Sir Martin Gilbert produces gilt-edged histories. The author of a magisterial biography of Winston Churchill and 80 other titles, he provides in this erudite study a definitive account of the neglected history of persecution, intermittent toleration and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Jews from Muslim lands. The impact of his work will be significant. Too often the cause of the enmity between the two peoples is presumed to be associated with the creation of Israel. Gilbert demonstrates the antagonism to be as ancient as Islam itself.
The Jewish presence in Arabia predated the birth of Mohammed by more than 1,000 years. The refusal of the Jews of Medina to accept him as a prophet led to their mass execution. Islam’s expansion from the 7th century saw conquered Jewish communities annihilated or sold into slavery. Those spared were subjected to inferior dhimmi status. Equality under the law was proscribed and humiliating restrictions imposed on them survived for centuries. They were compelled to wear distinctive clothing; subjected to an exclusive jizya tax; prohibited from employing Muslims or having sexual relations with Muslim women. Their movement was restricted and they were compelled to walk in the gutters. Another feature was the vanquishing of Judaic holy sites.
In an act that heralded the apparently intractable feud over the Old City, the 7th century Caliph Omar Ibn al-Kattab insisted that the Mosque of Omar be erected at the exact spot in Jerusalem where the Jewish Temple had stood 1,500 years earlier. Gilbert’s narrative is seasoned with apposite quotations and anecdotal reports.
He cites the 12th century Jewish sage Maimonides, who was forced to convert to Islam, as having observed that “no nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us.” Bernard Lewis, the noted historian of Islam, more accurately summarised the position in his observation that the condition of Jews under Islam was “never as bad as in Christendom at its worst, nor ever as good as in Christendom at its best.” Certainly, there was nothing to compare with the progressive political emancipation and acceptance accorded to Jews in the democratic West.
The “golden era” that Gilbert cites as a precedent for present day co-existence was the Ottoman Empire, when Arabia enjoyed a form of plurality, and the period of mass migration of Jews to the Middle East. Religious fundamentalism, however, saw to it that such toleration was ephemeral. The 350 years of Persian Shi’ite theocracy that ended in 1925 saw anti-Jewish hatred adopt racial features. Jews straying out of their ghettos during the 3-day muharram mourning period were likely to be killed. Jews were not permitted outdoors when it rained as it was thought the dirt they would shed would sully the feet of Muslims. In 1839, the Jews of the northern Persian city of Mashad were faced with the choice of mass conversion or massacre. Gilbert tells the moving story – sadly, one of many – of a 17-year-old girl, Sol Hachuel, who was publicly beheaded in Tangier in 1834 for refusing to convert. The Spanish consul described the tragedy as that of a Jew “entrapped by Islamic enmity toward the infidel.”
The worst excesses of anti-Jewish violence, though, took place in 19th century Palestine. Pogroms, rivalling in intensity those of Tsarist Russia, took place in Hebron, Safed and Acre. Gilbert’s meticulous research has unearthed an article written for the New York Daily Tribune in 1854, where Karl Marx wrote that “nothing equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem…the constant object of Musselman oppression and intolerance.” Marx added: “Islamism proscribes the nation of the infidels constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Musselman and the unbeliever.”
The 20th century saw the increasing use of the law to exclude Jews from Muslim society. In 1926 and 1956, the Egyptian national code promulgated that nationality would only be conferred on those who “belonged racially” to the Arab nation or who embraced Islam. Similarly, Syria legitimised anti-Jewish violence by denying Jewish citizens the civil protection granted to others. The war years saw an escalation of hostility against both Jewish migration and the Jewish presence in Palestine and neighbouring Arab states.
The most extreme manifestation came in the form of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Banished from Palestine, and having fled Iraq where he unsuccessfully attempted to stage a pro-Nazi coup, the Mufti was granted refuge in Berlin. He succeeded in pressuring Hitler not to allow the transit of 4,000 Jewish children from Bulgaria to the safety of Palestine. He was instrumental in establishing an SS division, drawn from Muslim volunteers, who murdered most of Bosnian Jewry. Gilbert also reveals how the Mufti helped create an SS task force under the command of Colonel Walter Rauf who, with the help of Arab collaborators, were charged with planning the mass extermination of not only half a million Jews living in Palestine, but of the Jewish populations in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. The period leading up to the United Nations partition of Palestine witnessed the beginning of the end of Arabian Jewry.
Dr Mohammed Pasha, head of Egypt’s UN delegation, publicly threatened the lives of a million Jews in Muslim lands if partition went ahead. His Prime Minister, al-Nukrashi Pasha, proclaimed a state of emergency with the power to arrest all communists. All Jews were declared to be Zionists and all Zionists were held to be communists. Iraq witnessed the public execution of Jews and the expropriation of their property. More than 2,500 years of Jewish presence in Iraq would be brought to an end.
Gilbert recounts in often horrific detail the gradual ethnic cleansing of Jews across North Africa and Arabia. His figures are startling. Following the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, while 726,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees, 850,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from Muslim lands, of whom 580,000 fled to the safety of Israel. None of them received any UN assistance.
Those who remained in Muslim lands did so in constant fear of their lives. Gilbert reveals how between 1962 and 1964 the Israeli government was forced to pay a ransom of $10 million to secure the release of 100,000 Moroccan Jews.
Persecution in Syria took a different turn. There, Jews were forbidden to emigrate. They were also barred from employment, subjected to boycotts, curfews, forbidden to own radios and became the target of Nazi style anti-Semitism. Syria’s defence minister Mustafa Tlaas published a bestseller called Matza of Zion alleging that Jews used the blood of murdered Muslims to bake their passover bread. Syria only agreed to free its captive Jewish population in 1991, after unrelenting pressure from the United States. The Syrian authorities now vaunt the empty Jewish quarter of Damascus as a tourist attraction. Gilbert points out that even Muslim regimes that never hosted Jews are infected with a pathological anti-Semitism. The Malaysian Prime Minister Matathir Mohammed did not even bother to disguise his bigotry as anti-Zionism when he inaugurated Malaysia’s Anti-Jew Day.
The only Muslim state with a Jewish presence today is Iran. Some 25,000 souls live under a regime that not so long ago held a Holocaust Denial Conference addressed by the regime’s foreign minister and whose invitees included the fascist historian David Irving as well as the delightful David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted European neo-Nazi celebrities. Few Jews can be optimistic about their long term future in Iran.
Martin Gilbert’s work provides not just an academic but also an intensely moving new perspective on the world’s most intractable conflict.
