What do you think?
Rate this book
In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands
"In this epic examination, [a] celebrated historian explores the evolution of Judaism and Islam through a lens of Middle Eastern stability." (Publishers Weekly)
The relationship between Jews and Muslims has been a flashpoint that affects stability in the Middle East with global consequences. In this eloquent book, Martin Gilbert presents a fascinating account of the hope and fear that have characterized these two peoples through the 1,400 years of their intertwined history.
Harking back to the Biblical story of Ishmael and Isaac, Gilbert takes the reader from the origins of the fraught relationship--the refusal of Medina's Jews to accept Mohammed as a prophet--through the ages of the Crusader reconquest of the Holy Land and the great Muslim sultanates to the present day. He explores the impact of Zionism in the early twentieth century, the clash of nationalisms during the Second World War, the mass expulsions and exodus of 800,000 Jews from Muslim lands following the birth of Israel, the Six-Day War, and the political sensitivities of the current Middle East.
Ishmael's House sheds light on a time of prosperity and opportunity for Jews in Muslim lands stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, with many instances of Muslim openness, support, and courage. Drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources, Gilbert uses archived material, poems, letters, memoirs, and personal testimony to uncover the human voice of this centuries-old conflict. Ultimately Gilbert's moving account of mutual tolerance between Muslims and Jews provides a perspective on current events and a template for the future.
"A reliable source and a pleasure to read." --Herman Wouk, Pulitzer prize winning author of The Caine Mutiny
"Moving and important." --The Independent
The relationship between Jews and Muslims has been a flashpoint that affects stability in the Middle East with global consequences. In this eloquent book, Martin Gilbert presents a fascinating account of the hope and fear that have characterized these two peoples through the 1,400 years of their intertwined history.
Harking back to the Biblical story of Ishmael and Isaac, Gilbert takes the reader from the origins of the fraught relationship--the refusal of Medina's Jews to accept Mohammed as a prophet--through the ages of the Crusader reconquest of the Holy Land and the great Muslim sultanates to the present day. He explores the impact of Zionism in the early twentieth century, the clash of nationalisms during the Second World War, the mass expulsions and exodus of 800,000 Jews from Muslim lands following the birth of Israel, the Six-Day War, and the political sensitivities of the current Middle East.
Ishmael's House sheds light on a time of prosperity and opportunity for Jews in Muslim lands stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, with many instances of Muslim openness, support, and courage. Drawing on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources, Gilbert uses archived material, poems, letters, memoirs, and personal testimony to uncover the human voice of this centuries-old conflict. Ultimately Gilbert's moving account of mutual tolerance between Muslims and Jews provides a perspective on current events and a template for the future.
"A reliable source and a pleasure to read." --Herman Wouk, Pulitzer prize winning author of The Caine Mutiny
"Moving and important." --The Independent
569 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
124 people are currently reading
670 people want to read
About the author
Martin Gilbert
249 books417 followersThe official biographer of Winston Churchill and a leading historian on the Twentieth Century, Sir Martin Gilbert was a scholar and an historian who, though his 88 books, has shown there is such a thing as “true history”
Born in London in 1936, Martin Gilbert was educated at Highgate School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. He was a Research Scholar at St Anthony's College, and became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1962, and an Honorary Fellow in 1994. After working as a researcher for Randolph Churchill, Gilbert was chosen to take over the writing of the Churchill biography upon Randolph's death in 1968, writing six of the eight volumes of biography and editing twelve volumes of documents. In addition, Gilbert has written pioneering and classic works on the First and Second World Wars, the Twentieth Century, the Holocaust, and Jewish history.
Gilbert drove every aspect of his books, from finding archives to corresponding with eyewitnesses and participants that gave his work veracity and meaning, to finding and choosing illustrations, drawing maps that mention each place in the text, and compiling the indexes. He travelled widely lecturing and researching, advised political figures and filmmakers, and gave a voice and a name “to those who fought and those who fell.”
https://twitter.com/sirmartin36
https://www.facebook.com/sirmartingil...
Born in London in 1936, Martin Gilbert was educated at Highgate School, and Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with First Class Honours. He was a Research Scholar at St Anthony's College, and became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1962, and an Honorary Fellow in 1994. After working as a researcher for Randolph Churchill, Gilbert was chosen to take over the writing of the Churchill biography upon Randolph's death in 1968, writing six of the eight volumes of biography and editing twelve volumes of documents. In addition, Gilbert has written pioneering and classic works on the First and Second World Wars, the Twentieth Century, the Holocaust, and Jewish history.
Gilbert drove every aspect of his books, from finding archives to corresponding with eyewitnesses and participants that gave his work veracity and meaning, to finding and choosing illustrations, drawing maps that mention each place in the text, and compiling the indexes. He travelled widely lecturing and researching, advised political figures and filmmakers, and gave a voice and a name “to those who fought and those who fell.”
https://twitter.com/sirmartin36
https://www.facebook.com/sirmartingil...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
August 24, 2022
A fairly comprehensive volume, highly nuanced and an absorbing read.
One of the world's most prolific modern historians , Churchill'' official biographer and a foremost authority on Jewish history, the Holocaust and the roots of the Middle East conflict , Martin Gilbert takes us from the period of the millenium before the rise of Mohammed and Islam to the present day.
In Chapter 2, The Prophet Mohammed and the Jews he details Mohammed's emulation in some respects of the Jewish faith when creating Islam to his rage at the Jews for rejecting him as the final prophet and his massacre and expulsion of Jews in the Arabian peninsular , after signing agreements with them which he intended to break under the Muslim practise of Taqiya, strategic deceit permitted and actually mandatory in the Islamic faith.
The tribes of Qurayza and the Jews of Khaibar were destroyed and the Jews expelled from the city of Medina which had been theirs for centuries
Down the centuries different Muslim Empires, kingdoms and regimes treated the Jews in their realms in a variety of ways ranging from toleration and even favour (providing they strictly kept to their dhimmni status) to cruel persecution and massacres.
But it is necessary to stress that at all times the future and conditions of the Jews was dependent on the will of the Muslim leaders. They were always expected to accept their subordination as dhimmi community to their Muslim overlords even when they were prosperous and influential.
After an age of tolerance and prosperity for the Jews in the 1000s CE , the invasion of the Almoravids, a puritan Muslim sect from Morocco, meant great persecution for the Jews of Spain, mass forced conversions and massacres and pogroms if they refused.
In Persia, problems particularly became dire for the Jews at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.
The first Safavid ruler of Persia, Shah Ismail I established Shiite Islam as the state religion, giving the clerical elite almost unlimited control and influence over all aspects of public life.
The clerics emphasised the ritual uncleanliness of dhimnis and Jews in particular, making this the cornerstone of Muslim relations with non Muslims
Dhimnis were barred from building any structure higher than a Muslims, could not ride horses but only donkeys without saddles, could not build any new houses of worship or repair existing ones and were forbidden from making any noises that would attract attention to their worship or burial of their dead.
They had to wear distinctive clothes to identify them, Jews had to wear yellow, and the mandatory yellow patch which was forced upon the Jews by the Nazis had it's origins in Baghdad, and not in Medieval Europe as commonly believed.
The Nineteenth century saw an increase in persecution and atrocities against Jews in the Ottoman Empire including the Levant, in Jerusalem, a traveller recounted that 'Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew'.
In his 1854 article in the New York Daily Tribune Karl Marx wrote a hard hitting report of how cruelly Jews were treated in in Jerusalem.
Marx wrote that 'nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem. They lived 'in the most filthy quarter of the town between the Zion and the Moriah, where the synagogues are situated, the constant object of Mohammedan oppression and intolerance'. While Jews formed a plurality in Jerusalem Marx witnessed how Muslims were the masters in every respect.
Jews were taught that they were the Muslim;s dogs. Zionism meant the total emancipation of Jews and their self-determination over a small country of their own, this meant Jews were no longer the dogs of Muslims and this could not be tolerated.
The roots of Islamic hostility to Israel lie in two areas
The resentment of the Jews becoming equals that the Jewish State of Israel meant as the Jews had always been a despised and subservient minority, The idea of a state-no matter how small-in the heart of Arab Islam, ruled by Jews, was too much to bear, and the insult was compounded by the defeats the lowly-regarded Jews had dealt the Arabs after the many Arab attacks on Israel and the Levantine Jews before that.
The 1930's as Gilbert recounts in Chapter 11 saw a great deterioration in the conditions of Jews in the Middle East, with the spread of Nazi radio propaganda from Germany.
Gilbert includes hundreds of eyewitness accounts by Jews who suffered injury and insult at this time, through all the Muslim countries he includes in his study.
The pogroms carried out against Jews by Arabs in the British Palestine Mandate, of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939, coincided as it were, with increasing intolerance of the Jews in the newly independent Arab states of Egypt and Iraq.
As Gilbert states 'From a Muslim perspective...Zionism...which was seen in 1933 as a an unacceptable challenge to Arab national aspirations, and to the deep-seated Islamic perception of the Jew as an infidel '
To appease Arab aggression with the Nazi backed Arab Revolt of the 1930s the British colonial government issued the 1939 White Paper which severely restricted the Jewish immigration to Palestine so there could be no Jewish majority.
Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 23 May 1939 'So far from being persecuted , the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are being asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, an agitation, which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed with Nazi and Fascist propaganda'.
Gilbert points out that Churchill was completely correct. As he points out with incontrovertibly researched evidence and documentation and census data of the time 'Between 1922 and 1939 more Arabs had entered Palestine than Jews. There were Muslim immigrants including many illegals from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as from Transjordan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia...In 1948 many of these Arab immigrants were to be included in the statistics of 'Palestinian' Arab refugees.
With the Second World War anti-Jewish pogroms broke out across North Africa and the Middle East. A Jewish survivor of three days of anti-Jewish riots in the Tunisian city of Gabes recounts the tragic fate of a Jewish women , when a group of Arabs broke into her home. "They grabbed a pot of boiling soup, poured it over her, tortured her in her house, stoned her and then killed her"
The Vichy French in North Africa and the Germans when they occupied Tunisia set up concentration camps there and deported others, to death camps in Europe. They were enthusiastically cheered on and assisted by the local Muslim populations.
In Iraq hundreds of Jews were massacred by pro-Nazi mobs in Baghdad in the June 1941 Farhud.
The Mufti Haj amin al Husseini (who had organized the 1929 and 1930s pogroms against Jews in the Holy Land), fled Iraq in 1941 and first went to Iran, then to Italy and then to Berlin where he
offered his help to Hitler in person.
He then successfully pressed Hitler not to allow the transit of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine (they were diverted to Auschwitz instead where they were murdered) and was active in the formation of a Bosnian Muslim SS division
But the crux of the book involves the fate of the 900 000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands who fled Arab pogroms with nothing more than the clothes on their back and their battles to gain the same recognition as the 700 000 Arab refugees who left Palestine in 1948.
These are known as the forgotten refugees as their plight is seldom highlighted. Most of them, settled in Israel and are the ancestors of many Israelis, this needs to be highlighted to prove the lie of the idea that Israelis are transplanted Europeans who displaced the 'indigenous Palestinians'
As the Jewish Virtual Library recounts 'Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime. In Syria, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo and the government froze all Jewish bank accounts. In Egypt, bombs were detonated in the Jewish quarter, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were swiftly instituted and in Yemen, bloody pogroms led to the death of nearly 100 Jews. '
The author then go's on to recount the persecution of Jews in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Yemen and after the great benefactor, friend of Israel, and protector of the Jews Shah Reza Pahlavi (May his Blessed Soul Rest in Peace) was overthrown by the bloody Islamic Revolution in 1979, in Iran.
This includes sham trials and executions of Jews accused of Zionism' and espionage.
A very important and timely work which examines a subject that has not received enough study.
Merged review:
A fairly comprehensive volume, highly nuanced and an absorbing read.
One of the world's most prolific modern historians , Churchill's official biographer and a foremost authority on Jewish history, the Holocaust and the roots of the Middle East conflict , Martin Gilbert takes us from the period of the millenium before the rise of Mohammed and Islam to the present day.
In Chapter 2, The Prophet Mohammed and the Jews he details Mohammed's emulation in some respects of the Jewish faith when creating Islam to his rage at the Jews for rejecting him as the final prophet and his massacre and expulsion of Jews in the Arabian peninsular , after signing agreements with them which he intended to break under the Muslim practice of Taqiya, strategic deceit permitted and actually mandatory in the Islamic faith.
The tribes of Qurayza and the Jews of Khaibar were destroyed and the Jews expelled from the city of Medina which had been theirs for centuries
Down the centuries different Muslim Empires, kingdoms and regimes treated the Jews in their realms in a variety of ways ranging from toleration and even favour (providing they strictly kept to their dhimmni status) to cruel persecution and massacres.
But it is necessary to stress that at all times the future and conditions of the Jews was dependent on the will of the Muslim leaders. They were always expected to accept their subordination as dhimmi community to their Muslim overlords even when they were prosperous and influential.
After an age of tolerance and prosperity for the Jews in the 1000s CE , the invasion of the Almoravids, a puritan Muslim sect from Morocco, meant great persecution for the Jews of Spain, mass forced conversions and massacres and pogroms if they refused.
In Persia, problems particularly became dire for the Jews at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.
The first Safavid ruler of Persia, Shah Ismail I established Shiite Islam as the state religion, giving the clerical elite almost unlimited control and influence over all aspects of public life.
The clerics emphasized the ritual uncleanliness of dhimnis and Jews in particular, making this the cornerstone of Muslim relations with non Muslims
Dhimnis were barred from building any structure higher than a Muslims, could not ride horses but only donkeys without saddles, could not build any new houses of worship or repair existing ones and were forbidden from making any noises that would attract attention to their worship or burial of their dead.
They had to wear distinctive clothes to identify them, Jews had to wear yellow, and the mandatory yellow patch which was forced upon the Jews by the Nazis had it's origins in Baghdad, and not in Medieval Europe as commonly believed.
The Nineteenth century saw an increase in persecution and atrocities against Jews in the Ottoman Empire including the Levant, in Jerusalem, a traveler recounted that 'Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew'.
In his 1854 article in the New York Daily Tribune Karl Marx wrote a hard hitting report of how cruelly Jews were treated in in Jerusalem.
Marx wrote that 'nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem. They lived 'in the most filthy quarter of the town between the Zion and the Moriah, where the synagogues are situated, the constant object of Mohammedan oppression and intolerance'. While Jews formed a plurality in Jerusalem Marx witnessed how Muslims were the masters in every respect.
Jews were taught that they were the Muslim's dogs. Zionism meant the total emancipation of Jews and their self-determination over a small country of their own, this meant Jews were no longer the dogs of Muslims and this could not be tolerated.
The roots of Islamic hostility to Israel lie in two areas
The resentment of the Jews becoming equals that the Jewish State of Israel meant as the Jews had always been a despised and subservient minority, The idea of a state-no matter how small-in the heart of Arab Islam, ruled by Jews, was too much to bear, and the insult was compounded by the defeats the lowly-regarded Jews had dealt the Arabs after the many Arab attacks on Israel and the Levantine Jews before that.
The 1930's as Gilbert recounts in Chapter 11 saw a great deterioration in the conditions of Jews in the Middle East, with the spread of Nazi radio propaganda from Germany.
Gilbert includes hundreds of eyewitness accounts by Jews who suffered injury and insult at this time, through all the Muslim countries he includes in his study.
The pogroms carried out against Jews by Arabs in the British Palestine Mandate, of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939, coincided as it were, with increasing intolerance of the Jews in the newly independent Arab states of Egypt and Iraq.
As Gilbert states 'From a Muslim perspective...Zionism...which was seen in 1933 as a an unacceptable challenge to Arab national aspirations, and to the deep-seated Islamic perception of the Jew as an infidel '
To appease Arab aggression with the Nazi backed Arab Revolt of the 1930s the British colonial government issued the 1939 White Paper which severely restricted the Jewish immigration to Palestine so there could be no Jewish majority.
Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 23 May 1939 'So far from being persecuted , the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are being asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, an agitation, which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed with Nazi and Fascist propaganda'.
Gilbert points out that Churchill was completely correct. As he points out with incontrovertibly researched evidence and documentation and census data of the time 'Between 1922 and 1939 more Arabs had entered Palestine than Jews. There were Muslim immigrants including many illegals from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as from Transjordan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia...In 1948 many of these Arab immigrants were to be included in the statistics of 'Palestinian' Arab refugees.
With the Second World War anti-Jewish pogroms broke out across North Africa and the Middle East. A Jewish survivor of three days of anti-Jewish riots in the Tunisian city of Gabes recounts the tragic fate of a Jewish women , when a group of Arabs broke into her home. "They grabbed a pot of boiling soup, poured it over her, tortured her in her house, stoned her and then killed her"
The Vichy French in North Africa and the Germans when they occupied Tunisia set up concentration camps there and deported others, to death camps in Europe. They were enthusiastically cheered on and assisted by the local Muslim populations.
In Iraq hundreds of Jews were massacred by pro-Nazi mobs in Baghdad in the June 1941 Farhud.
The Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini (who had organized the 1929 and 1930s pogroms against Jews in the Holy Land), fled Iraq in 1941 and first went to Iran, then to Italy and then to Berlin where he
offered his help to Hitler in person.
He then successfully pressed Hitler not to allow the transit of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine (they were diverted to Auschwitz instead where they were murdered) and was active in the formation of a Bosnian Muslim SS division
But the crux of the book involves the fate of the 900 000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands who fled Arab pogroms with nothing more than the clothes on their back and their battles to gain the same recognition as the 700 000 Arab refugees who left Palestine in 1948.
These are known as the forgotten refugees as their plight is seldom highlighted.Most of them, settled in Israel and are the ancestors of many Israelis, this needs to be highlighted to prove the lie of the idea that Israelis are transplanted Europeans who displaced the 'indigenous Palestinians'
As the Jewish Virtual Library recounts 'Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime. In Syria, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo and the government froze all Jewish bank accounts. In Egypt, bombs were detonated in the Jewish quarter, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were swiftly instituted and in Yemen, bloody pogroms led to the death of nearly 100 Jews. '
The author then goes on to recount the persecution of Jews in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Yemen and after the great benefactor, friend of Israel, and protector of the Jews Shah Reza Pahlavi (May His Blessed Soul Rest in Peace) was overthrown by the bloody Islamic Revolution in 1979, in Iran.
This includes sham trials and executions of Jews accused of 'Zionism' and espionage.
.
One of the world's most prolific modern historians , Churchill'' official biographer and a foremost authority on Jewish history, the Holocaust and the roots of the Middle East conflict , Martin Gilbert takes us from the period of the millenium before the rise of Mohammed and Islam to the present day.
In Chapter 2, The Prophet Mohammed and the Jews he details Mohammed's emulation in some respects of the Jewish faith when creating Islam to his rage at the Jews for rejecting him as the final prophet and his massacre and expulsion of Jews in the Arabian peninsular , after signing agreements with them which he intended to break under the Muslim practise of Taqiya, strategic deceit permitted and actually mandatory in the Islamic faith.
The tribes of Qurayza and the Jews of Khaibar were destroyed and the Jews expelled from the city of Medina which had been theirs for centuries
Down the centuries different Muslim Empires, kingdoms and regimes treated the Jews in their realms in a variety of ways ranging from toleration and even favour (providing they strictly kept to their dhimmni status) to cruel persecution and massacres.
But it is necessary to stress that at all times the future and conditions of the Jews was dependent on the will of the Muslim leaders. They were always expected to accept their subordination as dhimmi community to their Muslim overlords even when they were prosperous and influential.
After an age of tolerance and prosperity for the Jews in the 1000s CE , the invasion of the Almoravids, a puritan Muslim sect from Morocco, meant great persecution for the Jews of Spain, mass forced conversions and massacres and pogroms if they refused.
In Persia, problems particularly became dire for the Jews at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.
The first Safavid ruler of Persia, Shah Ismail I established Shiite Islam as the state religion, giving the clerical elite almost unlimited control and influence over all aspects of public life.
The clerics emphasised the ritual uncleanliness of dhimnis and Jews in particular, making this the cornerstone of Muslim relations with non Muslims
Dhimnis were barred from building any structure higher than a Muslims, could not ride horses but only donkeys without saddles, could not build any new houses of worship or repair existing ones and were forbidden from making any noises that would attract attention to their worship or burial of their dead.
They had to wear distinctive clothes to identify them, Jews had to wear yellow, and the mandatory yellow patch which was forced upon the Jews by the Nazis had it's origins in Baghdad, and not in Medieval Europe as commonly believed.
The Nineteenth century saw an increase in persecution and atrocities against Jews in the Ottoman Empire including the Levant, in Jerusalem, a traveller recounted that 'Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew'.
In his 1854 article in the New York Daily Tribune Karl Marx wrote a hard hitting report of how cruelly Jews were treated in in Jerusalem.
Marx wrote that 'nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem. They lived 'in the most filthy quarter of the town between the Zion and the Moriah, where the synagogues are situated, the constant object of Mohammedan oppression and intolerance'. While Jews formed a plurality in Jerusalem Marx witnessed how Muslims were the masters in every respect.
Jews were taught that they were the Muslim;s dogs. Zionism meant the total emancipation of Jews and their self-determination over a small country of their own, this meant Jews were no longer the dogs of Muslims and this could not be tolerated.
The roots of Islamic hostility to Israel lie in two areas
The resentment of the Jews becoming equals that the Jewish State of Israel meant as the Jews had always been a despised and subservient minority, The idea of a state-no matter how small-in the heart of Arab Islam, ruled by Jews, was too much to bear, and the insult was compounded by the defeats the lowly-regarded Jews had dealt the Arabs after the many Arab attacks on Israel and the Levantine Jews before that.
The 1930's as Gilbert recounts in Chapter 11 saw a great deterioration in the conditions of Jews in the Middle East, with the spread of Nazi radio propaganda from Germany.
Gilbert includes hundreds of eyewitness accounts by Jews who suffered injury and insult at this time, through all the Muslim countries he includes in his study.
The pogroms carried out against Jews by Arabs in the British Palestine Mandate, of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939, coincided as it were, with increasing intolerance of the Jews in the newly independent Arab states of Egypt and Iraq.
As Gilbert states 'From a Muslim perspective...Zionism...which was seen in 1933 as a an unacceptable challenge to Arab national aspirations, and to the deep-seated Islamic perception of the Jew as an infidel '
To appease Arab aggression with the Nazi backed Arab Revolt of the 1930s the British colonial government issued the 1939 White Paper which severely restricted the Jewish immigration to Palestine so there could be no Jewish majority.
Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 23 May 1939 'So far from being persecuted , the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are being asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, an agitation, which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed with Nazi and Fascist propaganda'.
Gilbert points out that Churchill was completely correct. As he points out with incontrovertibly researched evidence and documentation and census data of the time 'Between 1922 and 1939 more Arabs had entered Palestine than Jews. There were Muslim immigrants including many illegals from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as from Transjordan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia...In 1948 many of these Arab immigrants were to be included in the statistics of 'Palestinian' Arab refugees.
With the Second World War anti-Jewish pogroms broke out across North Africa and the Middle East. A Jewish survivor of three days of anti-Jewish riots in the Tunisian city of Gabes recounts the tragic fate of a Jewish women , when a group of Arabs broke into her home. "They grabbed a pot of boiling soup, poured it over her, tortured her in her house, stoned her and then killed her"
The Vichy French in North Africa and the Germans when they occupied Tunisia set up concentration camps there and deported others, to death camps in Europe. They were enthusiastically cheered on and assisted by the local Muslim populations.
In Iraq hundreds of Jews were massacred by pro-Nazi mobs in Baghdad in the June 1941 Farhud.
The Mufti Haj amin al Husseini (who had organized the 1929 and 1930s pogroms against Jews in the Holy Land), fled Iraq in 1941 and first went to Iran, then to Italy and then to Berlin where he
offered his help to Hitler in person.
He then successfully pressed Hitler not to allow the transit of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine (they were diverted to Auschwitz instead where they were murdered) and was active in the formation of a Bosnian Muslim SS division
But the crux of the book involves the fate of the 900 000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands who fled Arab pogroms with nothing more than the clothes on their back and their battles to gain the same recognition as the 700 000 Arab refugees who left Palestine in 1948.
These are known as the forgotten refugees as their plight is seldom highlighted. Most of them, settled in Israel and are the ancestors of many Israelis, this needs to be highlighted to prove the lie of the idea that Israelis are transplanted Europeans who displaced the 'indigenous Palestinians'
As the Jewish Virtual Library recounts 'Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime. In Syria, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo and the government froze all Jewish bank accounts. In Egypt, bombs were detonated in the Jewish quarter, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were swiftly instituted and in Yemen, bloody pogroms led to the death of nearly 100 Jews. '
The author then go's on to recount the persecution of Jews in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Yemen and after the great benefactor, friend of Israel, and protector of the Jews Shah Reza Pahlavi (May his Blessed Soul Rest in Peace) was overthrown by the bloody Islamic Revolution in 1979, in Iran.
This includes sham trials and executions of Jews accused of Zionism' and espionage.
A very important and timely work which examines a subject that has not received enough study.
Merged review:
A fairly comprehensive volume, highly nuanced and an absorbing read.
One of the world's most prolific modern historians , Churchill's official biographer and a foremost authority on Jewish history, the Holocaust and the roots of the Middle East conflict , Martin Gilbert takes us from the period of the millenium before the rise of Mohammed and Islam to the present day.
In Chapter 2, The Prophet Mohammed and the Jews he details Mohammed's emulation in some respects of the Jewish faith when creating Islam to his rage at the Jews for rejecting him as the final prophet and his massacre and expulsion of Jews in the Arabian peninsular , after signing agreements with them which he intended to break under the Muslim practice of Taqiya, strategic deceit permitted and actually mandatory in the Islamic faith.
The tribes of Qurayza and the Jews of Khaibar were destroyed and the Jews expelled from the city of Medina which had been theirs for centuries
Down the centuries different Muslim Empires, kingdoms and regimes treated the Jews in their realms in a variety of ways ranging from toleration and even favour (providing they strictly kept to their dhimmni status) to cruel persecution and massacres.
But it is necessary to stress that at all times the future and conditions of the Jews was dependent on the will of the Muslim leaders. They were always expected to accept their subordination as dhimmi community to their Muslim overlords even when they were prosperous and influential.
After an age of tolerance and prosperity for the Jews in the 1000s CE , the invasion of the Almoravids, a puritan Muslim sect from Morocco, meant great persecution for the Jews of Spain, mass forced conversions and massacres and pogroms if they refused.
In Persia, problems particularly became dire for the Jews at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.
The first Safavid ruler of Persia, Shah Ismail I established Shiite Islam as the state religion, giving the clerical elite almost unlimited control and influence over all aspects of public life.
The clerics emphasized the ritual uncleanliness of dhimnis and Jews in particular, making this the cornerstone of Muslim relations with non Muslims
Dhimnis were barred from building any structure higher than a Muslims, could not ride horses but only donkeys without saddles, could not build any new houses of worship or repair existing ones and were forbidden from making any noises that would attract attention to their worship or burial of their dead.
They had to wear distinctive clothes to identify them, Jews had to wear yellow, and the mandatory yellow patch which was forced upon the Jews by the Nazis had it's origins in Baghdad, and not in Medieval Europe as commonly believed.
The Nineteenth century saw an increase in persecution and atrocities against Jews in the Ottoman Empire including the Levant, in Jerusalem, a traveler recounted that 'Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew'.
In his 1854 article in the New York Daily Tribune Karl Marx wrote a hard hitting report of how cruelly Jews were treated in in Jerusalem.
Marx wrote that 'nothing equals the misery and the suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem. They lived 'in the most filthy quarter of the town between the Zion and the Moriah, where the synagogues are situated, the constant object of Mohammedan oppression and intolerance'. While Jews formed a plurality in Jerusalem Marx witnessed how Muslims were the masters in every respect.
Jews were taught that they were the Muslim's dogs. Zionism meant the total emancipation of Jews and their self-determination over a small country of their own, this meant Jews were no longer the dogs of Muslims and this could not be tolerated.
The roots of Islamic hostility to Israel lie in two areas
The resentment of the Jews becoming equals that the Jewish State of Israel meant as the Jews had always been a despised and subservient minority, The idea of a state-no matter how small-in the heart of Arab Islam, ruled by Jews, was too much to bear, and the insult was compounded by the defeats the lowly-regarded Jews had dealt the Arabs after the many Arab attacks on Israel and the Levantine Jews before that.
The 1930's as Gilbert recounts in Chapter 11 saw a great deterioration in the conditions of Jews in the Middle East, with the spread of Nazi radio propaganda from Germany.
Gilbert includes hundreds of eyewitness accounts by Jews who suffered injury and insult at this time, through all the Muslim countries he includes in his study.
The pogroms carried out against Jews by Arabs in the British Palestine Mandate, of 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-1939, coincided as it were, with increasing intolerance of the Jews in the newly independent Arab states of Egypt and Iraq.
As Gilbert states 'From a Muslim perspective...Zionism...which was seen in 1933 as a an unacceptable challenge to Arab national aspirations, and to the deep-seated Islamic perception of the Jew as an infidel '
To appease Arab aggression with the Nazi backed Arab Revolt of the 1930s the British colonial government issued the 1939 White Paper which severely restricted the Jewish immigration to Palestine so there could be no Jewish majority.
Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 23 May 1939 'So far from being persecuted , the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are being asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, an agitation, which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed with Nazi and Fascist propaganda'.
Gilbert points out that Churchill was completely correct. As he points out with incontrovertibly researched evidence and documentation and census data of the time 'Between 1922 and 1939 more Arabs had entered Palestine than Jews. There were Muslim immigrants including many illegals from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as from Transjordan, Sudan and Saudi Arabia...In 1948 many of these Arab immigrants were to be included in the statistics of 'Palestinian' Arab refugees.
With the Second World War anti-Jewish pogroms broke out across North Africa and the Middle East. A Jewish survivor of three days of anti-Jewish riots in the Tunisian city of Gabes recounts the tragic fate of a Jewish women , when a group of Arabs broke into her home. "They grabbed a pot of boiling soup, poured it over her, tortured her in her house, stoned her and then killed her"
The Vichy French in North Africa and the Germans when they occupied Tunisia set up concentration camps there and deported others, to death camps in Europe. They were enthusiastically cheered on and assisted by the local Muslim populations.
In Iraq hundreds of Jews were massacred by pro-Nazi mobs in Baghdad in the June 1941 Farhud.
The Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini (who had organized the 1929 and 1930s pogroms against Jews in the Holy Land), fled Iraq in 1941 and first went to Iran, then to Italy and then to Berlin where he
offered his help to Hitler in person.
He then successfully pressed Hitler not to allow the transit of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine (they were diverted to Auschwitz instead where they were murdered) and was active in the formation of a Bosnian Muslim SS division
But the crux of the book involves the fate of the 900 000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands who fled Arab pogroms with nothing more than the clothes on their back and their battles to gain the same recognition as the 700 000 Arab refugees who left Palestine in 1948.
These are known as the forgotten refugees as their plight is seldom highlighted.Most of them, settled in Israel and are the ancestors of many Israelis, this needs to be highlighted to prove the lie of the idea that Israelis are transplanted Europeans who displaced the 'indigenous Palestinians'
As the Jewish Virtual Library recounts 'Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime. In Syria, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo and the government froze all Jewish bank accounts. In Egypt, bombs were detonated in the Jewish quarter, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were swiftly instituted and in Yemen, bloody pogroms led to the death of nearly 100 Jews. '
The author then goes on to recount the persecution of Jews in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Yemen and after the great benefactor, friend of Israel, and protector of the Jews Shah Reza Pahlavi (May His Blessed Soul Rest in Peace) was overthrown by the bloody Islamic Revolution in 1979, in Iran.
This includes sham trials and executions of Jews accused of 'Zionism' and espionage.
.
April 22, 2011
It is easy to get lost in this book since Gilbert is dealing with so many countries/groups and over such a long expanse of time. But it is almost consistently true that Jews in Muslim lands led uncertain lives--they may have sometimes lived good lives, suffering no severe persecution, but that could end at any time and often due to events that they had no control over. Most of the persecution was not institutional (except for the common special taxes the Jews paid) but rather that of mob rule. But too often the government and other institutions in power made no effort to prevent or stop these attacks.
One of the bitterest ironies is that the founding of Israel led to severe "punishment" of Jews that often had no personal interest in moving to Israel. The result--hundreds of thousands of Jews from these countries fled to Israel to escape persecution--the very event that the attackers hoped to prevent. I had not known how high a percentage of post-World War II refugees to Israel were not victims of the Nazi Holocaust but victims of the many small holocausts that took place in Muslim countries.
One of the bitterest ironies is that the founding of Israel led to severe "punishment" of Jews that often had no personal interest in moving to Israel. The result--hundreds of thousands of Jews from these countries fled to Israel to escape persecution--the very event that the attackers hoped to prevent. I had not known how high a percentage of post-World War II refugees to Israel were not victims of the Nazi Holocaust but victims of the many small holocausts that took place in Muslim countries.
February 27, 2024
After the horrific terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas and the inevitable Israeli reaction, we are often subjugated to a variety of lies, disinformation, and what is essentially merely anti-semitism masked as "policy" or political beliefs. For my part, as an atheist I have no use for the idiocy of Judaism as a religion, but I feel exactly the same for ALL religions from Christianity to Islam to Hinduism. So I do NOT have a religious bias other than disliking all religions in their premise.
This book was fascinating in that it is a detailed history of the lives of Jews in Islamic lands. While very well aware of the discrimination, death, hatred, and genocide of Jews in Western lands controlled by Christians, we face an even worse record of these foul deeds in the Islamic lands.
First, let us point out that the Jews had existed in the lands that became Islamic for a thousand years. Let that sink in. Especially to those who hold close to Leftist political beliefs- the invader, the oppressor, and the violent murderer were in this case a rabid, desert religion, concocted in 650 CE. For reference, the Judaism we are familiar with, starting with the Second Temple and Abraham stories, has existed since approximately 600 BCE. So a thousand years before. So what was life like for 1,400 years under Islamic rule? It can be best summed up by the words of the Jewish scholar Maimonides in the 1100's : "No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None have been able to reduce as they have."
That nutshell will be repeated time and again as the status of Jews as "dhimmi" (meaning a non-Muslim residing in Muslim lands) has resulted in them, in EVERY Islamic state, THROUGHOUT history for 1,400 years has been one of hate, discrimination, casual violence, rape, murder and even attempts at genocide.
A this excellent history goes through the various times and various types of Islamics (Arabs, Caliphates, the Ottomans, etc) and their terrible treatment if not downright oppression and murder at the hands of Islam. The stories of the abuses will leave you shocked and should make you realize that the Nazi's were not the only psychotic anti-semites. In fact that Nazis got along well enough with the Arabs due to their mutual anti-semitism wherein the Arabs became the useful idiots to the Nazi cause. In modern times the useful idiots carrying out the task of Jewish genocide reside in the ranks of the political Left (which is still very anti-Semitic) who act as the useful idiots parroting Islamic nations hyperbole and hatred.
The story does get interesting, when in the aftermath of WWII, wherein a Jewish people all across the globe, facing millennia of oppression from Western and Islamic lands, and having barely survived the Holocaust- were given the right to move back to their homeland of Judea, which became Israel.
Immediately they were attacked by a coalition of rabid Palestinians and other Arab nations. They got their ass kicked soundly and Israel grew. Over the decades that followed it was the same cycle-a bunch of Arab states and the rabid Palestinians attack, get their asses handed to them and Israel keeps growing. These astoundingly incompetent Islamic armies essentially GREW the Israeli state with each attack. The Palestinians, despised by all their Muslim neighbors, are the useful terrorist idiots that they use to harry the Jews, which only results in more violence, death, and inevitable defeat. Rinse and repeat. This is evident in the events of the Hamas terror attack. The actions of the individual terrorists that they recorded and the reactions of ordinary Muslim people dancing in joy are precisely why I do not oppose any Israeli action. It is also why a Two-State solution is a fallacy. The anti-semitic UNWRA (a corrupt organization infiltrated by terrorists and their sympathizers), the anti-semitic Leftists and, obviously, nearly every single Muslim nation (even if they do personally despise the Palestinians) can try to change facts about the situation on the ground but the history of the region and the actual relationship between Islam and the Jews is shown clearly in this book. Also take pains to note the vile lies (Blood Libel, eating of Muslim children, etc) and myths about Jews that will crop up in their original form are still with us today and often are repeated out of the mouths of Leftists and Muslims in this day and age.
A very timely and superbly researched history of the Jews in Islamic lands. Worth reading and then you'll understand why the vast majority of the world that isn't controlled by anti-semitic Leftists and isn't a majority Islamic nation is able to understand the plight of the Jews, whereas the others merely wish to finish the job that started 1,400 years ago and was nearly perfected by the Nazis, into the modern age.
This book was fascinating in that it is a detailed history of the lives of Jews in Islamic lands. While very well aware of the discrimination, death, hatred, and genocide of Jews in Western lands controlled by Christians, we face an even worse record of these foul deeds in the Islamic lands.
First, let us point out that the Jews had existed in the lands that became Islamic for a thousand years. Let that sink in. Especially to those who hold close to Leftist political beliefs- the invader, the oppressor, and the violent murderer were in this case a rabid, desert religion, concocted in 650 CE. For reference, the Judaism we are familiar with, starting with the Second Temple and Abraham stories, has existed since approximately 600 BCE. So a thousand years before. So what was life like for 1,400 years under Islamic rule? It can be best summed up by the words of the Jewish scholar Maimonides in the 1100's : "No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None have been able to reduce as they have."
That nutshell will be repeated time and again as the status of Jews as "dhimmi" (meaning a non-Muslim residing in Muslim lands) has resulted in them, in EVERY Islamic state, THROUGHOUT history for 1,400 years has been one of hate, discrimination, casual violence, rape, murder and even attempts at genocide.
A this excellent history goes through the various times and various types of Islamics (Arabs, Caliphates, the Ottomans, etc) and their terrible treatment if not downright oppression and murder at the hands of Islam. The stories of the abuses will leave you shocked and should make you realize that the Nazi's were not the only psychotic anti-semites. In fact that Nazis got along well enough with the Arabs due to their mutual anti-semitism wherein the Arabs became the useful idiots to the Nazi cause. In modern times the useful idiots carrying out the task of Jewish genocide reside in the ranks of the political Left (which is still very anti-Semitic) who act as the useful idiots parroting Islamic nations hyperbole and hatred.
The story does get interesting, when in the aftermath of WWII, wherein a Jewish people all across the globe, facing millennia of oppression from Western and Islamic lands, and having barely survived the Holocaust- were given the right to move back to their homeland of Judea, which became Israel.
Immediately they were attacked by a coalition of rabid Palestinians and other Arab nations. They got their ass kicked soundly and Israel grew. Over the decades that followed it was the same cycle-a bunch of Arab states and the rabid Palestinians attack, get their asses handed to them and Israel keeps growing. These astoundingly incompetent Islamic armies essentially GREW the Israeli state with each attack. The Palestinians, despised by all their Muslim neighbors, are the useful terrorist idiots that they use to harry the Jews, which only results in more violence, death, and inevitable defeat. Rinse and repeat. This is evident in the events of the Hamas terror attack. The actions of the individual terrorists that they recorded and the reactions of ordinary Muslim people dancing in joy are precisely why I do not oppose any Israeli action. It is also why a Two-State solution is a fallacy. The anti-semitic UNWRA (a corrupt organization infiltrated by terrorists and their sympathizers), the anti-semitic Leftists and, obviously, nearly every single Muslim nation (even if they do personally despise the Palestinians) can try to change facts about the situation on the ground but the history of the region and the actual relationship between Islam and the Jews is shown clearly in this book. Also take pains to note the vile lies (Blood Libel, eating of Muslim children, etc) and myths about Jews that will crop up in their original form are still with us today and often are repeated out of the mouths of Leftists and Muslims in this day and age.
A very timely and superbly researched history of the Jews in Islamic lands. Worth reading and then you'll understand why the vast majority of the world that isn't controlled by anti-semitic Leftists and isn't a majority Islamic nation is able to understand the plight of the Jews, whereas the others merely wish to finish the job that started 1,400 years ago and was nearly perfected by the Nazis, into the modern age.
October 20, 2011
أنهيتُ مؤخرًا قراءة كتاب "في بيت إسماعيل: تاريخ اليهود في البلاد الإسلامية In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands" لمؤلفه البريطاني السير (مارتن جلبرت Martin Gilbert). الكتاب صادر عن مطبعة جامعة ييل عام 2010 في 424 صفحة من القطع الكبير.المؤلف له أكثر من ثمانين كتابًا أغلبها عن اليهود والمحرقة اليهودية، إلا أن أشهر كتبه على الإطلاق هو سيرة رئيس الوزراء البريطاني ونستن تشرتشل المكوّنة من ستة أجزاء، حيث يُعتبر المؤلف هو المؤرخ الرسمي لتشرتشل. وتقديرا لهذا الجهد الكبيرفي سيرة تشرتشل وغيرها من الكتب التاريخية مُنح المؤلف لقب "سير" عام 1995.
أما الكتاب الذي نحن بصدده فيتألف من 22 فصلا يتحدث فيها المؤلف عن أوضاع اليهود في البلاد الإسلامية منذ ما قبل ظهور الإسلام وحتى يومنا هذا. ليس هناك شك في أنّ موضوع الكتاب وفكرته في غاية الروعة والتميز، وموضوع كهذا لا بد أن يضيف الكثير للباحثين والسياسيين حتى يكوّنوا فهمًا أفضل لتطوّر العلاقات بين العرب واليهود على مدى التاريخ. ومن الواضح أن المؤلف قد بذل جهدًا في قراءة الكثير من المراجع، وعقد لقاءات واتصالات مع عديد من اليهود الذين كانوا يسكنون البلاد الإسلامية قبل خروجهم منها.
ولكن، وأقولها بأسف، أنّ الكتاب جاء مخيبًا لكثير من آمالي الشخصية، وخائبًا فيما يتعلق بالكتابة الأكاديمية والتاريخية خاصة في الفصول التي تتحدث عن فترة ما قبل الإسلام وحتى قيام إسرائيل؛ فالمؤلف في حقيقة الأمر لم يفعل شيئا سوى التجميع من المصادر المختلفة، ولم يقدّم أي تفسير أو تحليل أو إضافة عليها بصمته الشخصية. يتحدث عن حالات من الاضطهاد عانى منها اليهود أو حالات من التسامح والانسجام والازدهار في بلد أو آخر، لكنه لا يبذل أي جهدٍ عقلي أو بحثي لتقديم سياقٍ تاريخي أو اجتماعي يفسّر الأسباب (باستثناء مرحلة بُعيد ظهور الإسلام، وما بعد قيام إسرائيل). كلّ ما يريده منك المؤلف هو أن "تشرب" المعلومات التي يقدّمها لك، أي أن تعرف ما حصل (من وجهة نظره) ولكن لا سبيل لكي تفهم أي شيء. استغربتُ كثيرًا من هذا المؤلف الذي يذكر عهدًا من الاضطهاد والتمييز ضد اليهود في دولةٍ إسلامية، وبعد فصل أو اثنين يتحدث عن عهدٍ من الازدهار والرخاء والتسامح في الدولة نفسها، دون طرح السياقين والمقارنة بينهما كي نعرف لماذا حدث ما حدث. التفسير (الجاهز) الوحيد الذي يقدمّه المؤلف هو تغيّر الحاكم. أتفق مع المؤلف في أنّ الحاكم ومزاجه ومدى تسامحه أو تعصبّه له دور كبير في أحداث كهذه، ولكن هذا التفسير وحده لا يكفي، كما أن هذا التفسير لا يقول لنا لماذا هذا الحاكم متعصب أو متسامح.
ومما يُفقد هذا الكتاب مصداقيته من وجهة نظري هو التحيّز الواضح لجانب واحد (اليهود). كل المصادر أو غالبيتها العظمى لكتّاب يهود/صهاينة، وكل المقابلات والمراسلات كانت مع يهود. كان من الواجب على المؤلف أن يسعى لطرح الرؤية الأخرى أيضًا ويترك للقارئ الحكم. وسيلاحظ القارئ أن المؤلف يعتمد كثيرًا جدًا في معلوماته وإحالاته (خاصة في الفصول قبل قيام إسرائيل) على "الموسوعة اليهودية". هذا وهناك مواضع ذكر فيها المؤلف ألفاظًا أو جملا لا يُمكن أن تُقبل في بحث تاريخي أكاديمي، حيث يُفترض أن تكون اللغة محايدة ولا تشتمل على إطلاق أحكام. خلاصة..كتاب لا أنصح به. هذا وهناك أحداث ومعلومات كثيرة (خاصة في الفصول قبل قيام إسرائيل) يذكرها المؤلف دون الالتزام بإثبات المصدر.
وللأمانة فقد استفدتُ من أحد الفصول في نهاية الكتاب، حيث عرّفني على أمر لم أكن أعرفه، وهو استمرار المطالبات الإسرائيلية على مستويات دولية عالية بتعويض "اللاجئين" اليهود الذين طُردوا من البلاد الإسلامية بعد قيام إسرائيل. ووفقا للمؤلف فإن هناك اهتمام متزايد بهذه القضية دوليا، ودعوة لمطالبة البلاد العربية/الإسلامية بتعويض اليهود الذين سُلبت أموالهم وممتلكاتهم بعد طردهم.
قد يبدو أنني متحامل جدًا على المؤلف، وربما لا أستطيع أن أخفي تحيّزي أنا الآخر. لكن، لستُ وحدي من ينتقد هذا الكتاب والمؤلف. مثلا، يقول روبرت إرون في صحيفة الإندبندنت البريطانية أن استخدام المؤلف للمصادر في بعض الأحيان يدعو للشك، ويذكر ��عض المصادر السيئة التي استخدمها المؤلف وثُبت تزييفها للحقائق. وقد نشر موقع معهد "Institute for Historical Review" مقالا لروبرت فوريسون بعنوان "كيف يزيّف المؤرخ جلبرت ويخترع"، بينما قال البروفيسور اليهودي البريطاني- العراقي الأصل- (آفي شلايم) بأن المؤلف "مؤرخ حكّاء، وليس مؤرخا تحليليا"، وبأن المادة التي استخدمها مُنتقاة (على هوى المؤلف) ومتركزة بشكل ضيق جدًا على اليهود، وتفتقر إلى سياق سياسي واجتماعي واقتصادي أوسع حتى يتمكن القارئ من وضع المجمع اليهودي في أي دولة إسلامية في إطاره التاريخي الصحيح.
إحالات:
مقال روبرت إرون: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...
مقال روبرت فوريسون: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n5p-7_F...
مقال آفي شلايم: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8ae6559c-b1...
أما الكتاب الذي نحن بصدده فيتألف من 22 فصلا يتحدث فيها المؤلف عن أوضاع اليهود في البلاد الإسلامية منذ ما قبل ظهور الإسلام وحتى يومنا هذا. ليس هناك شك في أنّ موضوع الكتاب وفكرته في غاية الروعة والتميز، وموضوع كهذا لا بد أن يضيف الكثير للباحثين والسياسيين حتى يكوّنوا فهمًا أفضل لتطوّر العلاقات بين العرب واليهود على مدى التاريخ. ومن الواضح أن المؤلف قد بذل جهدًا في قراءة الكثير من المراجع، وعقد لقاءات واتصالات مع عديد من اليهود الذين كانوا يسكنون البلاد الإسلامية قبل خروجهم منها.
ولكن، وأقولها بأسف، أنّ الكتاب جاء مخيبًا لكثير من آمالي الشخصية، وخائبًا فيما يتعلق بالكتابة الأكاديمية والتاريخية خاصة في الفصول التي تتحدث عن فترة ما قبل الإسلام وحتى قيام إسرائيل؛ فالمؤلف في حقيقة الأمر لم يفعل شيئا سوى التجميع من المصادر المختلفة، ولم يقدّم أي تفسير أو تحليل أو إضافة عليها بصمته الشخصية. يتحدث عن حالات من الاضطهاد عانى منها اليهود أو حالات من التسامح والانسجام والازدهار في بلد أو آخر، لكنه لا يبذل أي جهدٍ عقلي أو بحثي لتقديم سياقٍ تاريخي أو اجتماعي يفسّر الأسباب (باستثناء مرحلة بُعيد ظهور الإسلام، وما بعد قيام إسرائيل). كلّ ما يريده منك المؤلف هو أن "تشرب" المعلومات التي يقدّمها لك، أي أن تعرف ما حصل (من وجهة نظره) ولكن لا سبيل لكي تفهم أي شيء. استغربتُ كثيرًا من هذا المؤلف الذي يذكر عهدًا من الاضطهاد والتمييز ضد اليهود في دولةٍ إسلامية، وبعد فصل أو اثنين يتحدث عن عهدٍ من الازدهار والرخاء والتسامح في الدولة نفسها، دون طرح السياقين والمقارنة بينهما كي نعرف لماذا حدث ما حدث. التفسير (الجاهز) الوحيد الذي يقدمّه المؤلف هو تغيّر الحاكم. أتفق مع المؤلف في أنّ الحاكم ومزاجه ومدى تسامحه أو تعصبّه له دور كبير في أحداث كهذه، ولكن هذا التفسير وحده لا يكفي، كما أن هذا التفسير لا يقول لنا لماذا هذا الحاكم متعصب أو متسامح.
ومما يُفقد هذا الكتاب مصداقيته من وجهة نظري هو التحيّز الواضح لجانب واحد (اليهود). كل المصادر أو غالبيتها العظمى لكتّاب يهود/صهاينة، وكل المقابلات والمراسلات كانت مع يهود. كان من الواجب على المؤلف أن يسعى لطرح الرؤية الأخرى أيضًا ويترك للقارئ الحكم. وسيلاحظ القارئ أن المؤلف يعتمد كثيرًا جدًا في معلوماته وإحالاته (خاصة في الفصول قبل قيام إسرائيل) على "الموسوعة اليهودية". هذا وهناك مواضع ذكر فيها المؤلف ألفاظًا أو جملا لا يُمكن أن تُقبل في بحث تاريخي أكاديمي، حيث يُفترض أن تكون اللغة محايدة ولا تشتمل على إطلاق أحكام. خلاصة..كتاب لا أنصح به. هذا وهناك أحداث ومعلومات كثيرة (خاصة في الفصول قبل قيام إسرائيل) يذكرها المؤلف دون الالتزام بإثبات المصدر.
وللأمانة فقد استفدتُ من أحد الفصول في نهاية الكتاب، حيث عرّفني على أمر لم أكن أعرفه، وهو استمرار المطالبات الإسرائيلية على مستويات دولية عالية بتعويض "اللاجئين" اليهود الذين طُردوا من البلاد الإسلامية بعد قيام إسرائيل. ووفقا للمؤلف فإن هناك اهتمام متزايد بهذه القضية دوليا، ودعوة لمطالبة البلاد العربية/الإسلامية بتعويض اليهود الذين سُلبت أموالهم وممتلكاتهم بعد طردهم.
قد يبدو أنني متحامل جدًا على المؤلف، وربما لا أستطيع أن أخفي تحيّزي أنا الآخر. لكن، لستُ وحدي من ينتقد هذا الكتاب والمؤلف. مثلا، يقول روبرت إرون في صحيفة الإندبندنت البريطانية أن استخدام المؤلف للمصادر في بعض الأحيان يدعو للشك، ويذكر ��عض المصادر السيئة التي استخدمها المؤلف وثُبت تزييفها للحقائق. وقد نشر موقع معهد "Institute for Historical Review" مقالا لروبرت فوريسون بعنوان "كيف يزيّف المؤرخ جلبرت ويخترع"، بينما قال البروفيسور اليهودي البريطاني- العراقي الأصل- (آفي شلايم) بأن المؤلف "مؤرخ حكّاء، وليس مؤرخا تحليليا"، وبأن المادة التي استخدمها مُنتقاة (على هوى المؤلف) ومتركزة بشكل ضيق جدًا على اليهود، وتفتقر إلى سياق سياسي واجتماعي واقتصادي أوسع حتى يتمكن القارئ من وضع المجمع اليهودي في أي دولة إسلامية في إطاره التاريخي الصحيح.
إحالات:
مقال روبرت إرون: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...
مقال روبرت فوريسون: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n5p-7_F...
مقال آفي شلايم: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8ae6559c-b1...
January 12, 2017
I loved this book. It felt so important to get more of an insight to how Jewish people were treated around the world years ago and how it resonates with what is going on today. I think this is a must read for history lovers and curious folk alike!
January 3, 2022
This was a book close to my heart as my grandparents on my Mum's side are from Iraq and my great great grandad was the Chief Rabbi of Baghdad, Hakhim Ezra Dangoor.
My Grandma was also kicked out of Iraq along with 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Given all this, this book was important to me.
The book is impeccably researched as you would expect from a Martin Gilbert and a historian of his quality.
I did feel that he rushed a bit in the history up to the seventeenth century. Although it was interesting, it all felt a bit bundled together like a runaway train.
The book really hit its stride from the seventeenth century onwards and I felt immersed in the book. The most interesting parts for me was from when Zionism first led to Jews returning in significant numbers to what is now Israel. The impact this had on antisemitism in Middle Eastern and North African nations was interesting and profoundly sad.
The part of the book which addressed pogroms in Muslim majority nations from the 1930s was powerful and sad for me. My Grandma lived through the Farhud and it brought home to me how terrifying it must have been to live through..
The last part of the book from the establishment of the state of Israel was interesting and well written, though I did feel he was trying to pack too much in, in to few pages. I really think the flow and quality of the book could have been even higher if it didn't feel crammed in, i think it would have been better spaced out if it was say 100 pages longer.
The last third of the book powerfully used personal testimonies and this elevated and gave feeling to the book.
This was a well written insight in to the insecure relationship of Jews in Muslim majority lands- sometimes much more tolerant than Christian Europe, very insecure and based on the whims of rulers and the specter of how Dhimmi laws were used and ending in the tragedy of the 20th century, where thousands of years of Jewish presence in many nations in the Middle East and North Africa dating back to even before Islam was nearly removed entirely. The book tells this story well.
I do feel the book would have benefited from having more sources from Arab and North African non Jewish voices and I thought Gilbert relied too much on the likes of Bat Ye'or without giving context to the controversies her views on Islam have been utilised by the far right.
As someone active in interfaith passionate about bringing Jews and Muslims closer together, whilst challenging antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate I think its important the true story of Jews in Muslim lands is given and learned, not fairtytale world view some give, but the reality.
This is a good book, with some minor drawbacks. I learnt a lot and at times it engrossed me. It was a book close to my heart and is definitely worth 4 stars.
My Grandma was also kicked out of Iraq along with 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Given all this, this book was important to me.
The book is impeccably researched as you would expect from a Martin Gilbert and a historian of his quality.
I did feel that he rushed a bit in the history up to the seventeenth century. Although it was interesting, it all felt a bit bundled together like a runaway train.
The book really hit its stride from the seventeenth century onwards and I felt immersed in the book. The most interesting parts for me was from when Zionism first led to Jews returning in significant numbers to what is now Israel. The impact this had on antisemitism in Middle Eastern and North African nations was interesting and profoundly sad.
The part of the book which addressed pogroms in Muslim majority nations from the 1930s was powerful and sad for me. My Grandma lived through the Farhud and it brought home to me how terrifying it must have been to live through..
The last part of the book from the establishment of the state of Israel was interesting and well written, though I did feel he was trying to pack too much in, in to few pages. I really think the flow and quality of the book could have been even higher if it didn't feel crammed in, i think it would have been better spaced out if it was say 100 pages longer.
The last third of the book powerfully used personal testimonies and this elevated and gave feeling to the book.
This was a well written insight in to the insecure relationship of Jews in Muslim majority lands- sometimes much more tolerant than Christian Europe, very insecure and based on the whims of rulers and the specter of how Dhimmi laws were used and ending in the tragedy of the 20th century, where thousands of years of Jewish presence in many nations in the Middle East and North Africa dating back to even before Islam was nearly removed entirely. The book tells this story well.
I do feel the book would have benefited from having more sources from Arab and North African non Jewish voices and I thought Gilbert relied too much on the likes of Bat Ye'or without giving context to the controversies her views on Islam have been utilised by the far right.
As someone active in interfaith passionate about bringing Jews and Muslims closer together, whilst challenging antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate I think its important the true story of Jews in Muslim lands is given and learned, not fairtytale world view some give, but the reality.
This is a good book, with some minor drawbacks. I learnt a lot and at times it engrossed me. It was a book close to my heart and is definitely worth 4 stars.
May 25, 2011
For anyone who wants to better understand contemporary problems in the Middle East, this is a book that must be read. Anything that Martin Gilbert writes is worth the time to read carefully and consider all the issues and points he raises.
March 26, 2015
This is an excellent history of the Jews under Muslim rule which can be summed up by one sentence- things were never as bad under Muslim rule as the worst times under Christian rule but neither were they as good under Muslim rule as the best times under Christian rule.
July 3, 2012
I've been reading history books since I was a teenager but I would say that this is the most biased one-sided history book I have ever read. This was quite clear from the acknowledgements section where I found that all the people involved in the book were Jewish or pro-zionists. Not a single reference to any historian from the other side (Islam/arab)
To be fair, I learned a lot about the jews and their roles in the different societies they were in but the way the author was telling the stories was too zionist and unfair for someone who is supposed to provide a fair narration of history since that is what I would expect from good historians.
I read the whole book of course and I feel that I added to my knowledge about the topic but I don't think I will read any further works for the author.
Thanks you very much
To be fair, I learned a lot about the jews and their roles in the different societies they were in but the way the author was telling the stories was too zionist and unfair for someone who is supposed to provide a fair narration of history since that is what I would expect from good historians.
I read the whole book of course and I feel that I added to my knowledge about the topic but I don't think I will read any further works for the author.
Thanks you very much
August 6, 2018
Brilliant and Revealing - An Essential Read
Sir Martin Gilbert has created a master work and generational touchstone on the history of Jewish/Muslim relations from the time of Muhammed to the present day. The flowing narrative consolidates a wide range of reference material including books by Mark Cohen, Gotein,Hitti, Hourani, Levin, Lewis ,Satloff, Shulewitz, Stillman, Troper (and many others), historical archives, government documents and the author's personal interviews and correspondence with members of the Oriental Jewish community.
The book begins with how Jews came to live in Arabia, Persia and North Africa and continues with the life of the Prophet leading to the seminal Jewish defeat and subjugation at Khaybar which is still invoked by Hamas, Hiz b'Allah and others to this day. He describes the strictures on dhimmi life imposed by the Pact of Umar which was likely codified in the early 8th century. Once under the established dominance of Islam Jewish life was able to flourish and acquire a degree of protection.
This golden age ended under Almohed persecution in Spain, repression in Yemen and the Mameluks of Egypt (1250-1516) who enforced dhimmi regulations with rigor. Yet Jewish poetry and culture was admired and encouraged in Shiraz and in the Cairo massacre of Christian Copts of 1343, Jews lent Christians their own discriminatory garments which deceived the mob and kept them safe. In 1561 under the Ottomans, the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent gave a land grant of seven villages around Tiberea in perpetuity as a Jewish principality, predating modern Zionism by 300 years.
The middle section of the book focuses on the periods from the 1800s up until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Contrary to the myth that Jews and Arabs coexisted happily together throughout time. Chapter 7 relates a number of references to the quality of Jewish life, among them (pp104) a quote by William Tanner Young, British Vice Consul in Jerusalem in 1839: "The Jew in Jerusalem is not estimated in value much above a dog - and scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew"; "A Moslem's right to harass a Jew was taken for granted; it would not have occurred to the victim to react or report the matter to police" (pp169, Mordecai Ben Porat, on Jewish life in Baghdad in the 1930s).
Ch. 15-20 considers the post 1948 unjust surveillance, dispossession, imprisonment, attacks, murders and flight of Jews from Arab lands. Recall the threatening words of chief Egyptian UN delegate Heykal Pasha to UN on Nov 14, 1947 who said "the lives of one million Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by Partition... it might be responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of the large number of Jews." (pp209). Similar words were uttered by the representative of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, a close relative of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husseini. This indeed was the unacceptable reaction of Arab leadership and popular response to the defeat of their campaign against Israel's Jews and failure to reestablish their dhimmi status.
Gilbert does not focus solely on the negative. For example he points out that while popular opinion grew against Jews in the hinterland, forcing a migration to the cities, Jews enjoyed support of the Sultan of Morocco, a story more or less repeated in Tunisia where Jews eventually concentrated on the island of Djerba. Whereas Iran under Reza Shah turned more towards Nazi Germany, his son Shah Reza Pahlevi was more favourably inclined. In the early 1950s Arab Iranians drove anti-Jewish sentiments but the government refused to join in. When anti-Jewish riots broke out in Iranian Kurdistan the government extended protection to Jews who wanted to move to Tehran or Israel. Things became worse when the Shah's government fell to the Ayatollah, as they did for other non-Muslim minorities. The book ends with a chapter which brings us to up to the events of March 2009.
Can I recommend this book? Yes and yes and yes again! This review is merely an brief synopsis that I hope it encourages you to buy the book, gift it, keep it as a reference and place it prominently on your shelf. There is a much greater wealth of material inside. It should be part of the curriculum of every program of Jewish or Middle Eastern studies. If they have yet to order it ask your local public, church, mosque, college library to add a copy or two to their collection. It complements the Ashkenazic and Israeli narratives, which are well sourced elsewhere, and hopefully will be the basis of spurring further explorations of this kind, not only of the Jewish experience under Islam but also that of other minority communities from Armenians to Zoroastrians. Middle Eastern Muslims, peace be upon them, would also (I hope) greatly benefit by employing this book as a mirror to see how they are viewed by others.
Sir Martin Gilbert has created a master work and generational touchstone on the history of Jewish/Muslim relations from the time of Muhammed to the present day. The flowing narrative consolidates a wide range of reference material including books by Mark Cohen, Gotein,Hitti, Hourani, Levin, Lewis ,Satloff, Shulewitz, Stillman, Troper (and many others), historical archives, government documents and the author's personal interviews and correspondence with members of the Oriental Jewish community.
The book begins with how Jews came to live in Arabia, Persia and North Africa and continues with the life of the Prophet leading to the seminal Jewish defeat and subjugation at Khaybar which is still invoked by Hamas, Hiz b'Allah and others to this day. He describes the strictures on dhimmi life imposed by the Pact of Umar which was likely codified in the early 8th century. Once under the established dominance of Islam Jewish life was able to flourish and acquire a degree of protection.
This golden age ended under Almohed persecution in Spain, repression in Yemen and the Mameluks of Egypt (1250-1516) who enforced dhimmi regulations with rigor. Yet Jewish poetry and culture was admired and encouraged in Shiraz and in the Cairo massacre of Christian Copts of 1343, Jews lent Christians their own discriminatory garments which deceived the mob and kept them safe. In 1561 under the Ottomans, the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent gave a land grant of seven villages around Tiberea in perpetuity as a Jewish principality, predating modern Zionism by 300 years.
The middle section of the book focuses on the periods from the 1800s up until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Contrary to the myth that Jews and Arabs coexisted happily together throughout time. Chapter 7 relates a number of references to the quality of Jewish life, among them (pp104) a quote by William Tanner Young, British Vice Consul in Jerusalem in 1839: "The Jew in Jerusalem is not estimated in value much above a dog - and scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew"; "A Moslem's right to harass a Jew was taken for granted; it would not have occurred to the victim to react or report the matter to police" (pp169, Mordecai Ben Porat, on Jewish life in Baghdad in the 1930s).
Ch. 15-20 considers the post 1948 unjust surveillance, dispossession, imprisonment, attacks, murders and flight of Jews from Arab lands. Recall the threatening words of chief Egyptian UN delegate Heykal Pasha to UN on Nov 14, 1947 who said "the lives of one million Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by Partition... it might be responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of the large number of Jews." (pp209). Similar words were uttered by the representative of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee, a close relative of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al Husseini. This indeed was the unacceptable reaction of Arab leadership and popular response to the defeat of their campaign against Israel's Jews and failure to reestablish their dhimmi status.
Gilbert does not focus solely on the negative. For example he points out that while popular opinion grew against Jews in the hinterland, forcing a migration to the cities, Jews enjoyed support of the Sultan of Morocco, a story more or less repeated in Tunisia where Jews eventually concentrated on the island of Djerba. Whereas Iran under Reza Shah turned more towards Nazi Germany, his son Shah Reza Pahlevi was more favourably inclined. In the early 1950s Arab Iranians drove anti-Jewish sentiments but the government refused to join in. When anti-Jewish riots broke out in Iranian Kurdistan the government extended protection to Jews who wanted to move to Tehran or Israel. Things became worse when the Shah's government fell to the Ayatollah, as they did for other non-Muslim minorities. The book ends with a chapter which brings us to up to the events of March 2009.
Can I recommend this book? Yes and yes and yes again! This review is merely an brief synopsis that I hope it encourages you to buy the book, gift it, keep it as a reference and place it prominently on your shelf. There is a much greater wealth of material inside. It should be part of the curriculum of every program of Jewish or Middle Eastern studies. If they have yet to order it ask your local public, church, mosque, college library to add a copy or two to their collection. It complements the Ashkenazic and Israeli narratives, which are well sourced elsewhere, and hopefully will be the basis of spurring further explorations of this kind, not only of the Jewish experience under Islam but also that of other minority communities from Armenians to Zoroastrians. Middle Eastern Muslims, peace be upon them, would also (I hope) greatly benefit by employing this book as a mirror to see how they are viewed by others.
November 10, 2018
"He [Isaac] acquired flocks and herds and a large household so that the Philistines envied him." (Genesis 26:14) Despite the canard that the Jews had it better under Islam than under Christianity, the Jews in Islamic countries, with few exceptions, were subject to constant discrimination, degradation, persecution, pogroms and outright hatred. While these Jews never suffered an Inquisition or a Holocaust as under Christianity, their dhimmi status put them at the mercy of Moselms who imposed high taxes, confiscated their property, expelled or outright murdered them.
Even under these harsh restrictions, some Jews managed to lift themselves out of the gutter and achieve a modicum of success. In addition, the State of Israel did not immediately roll over and allow themselves to be driven into the sea during the wars of 1948 and 1967. These events caused untold envy and resentment which was taken out on what few Jews remained in these Islamic countries. Their societies are much the poorer, both socially and economically, for expelling their Jews; their loss is Israel's gain.
Sir Martin Gilbert has written and well-research, scholarly but highly readable history of the Jews in Islamic lands..
Even under these harsh restrictions, some Jews managed to lift themselves out of the gutter and achieve a modicum of success. In addition, the State of Israel did not immediately roll over and allow themselves to be driven into the sea during the wars of 1948 and 1967. These events caused untold envy and resentment which was taken out on what few Jews remained in these Islamic countries. Their societies are much the poorer, both socially and economically, for expelling their Jews; their loss is Israel's gain.
Sir Martin Gilbert has written and well-research, scholarly but highly readable history of the Jews in Islamic lands..
March 4, 2024
There is no question that this is a timely subject - the relationship between Jews and Muslins (mostly Arabs) throughout the ages. The book is very well researched, no doubt, and it succeeds in providing good information on how complex the relationship between the two peoples has evolved, often alternating between acceptance and assimilation, followed by periods of persecution and violence. Enlightening as it is, there is something lacking in this book, among its wealth of narratives and historical facts, one misses some analytical approach. Sometimes, it reads as a compilation of names and stories, with only a tenuous idea as leitmotiv. Perhaps those are minor quibbles for this is an important work, and the historic examples it provides merit reflection. Anyway it would gain in perspective if, in its final chapters, it could provide the perspective on the way Palestinians are treated in modern-day Israel. But maybe this is the subject for other book.
May 23, 2024
It is horrifying to read of the same antisemitic tropes being spewed out now are the same ones mentioned in a book that covers well over a thousand years of Jewish history in Arab lands.
I think every person that has screamed “white coloniser!” particularly since 7th October 2023, needs to read this book.
They won’t though because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
I have several books by Martin Gilbert who, to me, is the most accessible historian I have ever read.
I think every person that has screamed “white coloniser!” particularly since 7th October 2023, needs to read this book.
They won’t though because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
I have several books by Martin Gilbert who, to me, is the most accessible historian I have ever read.
January 1, 2025
Well-researched thesis on Jews living in Arab lands for three thousand years. Focusing on the period since 1948, Gilbert documents the experience of the 850,000 expelled, displaced, tortured and murdered. His viewpoint contrasts with Palestinian propaganda. A must read for anyone who thinks they know it all.
June 17, 2017
A readable survey of the history of Jewish people living in Moslem controlled parts of the world since the inception of Islam. A good reminder that even more recent history often gives way under the pressure of present day narratives.
July 2, 2018
I could not finish this book.
May 15, 2022
Excellent.
June 10, 2022
Meh. Very basic stuff and repetitive.
January 16, 2025
Required reading, chilling and sad. Explains so much about modern antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Thank you, Martin.
Read
July 28, 2011Sir Martin Gilbert has done it again. He has produced a masterpiece on the Jews from Arab countries. His work is very thorough giving the reader a vivid picture of what it was like for Jews to live under Muslim rule. He cites many sources and has an excellent bibliography in the back for those who wish to delve deeper into the subject.
Jews have been living amongst Arabs in the Arabian peninsula for thousands of years. By and large they were mostly traders. They got on well with their fellow denizens often time forming alliances with various tribes based on self interest. Judaism and Christianity made an impact on life in the Peninsula. There was even a Jewish Kingdom in Arabia headed by Dhu Nawas. His kingdom would later be over run by Byzantine allied Ethiopians. When Muhammad preached his message the Jews did not heed his call they chose to stick to their own religion. This lead to a war where in Jews were driven out of the Arabian Peninsula.
Else where in the Middle East the Islamic Armies often had Jewish allies helping them conquer Byzantine cities. Byzantine Christians discriminated against Jews rather heavily. Jews were rewarded by giving trading rights and rights to resettle in Jerusalem. Since that time Jewish existence has been rather schizophrenic under Muslim rule. On the bright side they were given a right to secure dwelling and even rose to high positions of authority. Something of this nature never really occurred in the Christian Lands. The Jews in Arab Lands never experienced a Holocaust, Inquisition or Russian massacres. On the other side of the coin Jews were never totally equal. They were a Dhimmi or protected person who was tolerated but never seen as an equal. Various Dhimmi laws were put in place to remind the Jew that he was less then his Muslim country man.
Muslim Spain providing the best example. Jews were thoroughly integrated into the country. They were invited in to conduct business and trade. Jews became doctors and philosophers and often reached high positions in the Kings court. Sometimes directly beneath the King himself. Moses Maimonides was the Sultan's official doctor in Egypt. In Iraq the Exilarch was accorded high honors even Muslims bowed to him. Turkey was the hven for Jews fleeing persecution in Christian Spain. Later in History Turkey would show an example of great tolerance to Jews. Jews were given their own court system and could conduct business as they saw fit. For Jews it was heaven.
The Dhimmi laws on the other hand left he Jews degraded. Being forced to wear different clothing, pay special taxes that could often mean poverty and impoverishment for Jews were always present. Granted not all Muslim rulers chose to enforce these laws but they were on the books. The laws were inherited from the Byzantines. Sometimes Jews were limited as to what careers they could pursue. There were rare occasions that Jews faced massacres and forced conversion.s
The last part of Jewish existence in Arab countries ended on a poor note. Many Arabs were hostile to Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish State on previously Muslim land. This did lead to government sponsored discrimination, torture and imprisonment just for being Jewish. The Jews were often attacked by mobss of people which resulted in property destruction, loss of life and rape.
Perhaps one day the Jews and Arabs can exist together in friends as equals. Using the example of Spain and Iraq and Turkey and then improving upon that.
Jews have been living amongst Arabs in the Arabian peninsula for thousands of years. By and large they were mostly traders. They got on well with their fellow denizens often time forming alliances with various tribes based on self interest. Judaism and Christianity made an impact on life in the Peninsula. There was even a Jewish Kingdom in Arabia headed by Dhu Nawas. His kingdom would later be over run by Byzantine allied Ethiopians. When Muhammad preached his message the Jews did not heed his call they chose to stick to their own religion. This lead to a war where in Jews were driven out of the Arabian Peninsula.
Else where in the Middle East the Islamic Armies often had Jewish allies helping them conquer Byzantine cities. Byzantine Christians discriminated against Jews rather heavily. Jews were rewarded by giving trading rights and rights to resettle in Jerusalem. Since that time Jewish existence has been rather schizophrenic under Muslim rule. On the bright side they were given a right to secure dwelling and even rose to high positions of authority. Something of this nature never really occurred in the Christian Lands. The Jews in Arab Lands never experienced a Holocaust, Inquisition or Russian massacres. On the other side of the coin Jews were never totally equal. They were a Dhimmi or protected person who was tolerated but never seen as an equal. Various Dhimmi laws were put in place to remind the Jew that he was less then his Muslim country man.
Muslim Spain providing the best example. Jews were thoroughly integrated into the country. They were invited in to conduct business and trade. Jews became doctors and philosophers and often reached high positions in the Kings court. Sometimes directly beneath the King himself. Moses Maimonides was the Sultan's official doctor in Egypt. In Iraq the Exilarch was accorded high honors even Muslims bowed to him. Turkey was the hven for Jews fleeing persecution in Christian Spain. Later in History Turkey would show an example of great tolerance to Jews. Jews were given their own court system and could conduct business as they saw fit. For Jews it was heaven.
The Dhimmi laws on the other hand left he Jews degraded. Being forced to wear different clothing, pay special taxes that could often mean poverty and impoverishment for Jews were always present. Granted not all Muslim rulers chose to enforce these laws but they were on the books. The laws were inherited from the Byzantines. Sometimes Jews were limited as to what careers they could pursue. There were rare occasions that Jews faced massacres and forced conversion.s
The last part of Jewish existence in Arab countries ended on a poor note. Many Arabs were hostile to Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish State on previously Muslim land. This did lead to government sponsored discrimination, torture and imprisonment just for being Jewish. The Jews were often attacked by mobss of people which resulted in property destruction, loss of life and rape.
Perhaps one day the Jews and Arabs can exist together in friends as equals. Using the example of Spain and Iraq and Turkey and then improving upon that.
January 21, 2014
This book provides a comprehensive history of the Jewish experience in Muslim countries, from the founding of Islam until the present. The author shows both the good and bad things in the relationship. The book is very detailed, but the narrative is never dull. The author doesn't try to develop an over-arching theory about the relationship between Jews and Muslims, but rather reports conditions continually. I thought it was interesting how there were periods of Jewish flourishing in between periods of savage repression. I also thought the sections on Persia/Iran were enlightening, indicting that Persian repression of Jews was wide-spread in the past, but also that Iran had- and in some places continues to have- a large Jewish presence.
October 22, 2023
Good book for folks to read if they want to know more about Jews in general, or to know about the great many Jews now in Israel who came in not from Europe but as refugees from old communities in North Africa and the Middle East. Easy to read and fairly short, this book covers a history - sometimes happy but often defined by oppression - that has often been glossed over or been simply unknown.
November 8, 2011
So far... Wow. I know Gilbert is coming from a certain perspective, but it's hard to fathom some of the stuff in here. Ultimately, the book is very dry, but pretty interesting. But, year. Dry. Very dry.
December 19, 2010
A must-read for anyone who wishes to truly understand the current Arab-Israeli conflict.
March 13, 2011
Fascinating history of Islamic Anti-semitism.
August 27, 2011
Very interesting book chronicling the relations of Jews and Muslims politically from the times of the Prophet Mohammed to modern day Israel and middle east.
August 14, 2015
Important but distressing history of Jews in Muslim countries. Impecably documented. Calmly reports even the most horrifying injustices. Maps and well-chosen illustrations.
December 2, 2016
This book made me so mad.All religion is shit.
October 6, 2012
Really quite interesting
March 30, 2015
A great book, very interesting and beautifully written.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews