Muslims and Jews

The single thing I consider most important to know in this area is that Muslims and Jews have not always been at odds. According to the Qur’an, Jews and Christians are “People of the Book” and they have a protected status in Muslim-majority societies, where they are free to practice their religion, earn a living, and raise families in their own traditions. For most of the last 1400 years, if you were going to be born a Jew, it was far better to be born in the Muslim world than the Christian world. That’s not to say that there were never tensions between groups in Muslim societies – that’s not the way human nature works – but it was Christian societies that had the most intensive persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust. In many times and places, Muslims and Jews interacted comfortably and casually, much as, say, Catholics and Protestants do nowadays in the United States.

Since the creation of Israel in 1948, however, one multi-religious society after another has broken down. Muslim hostility towards Jews grew, and was often stoked by political leaders for political purposes. Jews’ fears reflected not just local sentiments, but also their awareness of what was happening elsewhere in the world and what had happened in Germany. Many Jews left predominantly-Muslim societies where their ancestors had lived for centuries. Many Palestinians deeply resented losing their land and livelihoods, apparently to atone for what Europeans had done. In the years since 1948, many people’s loyalties and identities have shifted dramatically, repeatedly, and often painfully. An insightful exploration of this convoluted process is found in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage.

Much has been written about Palestine and Israel and their interlocked history, and I do not feel qualified to offer guidance about what to read in this enormous field with such heavy political implications. So let me simply suggest one book that tells a local and personal story – Adam LeBor’s City of Oranges.

Many people nowadays feel like Muslims and Jews are inherently locked in an eternal conflict, in which case I see no hope for resolving the very particular conflicts surrounding Palestine and Israel. But that perception is historically incorrect. Jews and Muslims have lived in peace in the past, which gives me hope that they will again live in peace in the future, and the tragedies of the last half-century will eventually fade into history. I hope so.

Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999). Ahmed’s memoir is lyrically written and very personal, but it also has a larger vision than most memoirs. It describes her 1940s childhood in a privileged Egyptian family, her father’s fall from favor because he opposed Nasser’s Aswan Dam project on environmental grounds, her studies in the “harem” of Girton College, her encounter with modern feminism, and her move to the United States, where she is now a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Along the way Ahmed reflects on women’s traditions and men’s traditions within Islam, language and literacy, colonialism and nationalism, Arab identity, the breakdown of Egypt’s multi-religious society, her discovery that many Egyptians in the early 20th century supported Zionism, and how some interpretations and experiences of Islam overtake others. This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read and I recommend it highly.

Adam LeBor, City of Oranges: An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (2006). LeBor traces the history of several families in and around Jaffa, a millennia-old city that has recently been absorbed into Tel Aviv. These families are both Arab (Muslim and Christian) and Jewish, and LeBor portrays all of them sympathetically without ignoring how one hurt can lead to another or pretending that any family, or any person, can be perfect. The only group for which he apparently cannot find sympathy is what he calls “the Ashkenazi elite,” and such people play only a shadowy (and sometimes sinister) role in his history. The book sometimes has internal inconsistencies, perhaps due to its quality of writing – it could have used a better editor. But much can be forgiven in a book that is this good at tracing the connections between world-historical events and the texture of real people’s lives.