Muslim Jews

In 2005, around the time I was thinking about the Moorish legacy in New Mexico, and indeed all of the Americas, Tom Reiss, an American writer of Jewish heritage, published the story of an enigmatic Jew with the Muslim name of Kurban Said, considered to be the Shiite nation of Azerbaijan’s national writer and author of Ali and Nino (first published in Germany, in 1937), a love story between a Christian girl and a Muslim boy set during the early twentieth-century oil boom in the wildly cosmopolitan atmosphere of Baku. When Reiss later came across a book titled Blood and Oil in the Orient, he found out that Kurban Said was another name for Essad-Bey, both pseudonyms of Lev Nussimbaum, known throughout the world as a Muslim writer. Nussimbaum published sixteen books, “most of them international bestsellers and one enduring masterpiece, all by the age of thirty,” but he “refused to be branded or categorized from the outside” and was therefore “an ideological Houdini, becoming a racial and religious cross-dresser in a decade when race and religion were as fixed as a death sentence.” He was born on a train between Zurich and Baku to Abraham Nussimbaum, an Ashkenazi Jew and oil-rich millionaire, one of the wealthiest men in the city, and a revolutionary mother, also an Ashkenazi Jew, probably from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (the geographical area to which Jews of the Russian Empire were confined after 1791), who apparently plotted with Stalin against her own bourgeois husband and committed suicide (by drinking acid) in 1911 or 1912, when Lev was six or seven and she was in her twenties. Lev grew up amid the tolerance, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism of Muslim rule in the Caucasus, not in the virulent anti-Semitic culture of Russia.1

From a very early age, Nussimbaum was drawn to the Muslim section of Baku; it was a place of relief and escape, where he had inexplicable feelings of kinship to Muslim culture. “To this day,” he later wrote, “I still do not know whence this feeling came, nor how to explain it. Perhaps it, too, was inherited from an unknown ancestor? I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of the Arabic edifices every night. [And] I do know that it was the most powerful, most formative feeling of my life.” Such feelings had a big hold on his imagination: “Things I had read, heard, and thought mixed themselves into these dreams. I saw the broad expanse of the sandy Arabian desert, I saw the horsemen, their snow-white burnooses billowing in the wind, I saw the flocks of prophets praying toward Mecca and I wanted to be one with this wall, one with this desert, one with this incomprehensible, intricate script, one with the entire Islamic Orient, which in our Baku had been so ceremoniously carried to the grave, to the victorious drumbeats of European culture.”2 When he discovered the “Kipta, or Bani Israel—the mountain Jews of Azerbaijan” speaking a medieval dialect of Persian, he found them to be indistinguishable from their Muslim neighbors. He even believed that the two were sworn allies against the West. No wonder, then, that Nussimbaum reinvented his father as a descendant of Turkic and Persian aristocrats.3

In the summer of 1918, Nussimbaum and his father fled Bolshevik-occupied Baku to Turkistan, then to Bukhara, and from there to Persia (the country would become Iran in 1935, “land of the Aryans,” partly because of German influence), whose civilization with its many sects and ancient traditions mesmerized him. It was a land whose mostly Shiite people, despite their celebration of passion plays commemorating the deaths of Ali and his children, “did not like to fight” and “where poetry and art mattered more than ideology and weapons.” In fact, “Shiism’s encouragement of the underdog nurtured Lev’s view of Islam as a bastion of heroic resistance in a world of brute force and injustice.” After a few misadventures and refuge in a mosque, father and son eventually returned to their house in Baku, now guarded and occupied by German and Turkish officers.4

It didn’t take long for the Bolsheviks to come back with their dreadful cheka, the police unit that would inspire Hitler’s gestapo, and whose autos-da-fé were reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition (a point that wasn’t lost on Joseph Pérez, the historian of the Inquisition);5 so they escaped through Georgia to Constantinople, the same city that had once welcomed Spain’s expelled Jews but now, in 1921, was so caught up in its own political remaking that the good times for refugees couldn’t last. Yet, here, Nussimbaum was in heaven. “I think I went mad for days,” he wrote before he died. “Walking among the palaces, the viziers and court officials . . . I was reeling with ecstasy, walking through the streets of the Caliph city. . . . Was that even I? A stranger with different feelings, different thoughts. . . . I believe that my life began in Istanbul. I was 15 then. I saw the life of the Orient and I knew that as much as I yearned for Europe, I would be forever captivated by this life.”6

Soon, father and son boarded a ship to Italy, leaving behind, as the younger Nussimbaum saw it, the Muslim culture of Constantinople that had given him purpose in life. “As he traveled west, dressed in his European suit, he was increasingly sure that no matter how he might appear to people on the outside or what it said in his Georgian passport, inwardly he was a Man from the East, a realm of lost glory and mystery. He began to fantasize about a pan-Islamic spirit that would preserve everything from revolutionary upheaval.” A monarchist by necessity, he thought that the “end of the imperial system in Europe and the Near East [such as the Hapsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire] unleashed a string of little genocides all across the continent” and that, like the Gypsies, the Jews, without a single Jewish nation in the world, “couldn’t claim a patch of ground as their ancestral land.” It was around this time that he decided to “adopt an Ottoman identity.”7

After a brief stay in Italy in 1921, where the anti-Bolshevik movement of fascism was being born and Mussolini was highly praised by European and American leaders, the Nussimbaums went to Paris, the center of White Russian exiles and home to Lev’s mother’s relatives. Ironically, the White Russian exodus was the first of its kind in twentieth-century Europe, and only the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, in Reiss’s view, can be compared to it (Reiss doesn’t seem to be aware of the case of the Moriscos in 1609): “Of course, there was a historic irony in that the Russians now found themselves in a position mirroring that of the Jews throughout the millennia, for entering the twentieth century, Russia had been the capital of world anti-Semitism.” After much thought, it was decided that the by-now-rather-odd, sixteen-year-old Nussimbaum would be educated in Germany.

While attending a Russian gymnasium in Berlin, with mostly Russian Jewish and other White Russian students, Nussimbaum was challenged to rethink his sense of separateness. By this time, too, German nationalists had been influenced by Russian anti-Semitism and the widespread circulation of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first “published as a series of newspaper articles in St. Petersburg in 1903.” The White Russians had come to see bolshevism “as a mask for a vast Asiatic devil plot led by Jews, Freemasons, Muslims, and a host of other ‘Eastern’ bogeymen.” This diabolical synthesis of German and Russian nationalisms turned Germany into a menacing and foreboding place.8 Lying about his citizenship status (as he always did), Nussimbaum discovered that he could indulge in his love for the Orient at the Seminar for Oriental Languages at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin and promptly signed up as Essad Bey Nousimbaoum, despite not having finished his gymnasium curriculum (a fact he hid from both schools): “There was no holding me back. I went to the rector, I went to the dean, I went to the director of the institute, begged for them to let me study there and I was successful. . . . I tore my way into the discipline like a starved dog who’d suddenly come on a piece of meat.”9

Nussimbaum realized that the Orient was a profession to his professors, not “a mysterious compulsion” as it was for him. Still, he was now an orientalist. In fact, it was his knowledge of the Orient that helped him graduate from the Russian gymnasium, where he had been considered “a very poor candidate.” Not only did he relish studying the Orient but, in August 1922, he walked into the Turkish embassy in Berlin and converted to Islam, assuming the aristocratic name of Essad Bey. (His first attempt at conversion in Constantinople, when he was fifteen, had gotten muddled by the ignorance of a mullah.) The following year, he joined a group of Muslims in founding the Islamic community of Berlin and, though he had no attraction for politics, started speaking out “about the wretched situation of Muslims in the colonial world.” He also became a prolific writer, writing for one of the leading publications in Germany, Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World), eventually outpacing Walter Benjamin, another contributor, in publishing “an average of one book every ten months” before he died, at age thirty-six. So prolific was he that his business manager begged him in 1934 to publish less.10

The “turbaned, dagger-toting Azeri literato named Essad Bey” was at home in the world of the German Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who wore “harem pants, a turban, and with long black hair, with a cigarette in a holder,” claimed to speak the “Asiatic” of the “Wild Jews.” (She would later win the Kleist Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor, in 1932.)11 To be sure, as Reiss puts it, “many Jewish journalists and scholars were writing books on the Middle East at the time, often out of a deep and sympathetic knowledge of the Muslim world, but they did not tramp around Berlin dressed in turbans, speak of their filial ties to warrior chieftains, and call themselves by fancy Turkish names.” Nussimbaum’s biographies of Mohammed and Stalin were best sellers, whereas Blood and Oil in the Orient turned the German army, right-wing groups, and certain Muslim nationalists who misread his sympathies for the Orient against him, and they outed him as an impostor who had forged his Muslim identity.

Nussimbaum, however, remained undaunted. After marrying a newly hired, dark-eyed secretary at Die Literarische Welt, the Jewish Erika Loewendahl, daughter of the wealthy Walter (“Daddy”) Loewendahl who owned the Czech-based shoe brand Bata in Germany, he lectured in Turkey, where his command of the language was appreciated. When the couple moved to the United States in 1933 and settled in a lavish residence in Manhattan, Nussimbaum was described by the New York Herald Tribune as “a true descendant of the race of Scheherazade,” a proud Muslim, monarchist, and orientalist who was a “tough morsel for the [U.S.] melting pot.” But Nussimbaum didn’t like U.S. commercial culture, with its postlecture receptions and Manhattan’s lonely skyscrapers. By 1938, he was back in Europe without his wife, who left him for a friend. His membership in the Third Reich’s German Writers Union was canceled, leaving him no serious publishing outlets in the German-speaking world. By this time, he had made the decision not to return to the United States (a mysterious, inexplicable decision that he would ponder on his deathbed). He published novellas in Polish, took a new agent, and eventually coauthored, with Wolfgang von Weisl, a Zionist who tried to convert Arabs to Zionism, Allah Is Great: The Decline and Rise of the Islamic World, about which Die Jüdische Rundschau (The Jewish Review) wrote that the authors “predict the loss of European colonial empires in Asia and the corresponding fear of an alliance of Islam with the yellow and brown races.”12

Thus banned, Nussimbaum sought the help of a fellow orientalist, the Austrian convert to Islam Baron Omar-Rolf von Ehrenfels, who wrote about the potential of “interfaith healing between Muslims and Jews,” among many other topics. It was under the name of Kurban Said (presumably the pseudonym of Elfriede Ehrenfels von Bodmershof, Omar-Rolf’s second wife, to whom the work was legally copyrighted) that Nussimbaum managed to publish Ali and Nino, in 1937. Meanwhile, although his father remained in Vienna, Nussimbaum ended up in Italy, where he hoped to write Mussolini’s biography but was denied access to him. Denounced by his enemies to the Fascist authorities, he moved into Casa Pattison, a house in the coastal town of Positano, where, with Raynaud’s syndrome suddenly plaguing his feet, he scribbled furiously in his notebooks and on whatever paper he could find, eventually producing The Man Who Knew Nothing about Love. Poor, starving, and dying, the “unfortunate Muslim,” as he was known, received the community’s help. A mysterious Algerian, Dr. Ahmed Giamil Vacca-Mazzara, probably a native of Tripoli named Bello Vacca, a drug dealer, smuggler, and convert to Islam, helped Nussimbaum during his last days and built his gravestone in the village cemetery overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, next to a medieval tower that “had been erected to warn of approaching Saracen raiders.”13 The tombstone was capped with a stone turban and inscribed in Arabic. Nussimbaum’s remains may have later been rearranged to face Mecca more properly, as John Steinbeck wrote in a 1935 article for Harper’s Bazaar, describing the strange fate of Positano’s “Muslim,” unaware that the man he was writing about had also been a prominent author.

Nussimbaum died in late August 1942, more than a year after his father had been deported to Poland and most likely had died in Treblinka. Had Nussimbaum’s father been sent to the death camp Auschwitz and meekly accepted his fate, he would, ironically, have been called Muslim—Muselmann—by the camp’s Nazi guards, because that is how the category of doomed Jew was designated in the made-up Nazi idiom.14 In the Nazi artificial language, Lingua Tertii Imperii (LTI), Muslims were the Jews who had given up all hope of struggle and survival, the “men and women reduced to staring,” in the words of Inga Clendinnen, “listless creatures, no longer responding even to beatings, who for a few weeks existed barely—and who then collapsed and were sent out to the gas.”15 The label designated, in the words of Elie Wiesel, “those resigned, extinguished souls who had suffered so much evil as to drift to a waking death,” those “who were dead but didn’t know it.”16 Primo Levi remembered the Muselmänner as the “backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men, who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.” The Muselmänner crowded Levi’s “memory with their faceless presence” because they were the very embodiment of humanity’s evil to humanity. “If I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image,” wrote Levi, “I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen.”17 So horrific was the case of the “Muslims” among the internees that one writer, Emil Fackenheim, described them as “the most truly original contribution of the Third Reich to civilization.”18 “It is for [the Muselmann] that Auschwitz was created,” wrote the Hebrew novelist Yehiel Feiner (also known as Yehiel De-Nur or, better still, as Ka-Tzetnik 135633) in Moni: A Novel of Auschwitz.19

The term Muslims was chosen to designate Jews in their most helpless state because, Inga Clendinnen and Giorgio Agamben postulate, it connects the docility of the victims and the widespread view of Islam as a religion of fatalism. “The term,” though, “like the condition, was current in many camps among prisoners and guards: a small linguistic indicator of the coherence of the univers concentrationnaire.” In Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, for instance, the Muselmänner were known as “tired sheikhs” and Muselweiber (female Muslims). Yet, probably because of the code name, the Muselmänner vanished from studies and encyclopedias of the Holocaust, ceding their place to the Nazi-sympathizing mufti of Jerusalem, thereby reordering priorities and effacing the pain of the original victims because of the politics of the moment. “It is a striking fact,” wrote Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz, “that although all witnesses speak of him as a central experience, the Muselmann is barely named in the historical studies on the destruction of European Jewry.”20 Whatever the origin of the choice of this word for this category of Jews, we know that a popular German song of the time, which associated coffee (a Turkish, and therefore Muslim, drink) with weak nerves, paleness, and sickness, concluded with these lines: “Sei doch kein Muselmann, / der ihn nicht lassen kann!” (Don’t be a Muslim / who can’t help it!)21

The Muslim, then, took the place of the Jew at the very end of Europe’s genocidal impulse as conceived by Georges Bensoussan. Just as Jew and Muslim started out as Christianity’s Other in the Middle Ages, and just as the Jew embraced the Moorish heritage to better resist European barbarism in the high age of the Enlightenment, the Jew reached the end of the genocidal rope, or gas chamber, as a Muslim. In a “ferocious irony,” commented Agamben, “the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews.”22 It is this remarkable fate, this overlapping of Jewish and Muslim identities in the European imagination, that has been largely unexplored, in the opinion of Gil Anidjar. As Anidjar emphasizes, “The Jewish question has never been anything but the Arab question,” because, in truth, one doesn’t exist without the other: “From the Crusades to accusations of ritual murder, from Shylock and Othello to the perverse distinctions that the French colonial regime established between Jews and Arabs in Algeria and in France, the Jew, the Arab [a phrase that Anidjar borrows from Jacques Derrida] has been in turns the theological or political enemy, but also the military, religious and ethnic enemy against whom the West fails.” Hence, “holy wars and expulsion, colonialism and genocide, mission civilisatrice and secularization, Islamophobia and Judeophobia have always been the two faces of the same and only question, the same strategy.”23

One needs to remember, too, that much of the Jewish heritage (language, theology, philosophy) is coterminous with the Islamic one, both happening within the same culture or sphere.24 In any case, Judaism would appear to be a quintessentially oriental religion, at least in the geographical and cultural sense, one that emerged and later developed in what are today the lands of Islam. It is Judaism’s embeddedness in the Middle East, regardless of its theological proximity to Islam, that has made the Jew the oriental Other in Christian Europe, for one can assume (at least in the primordial sense that religions are stamped by their birthplaces as much as by their historical evolution, not to mention genes)25 that, of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity is the most European, having been established as an imperial faith in the early centuries after Jesus’s death.

That Judaism is deeply intertwined with the Middle East and that Middle Eastern Jews have played a major role in the making of the Jewish religion are facts at the center of Raymond Scheindlin’s history of the Jewish people. Through trials, migrations, triumphs, defeats, and diasporas, early Jewish history was staged in what is today the larger Middle East. A Jewish identity, with its god (Yahweh) and the Jews’ “messianic dream” of someday returning to their glorious kingdom,26 was forged in the wake of the Diaspora following the fall and leveling of Jerusalem and its Temple by Babylonian forces in 587 BC. Though Jews survived the second loss of Jerusalem, to the Romans in AD 70, through the adoption of a rabbinical system and its scriptures (particularly the Babylonian Talmud), and then endured Greek and Roman anti-Semitic persecutions, the rise of Islam may very well have given the Jews a new lease on life, as they were for the first time united, with minor exceptions, by a common language across Muslim lands and protected by law from random persecution. “Aramaic-speaking Jews and Hellenized Jews” were brought together by the Islamic expanse and the lingua franca of Arabic. Thus, noted the eminent historian Bernard Lewis, Arabic “became the language of science and philosophy, of government and commerce, even the language of Jewish theology when such a discipline began to develop under Islamic influence.” While living in Cairo in 1190, the celebrated rabbi-philosopher Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides (1135–1204), wrote his famous treatise, Guide to the Perplexed, in Arabic before it was translated into Hebrew. So close were the two religions that one could talk about a Judeo-Islamic culture or tradition, one that parallels “the Judaeo-Christian tradition of which we are accustomed to speak in the modern world.”27

Major intellectual centers flourished in Baghdad, where Greek philosophy and sciences were studied by Muslims and Jews alike, and where the geonim (spiritual leaders) became the undisputed authority on religious law. One of these, the gaon of the Academy of Sura, Saadia ben Joseph (882–942), wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew, introduced philosophy to the study of religion, and founded a Judeo-Arabic literature. “Saadia may be said to have Arabized rabbinic Judaism not merely through his choice of the Arabic language, but by adapting the rabbinic tradition to the best of contemporary intellectual life.” According to Lucien Gubbay, the geonim of Baghdad “continued to uphold the unchallenged primacy of Babylonian Jewry, which lasted for close on seven hundred years.” The Karaites, “the people of Scripture,” a movement founded by Anan ben David, also emerged in Iraq, preaching sola scriptura and rejecting rabbinic law as “a fraudulent distortion of the principles of the Jewish religion,” instead paying close attention to Hebrew grammar and the commentaries. “It was in the tenth century that the Hebrew text of the Bible was authoritatively fixed, if not by Karaites, at least as a result of the impetus lent to this kind of work by their influence.”28

In fact, “the emergence of a Jewish theology took place entirely in Islamic lands,” and the use of Arabic had a significant impact on Hebrew philology: “Jews, studying Hebrew to achieve a better understanding of the Hebrew Bible, followed many of the procedures devised by Muslims examining Arabic for the parallel purpose of studying the sacred text of the Qur’ān.” Forms of worship, not to mention literature and the arts, were influenced by Islam. In many ways, the training and appointment of the Muslim ulema is comparable to the practice of the Orthodox rabbinate. The halakha and the shari’a, meaning “path” or “way,” “are surely closely related.” Both religions have dietary restrictions, although the Jewish ones are more extensive. The Muslim fatwa resembles the Jewish teshwot, and the Muslim notion of jihad has parallels with the Jewish doctrine of milhemet mitsva or milhemet hova, the only difference being that jihad can be global whereas the Jewish doctrine is “limited to one country.”

Unlike in Spain and Portugal after the Jews’ expulsion, marranismo was easier to tolerate in Islamic lands, perhaps because of the two religions’ strict monotheism, for, as Bernard Lewis argued, it was easier for Jews to live with the prophecy of Mohammed than with the Son of God. Despite hardships, conversion to Islam granted unequivocally equal status. In Muslim Spain, the Jew Samuel ha-Nagid, or Samuel ibn Nagrela (993–1056), “enjoyed a remarkably successful career as a statesman and general in the service of a Muslim ruler, and as a scholar, poet, and communal leader among the Jews.”29 Although Maimonides fled Muslim zealots in Spain, he prospered in Egypt, writing seminal works, as we have seen, in Hebrew and Arabic. But the combined attacks on Islam by crusaders and Mongols in Palestine, Spain, and Iraq compromised the status of dhimmis (religious minorities, mostly Christians and Jews) and gave occasional rise to public persecutions, leading rulers (as in Morocco) to give Jews special protection.30 Negative stereotypes of Jews certainly existed in Muslim lands, but the greatest Arab historian of all time, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), attributed such depictions to the hardships of discrimination, not to some essential, unchanging quality: “[Injury has been done] to every nation that has been dominated by others and treated harshly. The same thing can be seen clearly in all those persons who are subject to the will of others, and who do not enjoy full control of their lives. Consider, for instance, the Jews, whose characters owing to such treatment had degenerated so that they are renowned, in every age and climate, for their wickedness and their slyness.”31

After their expulsion from Spain, the Sephardim (Jews of Spain) were welcomed with open arms by Ottoman sultans and experienced, for about a century and a half, yet another golden age under the auspices of Islam. Over time, the Sephardim’s Spanish language was mixed with Turkish and Greek terms and evolved into Ladino or Judezmo. Unlike the Ashkenazim, who had focused almost exclusively on the study of the Talmud, the Sephardim in multiethnic and cosmopolitan Constantinople and Salonika recreated the vibrant cultural life of their ancestors in Muslim Spain. Safed, in Upper Galilee, became a major center of Jewish mysticism, home to Rabbi Isaac Luria. The impact of the Smyrna-born messianic kabbalist Shabbetai Zevi was widely felt—the Dönmeh, a sect of Muslim crypto-Jews, is his legacy—and an attempt by the Polish Jewish leader Jacob Frank to revive Zevi’s movement in the eighteenth century failed (Frank converted to Islam).32 Clearly, up to the fifteenth century, Jews in Muslim lands fared far better than their brethren in Christendom. A French Jew writing in the fifteenth century was so impressed by the status of Jews in Turkey that he called on his coreligionists to leave Christian lands and join him there:

I have heard of the afflictions, more bitter than death, that have befallen our brethren in Germany—of the tyrannical laws, the compulsory baptisms and the banishments, which are of daily occurrence. I am told that when they flee from one place a yet harder fate befalls them in another. . . . On all sides I learn of anguish of soul and torment of body; of daily exactions levied by merciless oppressors. The clergy and the monks, false priests that they are, rise up against the unhappy people of God. . . . For this reason they have made a law that every Jew found upon a Christian ship bound for the East shall be flung into the sea. Alas! How evil are the people of God in Germany entreated; how sad is their strength departed! They are driven hither and thither, and they are pursued even unto death. . . . Brothers and teachers, friends and acquaintances! I, Isaac Zarfati, though I spring from a French stock, yet I was born in Germany, and sat there at the feet of my esteemed teachers. I proclaim to you that Turkey is a land wherein nothing is lacking, and where, if you will, all shall yet be well with you. The way to the Holy Land lies open to you through Turkey. Is it not better for you to live under Muslims than under Christians? Here every man may dwell at peace under his own vine and fig tree. Here you are allowed to wear the most precious garments. In Christendom, on the contrary, you dare not even venture to clothe your children in red or in blue, according to our taste, without exposing them to the insult of beaten black and blue, or kicked green and red, and therefore are ye condemned to go about meanly clad in sad colored raiment. . . . And now, seeing all these things, O Israel, wherefore sleepest thou? Arise! And leave this accursed land forever!33

As Muslim power waned in relation to an aggressively ascending Europe, the status of Jews stagnated and deteriorated, especially as classical Christian anti-Semitism found its way into Arab lands (through Christian clients of France). Zionist nationalism also clashed with the Arab variety. Soon after Israel was created, in 1948, Jews in Arab and Muslim lands left for good, bringing an end to what was once the largest, most successful community of Jews in the world.

Before this dramatic turning point in relations between Jews and Muslims, many European Jews, like Africans in the United States, had adopted the Moorish or Arabian Islamic heritage as their own, using it to resist Europe’s assimilationist pressures. They proudly proclaimed themselves Orientals, not in the sense popularized by Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism (1978)34 but in a process of coming out, so to speak, after a long history in which the Jew stood for the Muslim at home and was thereby a target for domestic crusaders. We have seen that the two religions have much in common, but one must also remember that Islam is the younger partner in this marriage of faiths—a proud, jealous one, for that matter, because although aspects of Jewish theology were influenced by Islamic thinking, Islam consciously developed as an alternative or rival to Judaism following early disputes with the Jews in Medina and elsewhere in Arabia, after the migration of the Prophet, Mohammed, in 622.

The anxiety of Jewish influence led to what Bernard Lewis called Muslims’ “intentional distancing” from Jews and Christians, such as practicing the Sabbath on Friday.35 Mohammed, it must be recalled, was a prophet from a nation without writing, and thus without scripture. In the early phase of his settlement in Medina, which housed the three Arabized and relatively educated Jewish tribes of Qaynuqa, Nadir, and Qurayza, the practices of praying toward Jerusalem and fasting during Ashura (the tenth day of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar) seem to have been inspired by Jewish tradition; but, following disputes with the Jews, prayers were ordered toward Mecca in 624, and soon Ramadan was established to eclipse Ashura. Because Jews did not acknowledge Mohammed’s prophecy, Islam developed the theological theme of Abrahamism, that is, privileging the time before the prophets, and regarded itself as the “restoration of the original message.” The Torah and Psalms were not incorporated into Muslim scripture as they were in Christianity, a fact that led to the ignorance of Jewish tradition. Given this history, it is faith, and faith alone, not genealogy, that counts in Islam. In 628, Muslims conquered the mostly Jewish oasis of Khaybar, ninety-nine miles from Medina, and Jews were forced to accept the terms of surrender. The defeat and agreement with the Jews of Khaybar would become a model, “a locus classicus for later legal discussions of the status of conquered non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state.” Early on, Muslims imposed restrictions and a dress code on dhimmis, including wearing a special emblem, which later turned into the yellow badge, “introduced by a caliph in Baghdad in the ninth century and spread into Western lands in later medieval times.” Caliph ‘Umar I (634–644) expelled Jews and Christians from the whole of Arabia. As we have seen in the case of the Crusades and European encroachments on the Ottoman Empire, relations between dhimmis and Muslims would be affected by Muslims’ relations with the outside world.36

Though relatively better sheltered in Islamic lands, Jews were nevertheless persecuted and routinely humiliated for their faith. As a kid growing up in the cosmopolitan city of Tangier, in Morocco, a place that still boasts today an active synagogue, I witnessed firsthand the plight of Jewish minorities in our midst. Because the lihud (Jews) symbolized treachery and greed, to call someone a Jew was an insult. Muslims talk a lot about their respect for ahl al-kitab (People of the Book), but this is merely a ready-made excuse for not examining the fabric of our social patterns critically. Dhimmitude, the second-class status conferred on Christians and Jews in Islamic regimes—which is often presented by Muslim apologists as a testament to the tolerance of minorities in Islam—does not meet the minimum human rights expectations in nation-states. Under this theological legal code, Jews have lived precariously among Muslims throughout history, relying, at best, on the ruler’s protection against the ever-lurking violence of the mob. That an occasional courtier would rise to a position of prominence and power in no way meant that the collective rights of the Jewish community were secure. Without royal protection, Jews and Christians in Muslim societies were but one sermon away from catastrophe.

On the whole, Muslim violence is largely born out of ignorance. But it is, in some ways, a willed ignorance—the persistent refusal to measure Muslims’ complicity in the systematic discrimination against those who don’t share their faith. The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine should not erase the precarious status of the Jew in Muslim societies. Organizing colloquiums centered on the Holocaust in order to downplay the horrors visited upon European Jews is both a futile and pernicious attempt to soften centuries-old realities that cannot be ignored. Even if the goal is to shed light on the victimization of the Palestinians—the collateral damage of what Georges Bensoussan has termed Europe’s “genocidal passion”37—this approach makes sense only within the callous logic of a monstrous calculus.

One needs to keep in mind, then, this history of sharing, borrowing, rivalry, dispute, and persecution even as we focus on Muslims and Jews as substitutes for one another in Christian Europe’s imaginary, and on modern Jews embracing their Moorish heritage. Islam’s “intentional distancing” that Lewis mentions has not been entirely successful. Not only did the Semites originate from Arabia, but Moses is also by far the most cited biblical figure in the Qur’an. Islam may be the younger progeny of the Jewish monotheistic cosmogony, but if Arabic is the youngest of the Semitic languages, it is also the most archaic one, “probably the nearest to the ancestral Semitic language” and the “most widely spoken and written of all the Semitic languages.” Hebrew, revived as a common language for Zionists, is the second most widely spoken. (In fact, before the term Semitic was coined, in 1781, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz classified Hebrew as a member of the “Arabic” languages.)38 It is therefore as quarreling Semites that Jew and Moor stood on the stage of European history to face the long arm of persecution. Before the birth of Israel, such quarrels were minor enough to inspire prominent Jews to boast of their Muslim or Arab descent.

In their massive historical study The Jew as Ally of the Muslim (1986), using an exhaustive comparativist approach (193 pages of tightly packed notes, bibliographical resources in several languages, and a 40-page index), Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler set out to change our understanding of anti-Semitism by showing that classical anti-Semitism, rooted in Christian medieval charges of deicide and in social rivalries, was given new life by anti-Muslimism born out of the ongoing clash between the two world religions since, basically, the birth of Islam. Christian anti-Semitism, which had been dormant during the three centuries prior to the year 1000, emerged as a corollary of the Crusades, as the Jews came to be seen as the

natural allies of the Muslims. At the end of their first campaign, Christian crusaders ruthlessly slaughtered Muslims and Jews alike in Jerusalem, seeing them both as “the shadow-self of Christendom,” in the words of the noted interfaith historian Karen Armstrong.39 Indeed, the Cutlers go so far as to assert that, “had there been no such outburst of Christian hatred against the Muslims, anti-Semitism might well have died out altogether in Western society.”40 The edict of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 imposing distinctive clothing and a “badge of shame” on Jews (and Muslims) was part of a messianic policy whose final aims were the reconquest of Jerusalem and the degrading of its Muslim inhabitants. The fate of Jews in Spain, their persecution by the Inquisition after their sincere conversion in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the Jewish conversos’ reaction by going back to their ancestral faith were the result of the clash between Christians and Muslims. Moreover, “the Iberian Inquisition and its demonic attack upon thousands of innocent people in Europe and the New World circa 1480–1825 must ultimately be traced to the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711.”

Major scholars who have studied the medieval roots of modern anti-Semitism, such as Joshua Trachtenberg, author of The Devil and the Jews (1943), and Norman Cohn, author of, among other important works, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), “acknowledge the importance of the association of Jew with Muslim by medieval Christians as a factor in the history of anti-Semitism.” Pope John XXIII’s conciliatory attitude toward Islam in the mid-twentieth century may have prepared the ground for the church’s new attitude toward the Jews in Vatican II and subsequent changes in Catholic theology, but the problem of anti-Semitism cannot be truly solved without addressing, and coming to terms with, anti-Muslimism. This is a particularly daunting challenge, for “racial, ethnic, and political passions and enmities [including anti-Muslimism] remain very powerful forces.” Conceived during the cold war, the Cutlers’ argument may appear dated, now that anti-Semitism seems to surface mostly in its Islamic guise, typically triggered by political disputes and armed conflict over land in the Middle East. Still, “this approach to the history of anti-Semitism via anti-Muslim and ethnopolitical tensions makes a far greater contribution to modern efforts to fight and cure the chronic and pernicious social disease which is anti-Semitism than the approach via Christian theology and the deicide charge!”41

Peter the Venerable (1094–1156), the abbot of the highly influential monastic movement at Cluny who supported the Reconquista against the Moors, sponsored the translation of texts known collectively as the Collectio toletana, or the Toletano-Clunaic corpus, consisting of Arabic and original Latin texts translated for the main purpose of refuting Islam. This was a watershed event in medieval Christian-Islamic relations, coinciding with the Second Crusade (1145–1150). Yet, as important as this corpus was, even more significant was the earlier work of Petrus Alfonsi, born Moses of Huesca, a Jewish convert to Christianity (baptized in 1106) who mastered Arabic and was thus able to join the refutation of Jews and Muslims in his anti-Jewish polemic Dialogues against the Jews (ca. 1100). (His later work included, according to the Cutler thesis, translations [under the name of Peter of Toledo] and annotations for the Toletano-Clunaic corpus.) Alfonsi was also instrumental in translating Islamic medieval science into Latin, which, along with the Toletano-Clunaic corpus, enabled the nascent movement of the Renaissance. “Indeed, the major thrust of Alfonsi’s life and work taken as a whole was the attempt to solve the problem of Christian-Islamic, not Christian-Jewish relations,” for translating the intellectual traditions of Muslims would enable Christians to defeat Muslims intellectually as well as militarily. Whatever Alfonsi’s primary target, John Tolan shows that the medieval polemicist’s work marks a major turning point in the move to link Muslim and Jew in the Christian imaginary. Alfonsi’s influence cannot be overstated. His “attack on Islam found its way into the encyclopedic Speculum historiale of Vincent de Beauvais; thirteenth-century Dominican master general Humbert of Romans recommended it as required reading for those who preached the Crusades, and numerous fourteenth-and fifteenth-century authors reused it.”42

In this way, the birth of the Renaissance (if such an expression may be used) was also the (re)birth of anti-Semitism (an interesting phenomenon to ponder, given that the pattern was repeated in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe), for both were inextricably linked to the all-consuming purpose of conquering Islam. This is not surprising, because Jews had always been treated as the Muslims’ allies. “Was it mere coincidence that neither blood nor desecration-of-the-host libels were known in Western Europe before the Crusades?” the Cutlers asked. “Was it sheer coincidence that the first known instance of the blood libel in Western Europe, at Norwich, England, 1144, occurred during the decade of the Second Crusade, while the first known instance of the desecration-of-the-host libel, at Belitz, near Berlin, 1243, occurred the year before the Christians lost Jerusalem to the Muslims[?]” The first “major international persecution of the Jews,” following on the heels of scattered accusations in Spain, France, and Italy, “is clearly and unequivocally attributed by the Christian primary sources to the charge that the Jews were in league with the Muslims (specifically, in league with al-Hakim, the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, who destroyed the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem circa 1010),” thereby setting the tone for the persecutions of 1096 (the First Crusade). The Jews seemed to be natural allies of the caliph, or of Muslims, because of their similar theological and ritual practices and because the Jews of western Europe had come, directly or indirectly, from Muslim lands, where many still maintained contact.

The Crusades themselves were the outcome of a dynamic, imperialistic European civilization, driven by the messianic goal of taking back Jerusalem and converting Muslims. They also engendered the stock motifs of classical anti-Semitism. When, during the First Crusade, Jerusalem was literally submerged in its dwellers’ blood, crusader chroniclers, such as Raymond d’Aguilers, justified Christian massacres with the charge that Muslims “torture and mutilate crucifixes, icons, and the Eucharist, or even Christian children,” accusations that would later justify “many a pogrom, from the thirteenth century to the twentieth.”43 Equating Mohammed with the beast of the Apocalypse, the millenarian Pope Innocent III’s call for a new (Fifth) Crusade, on April 19, 1213, foresaw the ending of Islam by 1284. Such a momentous event would be initiated through, first, the conquest, defeat, and degradation of Muslims (through the differentiating elements of distinctive clothing and badges), then their conversion. Jews were assumed to be part of this process. It is for this reason that canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council, which deals with clothing and the badge, addresses Jews and Muslims, treating them as one and the same as it collapses time and “implies that Moses imposed a distinction in clothing . . . upon both Jews and Muslims!” Clearly, Innocent III (1198–1216) was far more interested in Christian-Islamic relations than he was in Christian-Jewish differences. Yet “no one has attempted to study Pope Innocent III’s Jewish policy [distinctive clothing, ‘badge of shame’] in terms of his Muslim policy.” For this reason, the Cutlers conclude that “the Jews were brought into the picture primarily because the Christians equated them with the Muslims and considered them Islamic fifth columnists in Christian territory. Hence, Christian-Islamic relations determined Christian-Jewish relations in one of the most crucial episodes in the history of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.”44

Between circa AD 600 and 1100, when anti-Semitism was not a major threat, the Jews associated themselves, in some of their major writings, with Arabs and Muslims. To explain the changing image of the Jew in Christian Europe from the medieval period to the High Middle Ages (that is, from contemptuous indifference to open hostility), Jeremy Cohen proposes that it was the Jews’ association with Muslims during the Crusades that accounts for this shift, this “reclassification” in Christian consciousness:

If, during the early Middle Ages, the Jews were the only non-Christians who consistently comprised a part of the Latin Christian experience, then the crusades, conquests, scientific discovery, and intellectual vitality of the high Middle Ages introduced Western Europe to a much larger, Muslim community of monotheistic unbelievers. In the ensuing adaptations in the Christian world view, the Jew, as it were, had to move over, to make room for these others. As an infidel, he was no longer unique but now represented a small subset of a much larger class. This reclassification affected not only the substance of anti-Jewish discourse, but also the function of the Jew in Christian doctrine.45

As the twelfth-century rabbi Solomon bar Samson explained the violence toward Jews during the First Crusade, in 1096, if Muslims were Ishmaelites in out-of-bounds Jerusalem, Jews were now Ishmaelites at home.46 This view was echoed by Peter the Venerable of Cluny, in 1146, when he wrote to Louis VII supporting the Second Crusade: “Why should we pursue the enemies of the Christian faith in far distant lands while vile blasphemers far worse than any Saracens, namely the Jews, who are not far away from us, but who live in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity!?”47

There were perceived differences between Muslims and Jews, to be sure. For Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the prominent Cistercian abbot who, according to the renowned medievalist Norman Cantor, “seems to have dominated the western church” in the middle of the twelfth century, “the Muslim exemplifies the passion for violence, conquest, and slaughter, [whereas] the Jew that for money and material profit.” But such differences were merely academic, because, in Bernard’s view, “the crusade expedites triumph over both.”48 The Protestant Reformation inherited the same legacy. Johannes Brenz (1499–1570), a colleague of Martin Luther and author of How Preachers and Laymen Should Conduct Themselves If the Turk Were to Invade Germany (1537), written after the first Ottoman siege of Vienna, in 1529, joined Luther in linking Jew and Turk.49

Thus, the genocidal impulse that Bensoussan traces cannot be separated from Europe’s crusading spirit against Islam, because, according to Richard Southern in his Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962), “the existence of Islam was the most far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom.”50 Although Muslims occasionally appeared as “new Jews,” making anti-Muslimism an extension of anti-Judaism,51 it is simply impossible to disconnect the rise of medieval Christian anti-Semitism from the Christian Crusades against Islam. As the Cutlers put it,

The climax of high medieval anti-Semitism was the Jewish badge imposed by Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. That badge was a key element in the ghettoization process of Central Europe (from Italy to Germany). This process began in earnest in the fourteenth century (after the Black Plague, during which frightful massacres of the Jews were perpetrated) and lasted to the time of the French Revolution/Napoleon. The badge was revived along with the ghettoization process by Hitler’s Nazi movement, leading ultimately to the gas ovens and the extermination of six million Jews.52

It is not for no reason, then, that the Nazis called the most helpless and degraded of their Jewish victims Muslims. Although quite a few “Jewish medieval scholars” held judgment on the merits of the Cutlers’ book—Gil Anidjar, for one, wondered whether “the scholars protest too much”53—the association of Jew with Muslim, until very recently, was not as unusual at it now appears. Some of the most prominent writers in Jewish history worked in tandem with their Muslim colleagues in Moorish Spain, despite the occasional setbacks and waves of Islamic intolerance. Even Jewish poets who were part of Christian Spain still felt closer to Muslims than to Christians. The little-known poet Todros Abulafia, who lived in thirteenth-century Christian Toledo, for instance, didn’t disguise his appreciation of high Muslim culture in contrasting sophisticated and erotically savvy Arab women with their uncouth Spanish peers:

There’s nothing wrong in wanting a woman,

and loving girls is hardly a sin—

but whether or not they’re pretty or pure,

Arabia’s daughters are what you should look for.

Stay far away from the Spanish Christians,

although they’re fair and bright as the sun,

for they’ll provide neither comfort nor ease,

even with shawls and silken sleeves:

their dresses are always covered with mud,

as their hems are dragged through dung and crud.

Their minds are empty from heartless whoring—

when it comes to seduction, they know not a thing.

But the Arab woman’s grace is her glory,

ravishing spirits, banishing worry.

And whether or not she’s wearing her clothes,

she looks as though she’s decked out in gold.

She’ll give you pleasure when the day arrives,

for in lewdness’s ways and desire she’s wise,

her legs gripped tightly around your head,

crying out Lord!!—and raising the dead.

The lover who opts for the Christian feast

is just like a man who’d lie with a beast.54

The disdain for Christian culture bound together Jew and Muslim in Christian Europe despite the differences between the two religious communities. In Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta, first performed in 1592, such sentiments are clearly expressed in the exchange between Barabas and his Muslim slave, Ithamore:

Ithamore:

Once at Jerusalem, where the Pilgrims kneeled,

I strowèd powder on the marble stones

And therewithal their knees would rankle, so

That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples

Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.

Barabas:

Why, this is something! Make account of me

As of thy fellow; we are villains both:

Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians both.

Be true and secret, thou shalt want no gold.55

The poet Abulafia and the character Barabas did not become Muslim, as Lev Nussimbaum did, but Nussimbaum’s kinship with Islam was by no means unique. It was shared, as we shall see next, by writers and scholars throughout much of modern history.

Nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Jews, notably German-speaking ones, had an interest in promoting the positive legacies of Islam not only because they played a role in Islamic civilization but also because they wanted to prove that Semites and Orientals, long vilified in Europe or pressured into renouncing their heritage, had contributed much to European culture itself, even as they felt the sharp edge of the Christian sword. In his play Almansor (1823), the poet and essayist Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) highlighted the predicament of the enlightened Moors in Christian Spain to draw a parallel with that of the Jews in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Germany:

Almansor:

We heard that Ximenes the Terrible

In Granada, in the middle of the market-place

—my tongue refuses to say it!—cast the Koran

into the flames of a burning pyre!

Hassan [his servant]:

That was only a prelude; where they burn books

They will, in the end, burn human beings too.56

This passage would turn out to be a terribly prophetic literary turn, for the gassing of the Jews was preceded by the burning of subversive literature, a great portion of which was written by Jewish socialists and intellectuals. As late as 1917, in the midst of war carnage in Europe, the dramatist Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953), who had renounced his Judaism and would later become a Communist, wrote his play Mohammed (published in 1924) to highlight Islam’s egalitarianism. He has Mohammed chastising his detractor Abu Jahl for the vain pursuit of riches, which leads to violence. “One measures a people,” the Muslim Prophet says, “not by how much power and how many possessions it needs, but by how little it needs to be great!”57

Towering nineteenth-century Jewish orientalists from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), and Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), were unafraid to openly express their contempt for Christianity and the nefarious impact of Orthodox Judaism, particularly the insidious Polish variety. These proud scholars of the Jewish heritage were all convinced of “the indissoluble links that bound Judaism and Islam together in marked contrast to the breech birth that constitutes the origins of relations between Christianity and Judaism.” Thus, Geiger, “an ardent defender of Jewish rights, an intellectual who repeatedly took a public stand to defend his co-religionists by asserting, like Moses Mendelssohn before him, that the attainment of German citizenship should not entail Jewish conversion to Christianity,” believed that Christian Europe could never reproduce the relatively open climate in Moorish Spain that allowed Jewish thought to flourish. An implacable critic of Orthodox Judaism, he saw in Islam, with its brand of monotheism, prophecy, and divine revelation, the purest form of Judaism, particularly the Reform Judaism he favored. No wonder the highly accomplished Jews in Moorish Spain who wrote in Arabic were still, for him, the unsurpassable model, the “heroes of Wissenschaft,” as he called them.58

Heinrich Graetz, “the greatest Jewish historian of the nineteenth century,” shared the same feelings and views toward Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and Islamic Spain. “The height of culture which the nations of modern times are striving to attain,” he said, “was reached by the Jews of Spain in their most flourishing period.” This was so because both Jews and Muslims had a high appreciation for intellectual inquiry. Al-Andalus was preceded by Arabia, because the latter had been a place of refuge for the Jews after the destruction of Jerusalem. Graetz saw the Arab world as a “safe haven” for “the sons of Judah” and, indeed, claimed Islamic civilization to be a “glorious page in the annals of the Jews.” So contemptuous was Graetz of east European Jewry that he called Yiddish “a half-animal language.”59

Then there is the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher, whose work on the Middle East and Islam was considered unsurpassable by the eminent Arab historian Albert Hourani.60 A “precocious child” who obtained a doctorate at the age of nineteen but refused to convert to obtain a professorship, Goldziher also rejected Orthodox Judaism, traveled through the Orient, attended lectures, and engaged Muslim scholars at the al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. He was so impressed by what he discovered that he came to consider himself a Muslim, particularly given that he assessed Islam, with its rational approach, closer to the essence of “prophetic Judaism” and certainly congenial with the Reform Judaism he favored: “I termed my monotheism Islam, and I did not lie when I said I believed the prophecies of Muhammad.” While staying in Damascus in 1890, he wrote, “I truly entered in those weeks the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds.” Goldziher was too attached to his own faith (he studied the Talmud every day) to convert, but he did want to “elevate Judaism to a similar rational level.”61 He believed that Islam and progress could be reconciled, because “classical works from the Koran to Ibn Khaldûn’s Al-muqadimma . . . even in light of Western intellectualism . . . were not contrary to human progress.” Meanwhile, he had nothing but contempt for Christianity, inferior on all counts to Islam. Not only was he vehemently opposed to European imperialism62 but he was also horrified and outraged by the Christian missionaries’ activities in the Levant and minced no words when he described Christianity in his diary in 1874: “In this abominable religion, which invented the Christian blood libel, which puts its own sons to the rack, they want to entice away the believers in the one and only Jehovah—in Muslim lands. This is an insolence of which only Christianity, the most abominable of all religions, is capable. It has no forehead to become aware of the insolence that forms its historical character. The forehead of a whore, that is the forehead of Christianity.”63 Not surprisingly, Goldziher condemned European colonialism, declaring that “the European in the Orient represents the class of the worst kinds of rascals who were spit out by European society.”64

Britain’s legendary prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) was also among the group of prominent Jews who saw themselves as the natural allies of Arabs. Although this British descendant of Sephardim (Marranos who fled Iberian persecution) from his father’s side was baptized into the Anglican Church in 1817, at the age of twelve or thirteen,65 he never fully identified with the European Christian heritage. Calling Jews the “Arabian tribe” and Arabs “Jews upon horseback,” Disraeli could claim that “God never spoke except to an Arab,” thereby expanding the category of Arabs to include all monotheistic prophets, including Jesus.66 Even Napoleon was an Arab in Disraeli’s racial view of history, for “the great Corsican . . . like most of the inhabitants of the Mediterranean isles, had probably Arab blood in his veins.”67 So triumphalist was Disraeli in his Ishmaelism, if one might call it that, that in 1877 William Gladstone (1809–1898) wrote in a private letter that “though [Disraeli] has been baptized, his Jew feelings are the most radical and the most real, and so far respectable, portion of his profoundly falsified nature.”68 Not only did Disraeli slap arrogant gentiles with the nobler Arab heritage of the Jews, but he himself, noted Lord Cromer (1841–1917), the colonial administrator of India and Egypt, in his physical appearance and manners embodied the features of the Orient.69

Through the character Sidonia in Disraeli’s novels Coningsby; or, The New Generation (1844) and Tancred; or, The New Crusade (1847), Disraeli’s alter ego, a wise and successful Sephardic Jew born to “New Christians” in Aragon, explains that Mosaic Arabs (Jews), persecuted by the Visigoths, sought the help of their brethren Mohammedan Arabs (Muslims/Arabs), therefore giving rise to al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, which centuries later fell to the dark forces of the Reconquista. In Muslim Spain, “the children of Ishmael rewarded the children of Israel with equal rights and privileges with themselves. During these halcyon centuries, it is difficult to distinguish the followers of Moses from the votary of Mahomet. Both alike built palaces, gardens, and fountains; filled equally the highest offices of the state, competed in an extensive and enlightened commerce, and rivaled each other in renowned universities.”70 The narrator of Coningsby laments the loss of a culture in which “Mosaic and Mohammedan Arabs” lived and prospered together: “Where is that tribunal that summoned Medina Sidonia and Cadiz to its dark inquisition? Where is Spain? Its fall, its unparalleled and its irremediable fall, is mainly to be attributed to the expulsion of that large portion of its subjects, the most industrious and intelligent, who traced their origin to the Mosaic and Mohammedan Arabs.”71

Sidonia is the heir to Sheikh Abraham, the son of an “unmixed race” of Mosaic and Mohammedan Arabs. In Disraeli’s hands, Muslims such as Emir Fakredeen, one of Tancred’s benefactors, are unimpressed by the false glories of Britain. “The country,” the emir tells the young pilgrim, “produces nothing; it is an island, a mere rock, larger than Malta, but not so well fortified. Everything they require is imported from other countries; they get their corn from Odessa, and their wine from the ports of Spain. I have been assured at Beiroot that they do not grow even their cotton, but that I can hardly believe. Even their religion is exotic; and as they are indebted for that to Syria, it is not surprising that they should import their education from Greece.”72 It is for this reason that Jerusalem, as stated in Tancred, will never fall into the hands of Europeans: “Jerusalem, it cannot be doubted, will ever remain the appanage either of Israel or of Ishmael; and if, in the course of those great vicissitudes which are no doubt impending for the East, there be any attempt to place upon the throne of David a prince of the House of Coburg or Deuxponts, the same fate will doubtless await him as, with all their brilliant qualities and all the sympathy of Europe, was the final doom of the Godfreys, the Baldwins, and the Lusignans.”73 Such views didn’t fail to elicit this subtle rebuke from the Times of London: “We think better of Europe than to suppose it rotten at the core and hastening to decay. We cannot think sufficiently well of the nations of the East to suppose them now the living fountains of all that is consolatory and good in life, the pure and immaculate possessors of celestial privileges and divine prerogatives.”74 In what Russell Schweller called “Disraeli’s semitic chauvinism,” the north European is simply unworthy of the great treasures of human civilization. Not surprisingly, before the Congress of Berlin was held, in 1878, Disraeli tried to propose a secular Jewish state in Palestine that would accommodate Muslims and Christians without prejudice.75

Another fascinating figure in this regard is William Gifford Palgrave (1826–1888), whose views may have influenced the birth of Arab nationalism. The son of a baptized Jewish father who prospered after marrying into a respectable Anglican family, “the mysterious traveler, sometime-spy, sometime-Jew, sometime Jesuit” Palgrave traveled in Arabia, changed his name to Michael Suhail, was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1857, and then started calling himself Father Cohen (taking his father’s original last name). Palgrave’s affinity with the Arabs didn’t extend to religion (he detested Wahhabi fanaticism, mostly because the Wahhabis wouldn’t convert to Christianity), but his book Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia was so influential on David George Hogarth (1862–1927), author of The Penetration of Arabia (1905) and Arabia (1922), who himself was influential on T. E. Lawrence, author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), that one could attribute much of British thinking on Arab nationalism and its compatibility with Zionism to Palgrave’s influence. After all, his books sold more editions in the nineteenth century “than Burckhardt, Burton, Doughty, the Blunts, and all other Victorian travelers in Arab lands combined.” He praised the town-dwelling Arabs (not the Bedouins, whom he despised) as “the Englishmen of the East.”76

It is worth noting that proudly reclaiming one’s Moorish heritage was a universal endeavor among Jews, Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike. “Moorish-style synagogues,” which became the architectural rage in European Jewry as well as in the United States (reflected, for example, in the Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati, designed by the architect James Key Wilson and built between 1863 and 1868), were “not built by and for the Sephardim but for [Western-looking and often liberal] Ashkenazim,” which proves that the synagogues, built at a time of Jewish confidence and ascendancy, were an affirmation of the Jews’ pride in their Arab/Muslim identity. At a time when assimilation was enticing and the future of Jews looked promising, many Jews chose to assert their oriental difference through architecture, eagerly associating themselves with their Moorish heritage, a fact now obscured, according to Ivan Davidson Kalmar, “by the veil of decades of Arab-Jewish strife.”77 As late as 1884, a Jew from Turin, G. Gustalla, still made the connection:

The most celebrated rabbis adopted into the ancestral doctrine that which was produced by the Arabs, transmitting it unaltered to [nourish] the heritage of the civilization of the late Middle Ages, and there they raised for their own religious practices temples using the same style as those famous religious and secular buildings of Córdoba, Seville, and Granada that have survived to our own day, a style that, besides, was also in harmony with their artistic genius and their temperament; seeing that it [was a style that] derived from the Orient, where their race had its origin.78

In fact, to build an Arabor Muslim-style temple was to come closer to replicating the Temple of Solomon (the Temple of Jerusalem), either because Jews had always borrowed from local traditions or simply because Arab/ Muslim architecture was the closet model Jews had in the absence of more information. Ludwig Förster, who designed the Vienna-Leopoldstadt synagogue (1853–1858), put the case succinctly:

It is known to be a difficult task indeed to build an Israelite Temple in a form required by the religion and suitable for its practice, and at the same time corresponding, at least in its essential features, to the hallowed ideal of all temples, the Temple of Solomon. It is doubly difficult insofar as [the building’s] external architecture is concerned, for the existing records cannot nearly provide us with a reliable picture; and those Houses of God that belong to a later time either lack any distinct style or carry features that are in their inner being entirely alien to the Israelite religion.

In my humble opinion, the right way, given the circumstances, is to choose, when building an Israelite Temple, those architectural forms that have been used by Oriental ethnic groups that are related to the Israelite people, and in particular the Arabs.79

So strong was this belief that the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence blocked a neo-Renaissance design in 1872, explaining that, “as every nation has stamped its own history on [its] monuments, and most of all its religious monuments, so a building with the said function must manifest at first sight so effectively a marked character that it recalls the dates and the places that are of most interest for this religion, and a character such as cannot be confounded with the religious or secular monuments of other nations and religions.”80

This bold Jewish self-assertion was not without its critics. The orientalist scholar Paul de Lagarde reacted in 1881 by saying, “[Their] alien nature is stressed every day and in the most striking fashion by the Jews—who nevertheless wish to be made equal to Germans—through the style of their synagogue. What is the sense of raising claims to be called an honorary German and yet building the holiest site that one possesses in Moorish style, so as to never ever let anyone forget that one is a Semite, an Asiatic, a foreigner?”81 But such anti-Semitic tirades had no chilling effect. As we have seen in the case of Disraeli, God revealed himself only to Arabs; therefore, it was fitting to build worship structures that reflected this divine bias.82 In 1912, the Zionist Martin Buber stated that “the great complex of Oriental nations . . . can be shown to be one entity.”83 In fact, the great architect and urban designer Wilhelm Stiassny (1842–1910), “an ardent Zionist” who was close to both the great Ignaz Goldziher and Theodor Herzl (1860– 1904), “the founder of modern political Zionism,” had no problem imagining “a sort of an autonomous city-state [for Jews] under Turkish suzerainty.” It was, furthermore, Stiassny who authored a pamphlet titled The Establishment of a Colony in the Holy Land or in One of Its Neighboring Regions and dissuaded Herzl from seeking a homeland for the Jews outside of Palestine. In the Orient, Jews would be returning home, a fact expressed by David Ben-Gurion himself, who, posing with a fez in Istanbul, announced that Zionists were on their way back to being Orientals.84

Such feelings were sometimes coupled, as I have noted, with a strong contempt for the West and its values, as passages from an unpublished manuscript found in the papers of Rabbi Aladar Deutsch in Prague unequivocally indicate:

A small fragment of the old Orient had given its old virtues, which had never decayed, a new life, in order to sweep away the Lie. The Orient is moving, it is beginning the fight with a small maneuver against the falseness of the West. . . . It is beginning to wake up, it will carry out its renaissance and reconquer what Esau of the West had snatched away from it; in order among other things to cleanse its soul of the influence of the mentally and spiritually wasted, to make “Ex oriente lux!” once more the truth. . . . The Orient as the old site of spiritually infused semitism [Semitentum] will, recognizing the spiritual emptiness and cowardice of the Aryan so-called culture, force back the Aryan where he belongs.85

Inspired by a new book on the “Teutonic-Turkish alliance jihad against the West,” a writer for the German Jewish monthly journal Jüdische Monatshefte, edited by Rabbi Dr. P. Kohn, reflected on this profound historical connection: “It is especially us, the German Jews, who follow this wonderful spectacle of how our Fatherland and the Islamic world are connected by political threads, with particular suspense. . . . Who is Ishmael to us? What does the Islamic world mean to us? The Muslim religious doctrine, customs and laws, the Muslim science and beautiful literature contain golden seeds which seem borrowed from us and the Jewish hereditary stock and thus seem familiar and related.”86 Others, like the Zionist Eugen Hoeflich, who took on the name of Moshe Yaacov Ben-Gavriel, wanted to bond with Arabs, the Chinese, and the Indians as well as to establish a Jewish state. To him, Jews were part of the larger Asiatic fabric, and so the return to Palestine was not the return of Europeans but part of the Asiatic renaissance. Buber would have agreed, given that he condemned “the subjugation of India, the self-Europeanization of Japan, the debilitation of Persia, and lastly, the ravaging of China where the ancient Oriental spirit seemed to dwell in inviolable security.”87

Such strong bonds between Jews and Arabs and their shared destiny in Europe didn’t fail to impress the great German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). Islam’s strict prohibition of graven images, Kant remarked in his Critique of Judgment, explains the “pride which Mohammedanism inspires” among Jews. Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, simply stated the fact that “Arabs and Jews have only to be noticed in an external and historic way.”88

Because of such affinities with Moors or Arabs, it was not unusual for Zionists to read their project as a reunion of Asiatic races, or, at least, a reunion of what Disraeli would have termed “Mosaic Arabs” (Jews) and their long-lost cousins, “Jews upon horseback” (Arabs). “One of the roots of Zionism . . . that has not been appropriately recognized,” argues the Israeli film critic Judd Ne’eman, “was a hidden identification of the European Jew with Arab Islamic peoples.” Such views, as we have seen, were not uncommon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The conviction of one “fiery character” in M. Z. Feierberg’s novella Whither? (1898) that it is “unnatural that we Hebrews, we Easterners, should throw in our lot with the West as we set out for the East. . . . The great East will revive from its slumber and the accursed people will march at its head, at the head of the living East” was echoed, for instance, by Martin Buber in 1912, as we have seen.89 Even if we assume that European Jews had drunk too much from the wells of orientalism (in the sense that Europeans projected their fantasies onto the Orient) and saw themselves as the redeemers of their fallen cousins in the East, as Arthur Hertzberg insinuates in The Fate of Zionism (2003), that doesn’t make the Jews’ real affinities with Muslims and Arabs any less real.90

In fact, many Jews rejected the school of Zionism that adopted Europe’s orientalist prejudices.91 In the negative Jewish orientalist perspective, Israel was the land of the “new Jew,” not the “exilic” or Arab one returning to an “empty” land. “By appropriating the ‘nativeness’ of the Arabs, these Zionists,” writes Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “assumed the role of natives and rendered the indigenous population obsolete.”92 Initially, the Mizrahim (a category that did not exist before Israel was established), or Arab Jews, in Yehouda Shenhav’s preferred expression (that is, “Arabs by culture and Jews by religion”), were not included in the European Zionist vision. Not only was Zionism a distinctly European movement (Arab Jews had no say whatsoever in its formulation),93 but, according to Shenhav, the son of Iraqi Jews who at one time was embarrassed by his background in Israel, it was modeled on German nationalism: “Zionist thinkers adopted ideas from the German nationalist movement concerning the relationship between homeland and Diaspora, socialization into the practices of nationalization (such as national education or the establishment of national youth and sports movements), and the establishment of rural settlements as also devoted to character building. As the early Zionist thinker Hans Kohn wrote, young Zionists ‘transferred Fichte’s teaching into the context of our own situation.’”94

Israel was consciously imagined as an advanced European country bringing the light to Arab Jews who, like non-Jews in Arab societies, had yet to come out of the late Middle Ages. The Arab Jew was the Other, but she was also the same. So, because Zionism was a nationalism deeply rooted in theology, to separate Arab Jews from non-Jews, secular Arab Jews had to prove their credentials by intensifying their religiosity in Arab lands, a process of “purification” that would later work against them in Israel, with its secular, European ethos.95

The Mizrahim’s Jewishness complicated the Zionists’ “Eurocentric conception of the Jewish nation,” for, like the Orientals in Europe’s imagination, they represented both the origin and what had been left behind. In fact, the Mizrahim would probably not have been encouraged to migrate had the Zionists not worried about ensuring a Jewish majority in Palestine after the Holocaust. “Their mass migration was rationalized in almost purely demographic terms,” says Raz-Krakotzkin. As with Palestine itself, the de-Arabization of the Mizrahim was crucial for their integration into the new polity. Although Ben-Gurion posed with a fez in Istanbul and called for a return to the Orient, he was clear about this: “We do not want the Israelis to be Arabs. It is our duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that ruins individuals and societies.” In this way, “the Mizrahim became the new Marranos,” hiding from their Ashkenazi coreligionists the culture that had shaped them in the ancestral lands.96

The presence of the oriental Jew as Other in the fabric of modern Zionism and in Israel proper was still evident in the early 1990s, as in the following comment about Russian immigration from a prominent journalist: “The state of Israel is about to undergo an amazing change. . . . It means a demographic earth[quake]. No, I do not speak about Arabs vs Jews. I speak about Mizrahim vs Ashkenazim. Our State, we’ve got to admit, that began its career as an Ashkenazi State, tilted, or if you wish, turned in the last two decades in the Mizrahi-Levantine direction. . . . I still believe that given the choice between Paris and Baghdad, [I] will choose Paris. And I still believe that the more distance there is between Baghdad and us the better off we are.”97 This point of view persisted when the Moroccan-born Amir Peretz was running for the leadership of Israel’s Labor Party in 2005. Not being part of the genuine Zionist vision, Arab Jews are seen as edot ha’ mizrah, or “oriental communities,” a folk group within Israeli culture. Never mind that the hybrid status of Arab Jews was and is still mirrored in the equally hybrid ideology of Zionism, a self-identified secular vision that cannot escape its theological and biblical imaginary. Still, the orientalist motif in Israel is so strong that Yigal and Haggai Amir, the assassins of prime minister Yitzak Rabin and his brother-accomplice, were described by an Israeli secular organization as “the Muslim Brothers.”98

Because the barely disguised contempt for Arabness put enormous pressure on the Mizrahim to prove their Israeli credentials, the Mizrahim developed a hostile attitude toward the Arabs, although, paradoxically, it was the Mizrahim who were better suited to negotiate the Zionist-Palestinian divide, because of their “in-betweenness.”99 The Sephardic scholar David Shasha sums up the tragedy of the Mizrahim and Sephardim in this eloquent passage:

Due to the stigma against all things Arab propounded by classical Zionism and Ashkenazi modernism under a Eurocentric bias, the Sephardim have become an invisible presence in modern Jewish life. Many Arab Jews have surrendered their native Levantine perspective in favor of the ruling ideology in Israel; some Israeli Sephardim in frustration have divorced themselves from the mainstream of the traditional Jewish community; and still others have submerged their ethnic rage in a thunderous barbarity vis-à-vis the Arab Muslims. The issue of anti-Arab prejudice among Israeli and American Sephardim has made many observers question the very propriety of even raising the issue of the Levantine nativity of Arab Jews; many of whom have become among the most militant followers of the Likud and other Right Wing parties in Israel. The movement of Jews out of the Arab world and into the orbit of the Jewish state has greatly disrupted the traditional ethos and bearings of Arab Jewry. This has translated not merely into Sephardic political intransigency, but a complete abandonment of the traditional Sephardic cultural and religious legacy. But we can indeed recall a time when Jews lived productively in the Middle East and developed a material and intellectual culture that proved amazingly durable and robust.100

Graetz, Goldziher, Disraeli, and others would not have accepted this state of affairs, for it went against the essence of the Jews’ Arab identity they proudly promoted. One Jew who refused to subscribe to the Zionist orientalist ideology was Leopold Weiss, born in what is now Ukraine, whose condemnation of “the immoralities of Zionism” was followed by his conversion to Islam after two life-changing epiphanies.101 After visualizing a Bedouin against the Jerusalem sky, Weiss “knew, with that clarity which sometimes bursts within us like lightning and lights up the world for the length of a heart-beat, that David and David’s time, like Abraham and Abraham’s time, were closer to their Arabian roots—and so to the Bedouin of today—than to the Jew of today, who claims to be their descendant.”102 Returning to Berlin after two years of travel in parts of the Islamic East, Weiss realized that Berliners looked miserable on the subway, and he found an explanation for the horrors of greed in the Qur’an. Thus, in 1926, he walked into the Berlin Islamic Society (could it be the same Islamic organization founded by Lev Nussimbaum following his conversion four years earlier?) and converted.103

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) became a regular in the Arabian monarch Ibn Saud’s circle (two of the four women he married were from Saudi Arabia, including Munira of the Shammar tribe, mother of the U.S.-based anthropologist Talal Asad), but later he came to see Ibn Saud as yet another Eastern despot, for he did “nothing to build up an equitable, progressive society.” Asad saw possible hope in the Sanusi movement in Cyrenaica, but that also led to nothing. He then got involved with the nascent state of Pakistan, represented it at the United Nations, and married there for the fourth time. In 1934, he published a pamphlet titled Islam at the Crossroads, linking Western imperialism with the Crusades and thereby developing the ideology of “Crusaderism” that would influence the thought of Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) and still influences Islamic fundamentalism today. But his constant efforts to reform Islam came to naught, although his book The Road to Mecca, published in New York in 1954, made him famous and he was able to sway others to convert, such as Margaret Marcus (b. 1934), known as Maryam Jameelah, who became “one of the best-known ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism, famous for her methodical indictments of the West.” By the mid-1960s, Asad, sponsored by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia (r. 1964–1975), settled in Tangier, Morocco, to write a new translation of the Qur’an, but it would be banned in Saudi Arabia before it was completed. Thus, Asad’s view of Arabs dimmed, although he remained attached to Islamic ideals. He left Tangier in 1982 and died ten years later. He was buried in the Muslim cemetery of Granada, the last bastion of Moorish Spain.104

Though Zionism is often associated with the long history of European imperialism in Arab lands, and thereby recasts Jews in the Arab or Muslim imagination as allies of colonialists, there is no doubt at all that Jews and Muslims were seen as quintessentially the same: enemies to be extirpated from the holy, Christian, racially pure body of Europe. The frenetic activity of Iberian and European exploration that followed the defeat of Moorish Granada in 1492 led Europeans to define people they had never seen before as either the Lost Tribes of Israel or Moors, and sometimes both. As Tudor Parfitt explains, “To medieval Europe the two most obvious forms of the religious other were the Jews and Muslims and to some extent this binary construct continued into the twentieth century. The myth of the Moor (synonymous with Muslim in the European discourse) was one of its aspects and stood more or less for wild tribalism and a state of fairly but not irredeemable savagery [sic].”105 Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar have even suggested that imperialism and anti-Semitism arose at the same time in Europe, both designed to exclude the Oriental from the main Western (white) body.106 In the words of Adolf Wahrmund, an anti-Semitic professor in Vienna, “In Africa the nomads have been pushed back into the desert from North and South; the new Congo State and the German colonies mean cutting off the nomads and Islam from the South, [and] in Central Asia Russia has laid its fist upon the Touranian nomadic tribes . . . ; even the Turkish nomads of Asia Minor will soon have their practices stopped by the West; but among us, in the realm of Christian German statehood, the Semitic-Pharisaic nomad lays down the law.”107

Zionism didn’t necessarily mean eradicating Arab presence from Palestine, despite Ben-Gurion’s remark quoted earlier. The Odessa-born militant Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Jewish Legion, started out by imagining his mission as that of a superior European colonist advocating an all-out war on Palestinian Arabs and erecting an “iron wall” to protect Jewish interests in Palestine, but he eventually imagined Muslims, Christians, and Jews living side by side. In the novel Old-New-Land (Altneuland), published in 1902, shortly before he died, Theodor Herzl imagined a Zionist utopia “under a kind of loose Turkish suzerainty.”108 Meanwhile, Arabs such as the celebrated Iraqi poet Ma’ruf al-Russafi denied any animosity toward the project of Zionism per se:

We are not, as our accusers say, enemies of the Children of Israel in secret or in public.

How could we be, when they are our uncles, and the Arabs are kin to them of old though Ishmael?

The two are akin to one another, and in their languages there is proof of their kinship.

But we fear exile, and we fear a government that rules people by force.109

In his book Genesis 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, Dan Kurzman recounted the encounter between King Abdullah of Transjordan and Golda Meir in 1948, during which the king invited Meir to consider joining his kingdom, promising that 50 percent of the seats in Parliament would be allocated to Jews, thereby creating a powerful Arab-Jewish Palestinian country. Meir refused, even as she reminded the king that “the Jews are the only friends you have.” This led the king to make the following comment:

I know that very well. I have no illusions. I know you and I believe in your good intentions. I believe with all my heart that divine providence has brought you back here [to Palestine and the Middle East], restoring you, a Semitic people who were exiled to Europe and shared in its progress, to the Semitic East which needs your knowledge and initiative. Only with your help and your guidance will the Semites be able to revive their ancient glory. We cannot expect genuine assistance from the Christian world, which looks down on Semitic people. We will progress only as the result of joint efforts. I know all this and I believe it sincerely, but conditions are difficult. One dare not take rash steps. Therefore, I beg you once more to be patient.110

King Abdullah here treated Jews as the Arabs’ long-lost siblings, perhaps like a Semitic or oriental delegation bringing back European know-how to the Orient. This vision was central to many prominent Zionists and figures such as Wilhelm Stiassny and Wolfgang von Weisl, who in the 1920s published the periodical The Nile and Palestine Gazette in Egypt and tried hard to convert Arabs to his Zionist cause. It may sound condescending to those who are attuned to orientalist prejudices, but when the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg stated his hopes in lines such as “Believe: our race’s sister, the Arab, is here / . . . we will come to instruct him, great in wisdom and experience,”111 he seems to have simply stated the obvious fact that diasporic Jews had benefited from European knowledge and were bringing it back to their ancient lands.

But the reunion of long-separated “Mosaic Arabs” and “Mohammedan Arabs,” in the terminology of Disraeli, was not destined to be in the twentieth century, and one wonders whether it will take shape in the near future. The Arab-Israeli conflict “has stifled virtually all expression of romanticized kinship or even pragmatic commonality between the children of Isaac and Ishmael. This is a tragedy,” comment Kalmar and Penslar, for “although Jewish claims to propinquity with the Orient frequently masked or justified claims of cultural superiority and unfettered rights to land in Palestine, the future of Israel depends upon the formulation of a mutually acceptable conceptual framework in which the Jews’ place as a sovereign collective in the Orient is assured.”112

Looking back at the strong Jewish-Muslim bonds through the ages, there is no reason to believe that Zionism could not coexist with full Palestinian rights. In 2004, during an encounter between Arabs and Jews in France, Patrick Klugman, a member of the board of directors at the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France, called himself “a pro-Palestinian Zionist.”113 Even when all Muslims have become suspect in the Western imagination since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and Jewish-Muslim relations have deteriorated even further in the wake of the conflict between the West and Islam, some Jewish leaders are still defending Muslim rights. When Muslims gathered in Rosemont, Illinois, in early September 2007 to talk about their collective plight after 9/11, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, denounced such maltreatment in language reminiscent of nineteenth-century Jews who defended Islamic causes. “The time has come,” the rabbi told the opening session, “to stand up to the opportunists, the media figures, the religious leaders and politicians who demonize Muslims and bash Islam, exploiting the fears of their fellow citizens for their own purposes.”114 A similar spirit was exhibited by Dutch Jews when they condemned the association of Qur’an-inspired violence depicted in Fitna, a fifteen-minute film released in early 2008 by Geert Wilders, a right-wing and pro-Israeli Dutch politician, with Muslims in general.115 Such Jewish stances, as well as Muslims’ defense of Jewish rights in Morocco and Iraq, point to a path that has yet to be fully explored in the breakdown of relations between Jews and Muslims. If both sides were to bracket off the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a serious but, in the end, political problem and explore the history and bonds they share, perhaps enough goodwill could be generated to help Israelis and Palestinians and other aggrieved Muslims work out a solution.

Whatever the outcome of this dispiriting mistrust between Jews and Muslims today, both the triumph of the Jews in the Orient and their unprecedented acceptance and success in the diaspora after World War II116 gradually brought an end to their proxy Moorish presence in Europe; and Mohammedan Arabs were pulled into the European economy by the dual arms of colonial control and postcolonial capitalist hegemony. Even as the Jew has morphed into a seemingly natural member of a Judeo-Christian civilization, the Moor has once again reappeared to haunt the West with her troubling presence and resistance to national assimilationist policies. The Moors were presumably expelled from Europe in the early seventeenth century for lack of assimilation into the Christian national body; now they have returned in the guise of dark-skinned immigrants seeking some form of livelihood in the nations that have played a major role in upsetting the world order in the last five centuries. Despite all appearances, it is not necessarily the resistance of Islam to Western ways that is the problem (although this plays a part and gets amplified by the media to serve nationalist agendas) but the slow unraveling of the European national order based on race that was established by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and culminated in the wholesale expulsion of Moriscos from Spain by 1614. However undesirable they may be, the unassimilable Moors of yesterday, the aliens against whom Spain and Europe built their identities, have come back to reclaim a seat at the global economic and political table. And from all indications, they seem intent on staying.