Jews were treated better in medieval Islam than during the Prophet’s era, and much better than in medieval Christendom”.
In fact, when Christians entered the picture, in these triangular dynamics, relations between Jews and Muslims tended to “worsen”.
But he takes care to steer us away from rose-tinted views. True, the Ottoman Empire offered a home to exiles from the Inquisition – although he dismisses the popular story that Sultan Bayezid II sent a ship to pick them up as a “ridiculous myth” invented by Turkish Jews. Ottoman Muslim chroniclers in the 15th to 18th centuries did not hail the Jews from Andalusia as a welcome addition to the empire but rather depicted them as “greedy, cunning and deceitful”.
Rembrandt's Man in Oriental Costume (Samuel Pallache)[Missing Credit]
The first Turkish language history of the Jews in the late 1880s was influenced by the stereotypes of French antisemitism. During the Second World War, neutral Turkey abandoned thousands of Turkish citizens in Nazi Europe to their fate, refusing to repatriate them.
While the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini, cosied up to Hitler, most Muslims “did not take the bait” of Nazi propaganda. In Berlin, an Egyptian doctor, Mohammed Helmy, saved two Jews, one a Hungarian teenager whom he installed as his assistant and pretended was his niece, even having to take her on one occasion to SS headquarters to treat the Mufti.
In German-occupied North Africa, “some Arabic-speaking Jews passed themselves off as Muslims, others were saved by Muslims… and yet others were turned over to the Germans by them,” Baer says.
Even before Zionism, tensions had been growing between Jews and French in parts of the Arab world. In Algeria, colonial France offered citizenship to Jews but not to Muslims, for example, while the opportunities of modern education was a factor more widely driving a wedge between the two groups.
Events took a turn for the worse after Israel’s fight for independence. In Our Struggle with the Jews, the Egyptian ideologue Sayyib Qutb, one of the godfathers of the Muslim Brotherhood, mixed a poisonous cocktail of European antisemitism and scriptural precedent.
But when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat launched his peace mission to Jerusalem in 1977, the Cairo-born Jewish writer Jacqueline Kahanoff, who had emigrated to Israel, could call for “a new covenant” between Jews and Muslims. A challenge that remains to be taken up.
In his conclusion, Baer suggests that rather than siblings, the relationship between the two Abrahamic groups might be better characterised as that of a couple – married or divorced, who even if they can not love each other, should learn to act towards each other with respect.
A couple, we might add, who perhaps need a little counselling.
Children of Abraham – the Story of Jewish-Muslim Relations by Marc David Baer, Profile Books is out now
The Children of Abraham by Mark David Baer. Profile Books[Missing Credit]