Have Muslims and Jews been “at war” for “thousands of years”?
I hear or read that quite frequently. It seems to be a very commonly held belief. But I think it’s a misunderstanding or a lie, depending on the answer to the “fool or knave” question.
First of all, Islam hasn’t even been around for “thousands of years.” It has a very specific origin date and a founder: the date is 610 CE. So it’s 1,416 years old.
Yes, there are certainly passages in the Koran that show hatred of Jews. But no, there wasn’t any “war” – and one very basic reason is that for almost all of those years Islam has been in existence, right up till 1948, Jews had no army and couldn’t fight wars. They certainly were the victims of violence, but that violence was not mainly at the hands of Muslims; more of it occurred in Christian lands, and it was more in the nature of sporadic massacres than formal wars. The Holocaust was a very special case in which there was an attempt by Nazis (with the cooperation of many others) to eradicate the Jews of Europe and it was during a war, but that was not a Muslim endeavor.
But to go back to the origins of Islam – Islam is a religion that claims to spring from Judaism and Christianity in that it incorporates some elements of each, but in a different way, and it believes it superceded and ought to replace both worldwide. Mohammed (like some Christians before and after him) thought he could convert the Jews, and he got mad at them when they didn’t support him or accept his new religion (Luther had a similar reactoin – he thought he could convert the Jews and when they said no he turned on them with vicious hatred). There are definitely some hadiths that are anti-Jewish.
However, over the centuries, Islamic countries actually “tolerated” their Jews – and they had many many Jews within their borders. Attitudes varied over the years, but as long as the Jews as a group had a subservient status in Muslim lands and paid the jizya (which is a tax Muslim countries levied on non-Muslims living under them) it was mostly okay for them although there were some massacres. But the massacres of Jews in Muslim lands tended to kill fewer than the ones in Christian lands for many years during ancient and medieval times. And as far as I can tell, Muslim countries did not expel their Jews, unlike many European Christian countries who periodically did so over the centuries. Therefore, Muslim countries often had stable Jewish communities that had lasted for well over a thousand years.
Of course, Jews didn’t have a country until 1948. However, starting a couple of decades before that, the Nazis began to influence Arab leaders in particular to hate Jews in the Nazi-esque way. That’s when the more serious trouble began to rev up for Jews in those lands. Google AI has a nice summary of what happened:
Prior to the 1930s, antisemitism in the Arab world was primarily social and religious, but the rise of Nazism and the intensification of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine fueled a toxic cultural fusion of European conspiracy theories and radicalized local prejudices.
Ideological Penetration: European antisemitic literature, notably The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Arabic translations of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, began circulating in the Arab world in the 1920s and 1930s.
Strategic Alliance: Following the 1937 British Peel Commission’s proposal to partition Palestine, Nazi Germany reversed its earlier policy and began actively supporting Arab opposition forces. Germany supplied money and arms to radical Arab leaders to undermine British colonial control and check Jewish influence in the Middle East.
Anti-Zionist Mobilization: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, received ideological and financial assistance from Nazi Germany, shifting from a primarily religious group to a heavily mobilized, anti-Zionist, and vehemently anti-Jewish political force.
Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the most prominent Arab leader to collaborate with the Axis powers.
Al-Husayni utilized his overarching religious authority to fuse traditional Islamic anti-Jewish sentiments with modern European totalitarianism.
He sought to secure Axis approval to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine, eventually broadcasting Nazi-sponsored, anti-Allied, and anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin to the Middle East during World War II.
The Nazis circumvented the non-Aryan prejudices in their ideology by framing the conflict strictly against “International Jewry,” characterizing it as the shared enemy of both the German state and the Arab peoples.
Propagandists often invoked selective readings of the Qur’an and linked them to Nazi ideology to frame Zionism as an existential threat to Islam and Arabs.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration by Britain, prior to that, also fanned the flames of Arab anger because it promised the Jews a homeland. There were several massacres as a result of these forces, years before Israel became a country (see this, for example).
These days, half of Israel consists either of Jewish refugees from Arab and North African Muslim countries or their descendants. Many fled during the 1940s and 1950s till the 1970s. Some came to this country as well. As far as I know they never received any compensation. Until that period, they had lived in Muslim lands with some problems, but nothing like what was happening in the 20th century.
Also from Google AI:
Approximately 600,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa to settle in the State of Israel, primarily between 1948 and the early 1970s.
In total, an estimated 850,000 to 900,000 Jews left the Islamic world during this period, with the remaining refugees migrating to France, the United States, and other Western countries. This mass displacement was largely the result of escalating persecution, state-sponsored expropriation, and anti-Jewish violence following the establishment of Israel.
I often wonder how widely any of these facts are known. My sense is: not widely at all. And so the “cycle of war for thousands of years” myth goes on.
First of all, Islam hasn’t even been around for “thousands of years.”
Well, yeah! Sheesh. I’ll spare the details, but I socialize with something of a motley crew of music and dancing enthusiasts, one of whom is a Jewish lady. The weird stuff she’s heard from Christians who know nothing of Judaism!
Our excellent host wrote: Mohammed (like some Christians before and after him) thought he could convert the Jews, and he got mad at them when they didn’t support him or accept his new religion.
In graduate school I took a seminar on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam. Researched and wrote a long paper on Christian and Muslim relations during the lifetime of Muhammad. I looked at numerous references to Christianity in the Qur’an and also considered them in light of when those suras were written. (There are traditions about when chapters of the Qur’an were written.)
What I found is that the earliest references (in Meccan suras) to Christianity (and Judaism) are positive or at least not negative. He encountered no significant opposition from Christians of whom there were few. Christians and Jews were ahl al-kitab People of the Book and viewed as natural allies.
But after moving to Medina we see passages attacking specifically Christian ideas. Muhammad was beginning to encounter Christians more directly and experiencing more opposition.
That seems to be an important dynamic in the career of Muhammad as prophet. He had a message and a revelation. He encountered opposition. He became increasingly hostile toward those that opposed him. That included conflicts with Jewish tribes in the region. They were far less willing to accept Muhammad as a prophet.
A lot of people, especially the anti-Israel crowd, think Israel was largely populated at the outset by eastern European “invaders” who just waltzed in and stole the land from the native Arabs. The idea that there were already Jews there, some for decades, some for centuries, and the fact that something like half the immigrants fled neighboring Arab states, doesn’t fit with their preconceptions. Then there is also the inconvenient fact that a lot of the “Palestinians” migrated there as well in the early 1900s. Yasser Arafat came from Egypt, for example.
Jimmy:
Plus, the Jews bought the land; they didn’t “steal” it. They bought it mostly from Arabs who hadn’t been there long, or who were absentee landlords. There were quite a few Bedouins there, too, but they had different (complex) ideas about land ownership. Many are still in Israel.
Some Israeli Bedouins were murdered by Hamas on 10/7 (estimates are between 19 and 21). Hamas could not care less about them.
I see a very broad international eruption of anti-semitism, which does temporally coincide with Muslim hordes pouring into western Europe and into the USA. Mamdani, the Uganda-born mayor of NYC, is a Shiite Muslim. The Mayor of London is a Muslim, and of course Britain is awash with them. Iran is predominantly Shiite, Iraq is Sunni. Shia vs. Sunni Islam is a only a little bit like Catholic vs. Protestant.
It is clear that Muslim immigration does not improve (elevate) cultural commitments to the decency, the caring for others, of the Christian West.. Individuals may be OK, but the culture is not.
I had a Jewish colleague, a most capable doc who kept kosher, who left academia to be a hospital-based doc in Dearborn, Michigan. Well, Dearborn has since become 55% Arab, has a huge mosque, and is full of antisemites who made life for him there intolerable. So he fled.
From AI: “Hamtramck is nearby (Detroit) and more Yemeni/Bangladeshi. The adhan is broadcast from most of the masajid so you can’t really go anywhere in the city without hearing it. Niqab is super common, most restaurants are halal, and there’s a halal grocery store on every corner. It’s 80%+ Muslim.”
I have not detected much good arising from Yemen or Bangladesh.
A dear departed friend was a Sephardic Jew from Morocco. She married a US serviceman stationed in Morocco. A neighbor in our condo complex was a Muslim from Morocco—worked in real estate. When his mother visited from Morocco, she and my Jewish friend got together to talk about Morocco. (Certainly they agreed about Moroccan food. My friend told me there was no better food than Moroccan food. Not wanting to bite the hand that fed me, I did not disagree. But it IS pretty good. Much better than blaah Ashkenazi food.)
Her wanting to talk with someone from the old country indicated to me that Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco were not that bad.
A sister and a son moved to Israel. A great grandson went to Israel for his Bar Mitzvah. The other great grandson had no such interest.
In some places (not all) there was warmth and friendship; in others, correct relations.
The general problem was an easily-triggered volatility of the majority and resulting out-of-control mobs.
(For a more contemporary example, look at the plight of the Copts in Egypt and the Christians in Pakistan.)
Mayor “Pogroms ‘R Us” Madmani knows what he’s doing and well understands the (not so subtle) “art” of incitement.
Related…
Lyn Julius:
(Google “julius + Jew + Arab”)
Also see:
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/uprooted-how-3000-years-of-jewish-civilization-in-the-arab-world-vanished-overnight
“Tolerated”
A better translation would be “suffered”. As in, ‘I suffer your existence’.
Once one understands that, many things come into clearer focus.
Islam’s borders are bloody. (Around 55 min mark.)
https://youtu.be/9jcW1vQ0nZM
Funnily enough he discusses their general issue with the Jews right after. But yeah, it seems historically to be in response to the Jews rejection of Mohammed as a prophet. He took it personal and has never forgiven them for it.
The tolerance of the Jews by Christians and Muslims has a significant difference as highlighted by population figures. At the time of Islam’s establishment and immediate expansion across North Africa and the Middle East the Jewish population was predominantly in the Middle East.
Over the next centuries the Jewish population center moved to Europe. As noted by Grok (up until the decade prior to WW2):
“Europe’s (especially Eastern) political fragmentation, economic niches for Jews, and later modernization enabled faster demographic growth, while MENA’s relative stability came with constraints that limited expansion until modern upheavals.”
There is the parallel with the decimation of the Christian population of North Africa.
In brief Islam ground down the pagans immediately and the dhimmis slowly but incessantly. Christianity had tolerance which ran hot and cold but allowed for flourishing over time.
Please note that National Socialism, much like International Socialism, is not Christian.
“as long as the Jews as a group had a subservient status in Muslim lands and paid the jizya (which is a tax Muslim countries levied on non-Muslims living under them) it was mostly okay for them although there were some massacres.”
As I understand it, jizya was available only to Christians and Jews, who are ahl al-kitab, People of the Book, and viewed as natural allies. Everyone else was supposed to convert or die.
“Iran is predominantly Shiite, Iraq is Sunni.”
Apparently not true. While Iran is mostly Shite, so is Iraq. Iraq is apparently 60%/35% Shi’a/Sunni Muslim. Saddam Hussein was Alawite, a branch of Sunni Islam. Hence one of the destabilizing factors there that we were able to exploit in our war there. Saddam tended to promote Alawites first, Sunni second, and Shi’a last.
But it doesn’t end there. Persia has long claimed spiritual supremacy over Shi’a Islam. This goes back for many centuries. But the real spiritual center appears to be in western Iran, not far from Iraq, and in particular Qom. That is where the Ayatollahs in both countries tend to be trained, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Husayni Sistani, the most powerful cleric over the last several decades in Iraq.
The interesting thing is that the Iraqi Shi’a, now essentially now in majority control of Iraq, did not join the Shi’a in next door Iran opposing the US, but are apparently a firm ally of the US in our dispute with Iran.
The Assads of Syria were Alawite, and did fill their governments with their fellow (minority) sectarians.
Saddam Hussain of Iraq was not an Alawite, but was a Baathist partyman, and insofar as he pretended to a faith, was nominally a Sunnii muslim.