Ac<\/span><\/span>cording to received wisdom, an Islamic faith that once tolerantly coexisted with Jews and Christians has been traumatized by the twentieth century and its destructive ideologies (such as fascism, communism, and nationalism), by the depredations of European colonialism and imperialism, and by the displacements wrought by globalization. These developments, according to such apologists as John Esposito and Reza Aslan, have given rise to a distortion of Islam, one manifested not just in \u201cIslamist\u201d terror but also in the virulent anti-Semitism visible today throughout the Middle East and in Europe\u2019s Muslim communities. A religious culture that once embraced the kindred \u201cpeople of the book\u201d \u2014 Jews and Christians \u2014 has now been infected by European anti-Semitism, just one more way that Western cultural dysfunctions have damaged the traditions of a proud faith.<\/p>\nThe problem with this tale, as Andrew Bostom documents in\u00a0The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism<\/i>, is that it isn\u2019t true. A physician and professor of medicine at Brown University, Bostom demonstrated a doctor\u2019s fidelity to empirical evidence in his previous book,\u00a0The Legacy of Islamic Jihad<\/i>, showing how violence against the infidel is central to Islamic doctrine, theology, and jurisprudence. He now performs a similar service in examining Islamic anti-Semitism, exploding the delusional myths with which too many in the West obscure the truth of Muslim Jew-hatred.<\/p>\n
As he did in his earlier book, Bostom provides copious documentation from primary sources \u2014 including the Koran, hadith (traditional accounts of Mohammed\u2019s deeds and sayings), sira (early biographies of Mohammed), and other Muslim texts \u2014 as well as modern scholarly commentary, including his own introduction, which summarizes his conclusions. His use of such an abundant body of scholarship makes it difficult for critics to dismiss his arguments as biased interpretations of the evidence. As he writes, \u201cFor the Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Qu\u2019ran, hadith, and sira . . . may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred on to which non-Muslim sources of Jew hatred are easily grafted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Islamic anti-Semitism begins, as do all things in Islam, with the Koran \u2014 the immutable, infallible, timeless words of Allah dictated to the Prophet \u2014 in which Jews are cursed with \u201cabasement and humiliation\u201d and are \u201cdeserving of Allah\u2019s wrath\u201d because they rejected Mohammed. Jews are further characterized as corrupt, treacherous rebels and infidels whose destiny is to be the enemy of the true believers. The debased status of Jews is communicated most starkly in the Koranic verse (5:60) referring to their transformation into \u201capes\u201d or \u201capes and swine,\u201d a motif repeated in the early Muslim biographies of Mohammed: just before he executed the adult males of the Banu Qurayza, a Medinan Jewish tribe, Mohammed called them \u201cbrothers of apes\u201d or, in another version, \u201cbrothers of monkeys and pigs.\u201d This odious phrase recurs repeatedly in Muslim writings right up to the present: in a 2002 radio broadcast, Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir called for jihad against the Jews, \u201cthose apes, pigs, and worshipers of calves.\u201d And Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, grand imam of Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious center of Muslim learning and theology, likewise has called Jews the \u201cdescendants of apes and pigs.\u201d As the Tantawi example shows, such characterizations of Jews are not limited to fringe writers or marginalized extremists, as they are with present-day Christian anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n
Further, Jew-hatred has been voiced over the centuries by the most respected theologians, jurists, and Koranic commentators, such as al-Tabari, Baydawi, and ibn Kathir. In the sixteenth century, the Moroccan sheikh al-Maghili\u2019s voluminous diatribes against the Jews of the Touat oasis \u2014 \u201cLove of the Prophet requires hatred of the Jews,\u201d he wrote \u2014 culminated in a massacre of Touat\u2019s Jews and the destruction of their synagogue. Closer to our own times, this tradition can be found in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and prolific Koranic commentator, who was the most important theorist for modern jihadists. Qutb linked his call for a fundamentalist return to Islam to the Jews, whose \u201cwicked nature . . . is full of hatred for Islam,\u201d and whose defeat would come about only at the hands of Muslims who \u201cimplement Islam completely in their lives.\u201d And modern terrorists have accompanied their murders of Israelis with similar justifications that refer to the Koran and Koranic exegetes, as in a 1968 Cairo conference that called repeatedly for forcing the Jews to return to their proper status of permanent abasement, humiliation, and wretchedness.<\/p>\n
Like the Koran, the deeds and sayings of Mohammed collected in the hadith justify Muslim hatred of Jews. Mohammed repeatedly defines the proper behavior of Muslims by contrasting it with the customs and practices of the Jews. In the hadith, Jews are treacherous, envious, and spiteful. They alter the sacred scriptures to remove references to Mohammed; cast evil spells on Muslims; poison Mohammed; and reject spitefully Mohammed\u2019s revelation and status as \u201cseal of the prophets.\u201d This alleged Jewish hostility toward Muslims justifies Muslims\u2019 obligation to subdue and humiliate Jews. A seventeenth-century Yemenite ruler, Imam al-Mahdi, desired to fulfill Mohammed\u2019s deathbed charge, as recorded in a canonical hadith, that \u201ctwo religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs,\u201d so he exiled the Jews of Yemen to the desolate plain of Tihama, destroying synagogues and desecrating Torah scrolls. Only 1,000 of the original 10,000 Jews survived the ordeal.<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n traditional biographies of Mohammed, the Jews appear as rivals to the new faith who must be conquered and displaced in order for Islam to advance. According to the eighth-century biographer ibn Ishaq, the Jews of Medina harassed Mohammed \u201cout of jealousy, envy, and malice because Allah Exalted had conferred distinction upon the Arabs by choosing him as His messenger.\u201d In point of historical fact, the Medina to which Mohammed repaired after leaving Mecca was home to three Jewish tribes whose rejection of Mohammed impeded his ambitions and whose ridicule of his exegesis of Jewish scripture aroused in him something akin to Harold Bloom\u2019s \u201canxiety of influence\u201d \u2014 a humiliating reminder of how much of the Koran was plagiarized from Jewish sacred writings. What followed was a campaign of assassinations of Jewish poets and leaders \u2014 ibn Ishaq quotes the Prophet as saying, \u201cKill any Jew that falls into your power\u201d \u2014 and raids on Jewish caravans. This escalating aggression culminated in an attack on the Banu Qaynuqa tribe, whose members were despoiled and expelled from Medina. Next was the turn of the Banu Nadir, who were also expelled, their property distributed to Muslims. The last tribe, the Banu Qurayza, held out for a while behind their fortifications; when they finally surrendered, 600 to 900 men were beheaded, their women and children were sold into slavery, and their possessions were distributed, again, to Muslims. Subsequent Islamic exegetes (Abu Yusuf and al-Mawardi, for example) pointed to the extinction of the Banu Qurayza as a model for Muslim treatment of infidels who stand in the way of Islam\u2019s ambitions by refusing the call to convert.<\/p>\nBostom links this tradition to Muslims\u2019 later treatment of Jews in Palestine, Spain, Turkey, and Iran. The doctrine of jihad is crucial to the story, for it links the goal of conquest to the protocols for treatment of Jews and Christians, who as dhimmi must live at the sufferance of their Muslim overlords, subjected to humiliating restrictions on their lives and payment of a poll tax. Contrary to the apologists and their fantasies of ecumenical tolerance in historic Islamic states, Bostom\u2019s history is filled with massacres, enslavement, dispossession, and plundering of Jews, all justified by the Koran and Mohammed\u2019s own behavior. This pattern extends to the present. Yasser Arafat, for example, appeared to the West in the guise of a secular nationalist, but his \u201ccore ideology,\u201d Bostom writes, \u201cremained . . . rooted in jihad.\u201d Thus Arafat wrote to the Ayatollah Khomeini, \u201cI pray Allah to guide your step along the paths of faith and Holy War in Iran, continuing the combat until we arrive at the walls of Jerusalem.\u201d After the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, which provided the Palestinians with a golden opportunity to realize their goal of an independent state \u2014 the presumed motive for their violence against Jews \u2014 Arafat said, \u201cThe jihad will continue.\u201d And Hamas, of course, continues the long tradition of Jew-hatred and jihad today.<\/p>\n
Bostom sees the same pattern of faith-sanctioned Jew-hatred and violence in Muslim Spain and Ottoman Turkey, both frequently extolled by apologists as oases of Islamic tolerance for Jews. Those who believe in the \u201cgolden age\u201d of Andalusia should remember the slaughter of 3,000 to 4,000 Granadan Jews in 1066, a massacre preceded by the polemics of ibn Hazm, who repeated the traditional calumnies characterizing Jews as liars, tricksters, and the \u201cfilthiest and vilest of peoples, their unbelief horrid, their ignorance abominable.\u201d So, too, the verses of Abu Ishaq, ibn Hazim\u2019s contemporary, which sounded all the traditional notes of Islamic Jew-hatred, particularly the \u201chumiliation and abasement\u201d due to \u201capes.\u201d Since this linkage of traditional rhetoric with violence continues in our own time, we must take such utterances seriously and not dismiss them as Muslim frustration with neocolonialism or Israel\u2019s so-called occupation of Palestine.<\/p>\n
Based solely on the historical evidence, Bostom\u2019s survey and 500 pages of supporting documentation sweep away what he calls the \u201cfalse pillars\u201d of current apologies for Muslim anti-Semitism: that Muslim hostility to Jews is not grounded in Islamic theology, and that Jews living in historic Muslim societies were not subject to subservience and persecution. For Westerners doubtful of their own culture\u2019s rectitude and unsure about what to believe, it might be pretty to think that Islam is just another Abrahamic path to God that shares the values of Christianity and Judaism. But the facts that Bostom collects tell another tale, one we should heed if we are to prevail against jihadist terror.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\u00a92008 Bruce Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Andrew Bostom documents the long history of Muslim anti-Semitism. by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal A review of\u00a0The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, by Andrew G. Bostom (Prometheus Books, 766 pp.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87,22,740],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Rc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":342,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism\/","url_meta":{"origin":3298,"position":0},"title":"The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9\/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama\u2019s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5217,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-forbidden-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":3298,"position":1},"title":"The Forbidden History","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 9, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"A Review of\u00a0The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims\u00a0edited by Andrew G. Bostom. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers Four years after 9\/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies and government bureaucracies. Yet the larger\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5233,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/jihad-is-knocking-another-episode-in-the-war-between-christendom-and-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":3298,"position":2},"title":"Jihad Is Knocking: Another Episode in the War between Christendom and Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 9, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The slaughter in London is another grisly wake-up call that likely will go as unheeded as earlier ones. Already the standard narrative is being trotted out: evildoers created by what the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0predictably called the \u201croot causes of terrorism\u201d: autocracy, or economic stagnation, or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":176,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/democracy-promotion-or-islamist-promotion\/","url_meta":{"origin":3298,"position":3},"title":"Democracy Promotion or Islamist Promotion?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thronton Frontpage Magazine The hope that democracy would bloom in Egypt following our collusion in removing Hosni Mubarak looks more and more delusional every day. Even our foreign policy wishful thinkers are no longer peddling the canard that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood is \u201csecular\u201d and \u201cmoderate,\u201d thus proving\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5458,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/by-the-sword-ibrahim-and-spencer-unveil-the-truth-of-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":3298,"position":4},"title":"By the Sword: Ibrahim and Spencer Unveil the Truth of Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The\u00a0New York Times\u2019s Thomas Friedman is right on the mark most of the time in his analysis of the dysfunctions troubling the Muslim world and of our own failures in confronting them. Particularly important is his frequent criticism of our feckless disregard of our\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5435,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fighting-at-a-disadvantage\/","url_meta":{"origin":3298,"position":5},"title":"Fighting at a Disadvantage","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Bad cultural habits plague the West in the War on Terror by Bruce S. Thornton City Journal Six years after the terrorist attacks of 9\/11, we continue to hunt for those whose blunders let them happen. The latest addition to earlier investigations such as\u00a0The 9\/11 Commission Report\u00a0and television\u2019s\u00a0Path to 9\/11\u00a0is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3299,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298\/revisions\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}