A lot of the stuff I write for this blog is critical or
angry or mocking, reflecting my angst over the state of the Jews and my anger at the neocons for pushing the Iraq War. Today I’m sitting down to write with a positive excitement. I still can’t believe how good I felt last night in a very Jewish space, and I am thinking about the ways I can invest this piece of writing with the pleasure I experienced so that others will feel it too.
My friend Menachem had sent me a link to a lecture on "Modern Myths of Muslim Anti-Semitism" at the Jewish
Theological Seminary in New York,
the leading conservative seminary in the States, and when I got there I was
filled with trepidation. There was the usual security you go through at Jewish institutions in New York–basically, black employees going through your bags–and I remembered that Gabriel Schoenfeld used as his leading
image for a book on antisemitism the fact that to get to work at the American Jewish Committee, he had to pass among heavy concrete barriers. I.e., the world is not safe for Jews.
When I got into the hall, the lecturer and the man who was going to introduce him, both wearing yarmulkes, were getting the slide show ready on stage– and projecting a repulsive cartoon from a Jordan
newspaper in 1994 of two fat Jews, a boy in uniform handing a bottle of blood
to his mother, both of them with big sweaty noses, and the caption was: The Blood of a Palestinian Child, A Gift for Mother's Day.
Oh man. We’re in for it.
And what followed was just a fabulous lecture. Mark R. Cohen is a rabbi and a student of Judeo-Arabic history. He has
written histories of Jews in Egyptian society in the middle ages and Jews under
Christianity and Islam. His subject was, What to make of anti-Semitism in
Islamic societies in the last 100 years or so.
There are two ideological theories about this antisemitism. One is that it goes back to the
Koran, the other that Jews have always gotten along with Muslims and it is only
since Zionism that this has happened–so actually this is anti-Zionism, not anti-semitism.
Cohen would steer the middle path, and yet the weight of his
lecture was almost fervently against Islamophobia. I will set out his main points without
a lot of quoting. (I have a tape but I don’t have the time.) Islam contains a "nucleus of pluralism" that is absent in Christianity. The Koran does contain a lot of anti-Jewish statements, but they
must be understood as the disdain that each of the monotheistic religions
expressed against the other, and that they all expressed toward paganism in that
period of civilization. There was a lot of invective. Tolerance was not a virtue. In fact, intolerance was praised by all three religions, as the firm way to
behave toward people different from oneself.
Antisemitism is a more virulent feeling: the belief that Jews are enemies of society, a
degraded class of humanity that conspires to wield power over other people and
to prey on them for religious ritual.
Jews generally lived alongside Muslim Arabs without persecution, while in Europe Jews were routinely persecuted and expelled by the Christians. Classical Islamic texts are remarkable for their
lack of anti-Semitism. Even the Koran’s famous expression that Jews are pigs
and apes he read in a way that is not simply racist.
In Islamic societies, Jews participated in the scientific and
administrative realms, they practiced philosophy and mathematics,
they often shared businesses with Muslims and respected the ability of Muslim judges to adjudicate matters of family and even personal life (compare to Isaac Bashevis Singer's father's court in Warsaw).
They were second class citizens, to be sure. They had to defer to the Muslim
religion and be humble. They had to pay a tax. They were dhimmi. They were not free in the modern
way we think of a minority as having freedom. There were sporadic episodes of antisemitic violence. But Jews had freedom of religion and
assembly, freedom to travel, and could participate fully in markets. They also looked like their Arab neighbors.
Islamophobes ignore this evidence. The people who talk about Islamic anti-Semitism don’t know
what they're talking about; in journals, in books, in the
blogosphere, they lack a context or sense of history.
How did the relationship change? Several factors. The rise of Arab nationalism. The
intervention of western imperialism, which sometimes granted special status
to Jews. And the arrival of the Zionists.
Cohen turned to the cartoon. He pointed out that it was neither fully anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist either. Who does this lady remind
you of? We all shouted at once, Golda Meir. Exactly. And the man is a soldier.
So it has an anti-Zionist component. But you cannot remove the anti-Semitic
component, the blood libel, the disgusting degraded caricatures. And the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are translated all over the Arab world now.
The
political use of the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab societies post 48 is overdone.
There is actually, he said, some great nostalgia among these Jews for the societies that
they left. They were happy there. They had existed there for ages. They did well. There was not the long
narrative of persecution that the Ashkenazi Jews have. The popularity of the term "Judeo-Christian ethic" in
the years after the Holocaust was actually a form of penance by the Christian
world and is misleading. As Bernard Lewis has stated, Islam and
Judaism have far more in common.
We came to the end of the lecture. What is going to
happen? There are two scenarios, or maybe three. If there is a peace deal, and
the occupation and oppression of Palestinians that has lasted 40 years ends, the anti-Semitism might "fade away." It's not deeply rooted, and "it's largely fueled by the conflict itself." Please note that at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cohen used the word: "oppression," without a qualifier. Good on ya, mate. Though of course he insisted on two states.
On the other hand, even with the Arab-Israeli conflict gone, the years of Arab militancy and resistance and terrorism may have entrenched this hatred in Arabs to the point that people won't give it up. And maybe Israelis won't give up "anti-Muslimism," either, he said. Antisemitism may continue as a "veiled protest against normalization" of relations with Israel or as an answer to domestic problems not easily resolved.
Cohen's third scenario was a scenario without a peace deal: Absence of agreement, "the very worst case scenario," with consequences we don't even want to imagine. "Terrible" developments that will make the issue of Muslim antisemitism irrelevant. Let's hope for good news. This was a reference to Iran, I think.
"Thank you," Cohen said. He had spoken for 50 minutes.
In the Q-and-A, there were two interesting questions. One guy asked about the Damascus riots of 1840 that targeted Jews. I knew someone would ask me about this, Cohen said. He insisted that it fell within his theory. Christians had introduced the idea of a blood libel into Damascus. It was Christian-fomented. The sultan had repeatedly rejected the idea of the blood libel.
The second question was mine. I never ask questions at these events; but I rushed to the microphone. The provocative question I was tempted to ask was, How do you answer the idea in both Ian Lustick's recent paper and Trita Parsi's book that Israel has helped militarize the region and helped propagate in the west the idea of "radical Islam" as a way of preserving its joined-at-the-hip relationship to the superpower, the U.S. In my provocative youth, I would have asked that question.
Instead, I asked about assimilation and intermarriage. Was this a factor in the relations of Moslems and Jews?
Cohen seemed a little surprised by the question. It is inspiring to watch a learned man turn on a high inside fastball. He instantly took up the subject and said a few interesting things. There was no assimilation in traditional Muslim societies. You were one thing or another. You could convert; and a Muslim man could marry a Jewish woman–marriage between a Jewish man and a Muslim woman being barred under Muslim law–and in such a marriage there was an expectation that the Muslim man would respect the Jew's religion.
Assimilation, Cohen said, is a term that describes the secular, neutral space in a society between religions. This space was first created in modern Europe, with the rise of liberal ideas. (Immediately I thought of Jacob Katz's classic, Out of the Ghetto.) When that space exists, people can give up religion and take on different attributes of the other.
What you had in Muslim societies were "acculturated" Jews. Arab Jews. They spoke Arabic, they wrote in Arabic, they felt home in the places they lived. Indeed, he said, it is almost verboten in Israel to speak today of being an Arab Jew, "it is dangerous" to be so identified, but this is how the Jews who were forced out of Arab societies after '48 often thought of themselves.
"You would be amazed to know how much they felt a part of the Arab world. They were Arabs. They were immersed in Arab culture."
At a great lecture, you learn something about yourself. I walked out past the paintings of the legendary leaders of the Jewish Theological Seminary and realized that I am most comfortable in that secular space between religions. I grew up in that space, I've always made friends in that space. And there is a wonderful tradition of it, across human civilization. The problem with Zionism and more generally Jewish parochialism, for me, is that it says That space is a dangerous one. Well it never has been for me. Our great task is to create that space across the Middle East.
Finally I'd say that while Cohen is a Zionist, he is intimate with the Arab world, and for me, his lecture described a tragic aspect of Zionism, the end of acculturation. Today in Jerusalem you see no Arab artifacts on Jews' walls. Yes, it's true, Cohen said that the origins of Muslim antisemitism were manifold. But in his final scenario, what was the most important factor in his considerations? Resolution of the Israeli/Arab conflict. If this is resolved, he seemed to say, a new golden era of relations could begin. And, by implication: who knows what new cohesion Jerusalem, the nucleus of pluralism, might again produce.
