Washington Report, April 2006, pages 57-58

Israel and Judaism

A Look at History Encourages Growing Efforts Toward Muslim-Jewish Understanding

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Throughout the U.S., dialogue between American Jews and Muslims is increasing. According to The Jerusalem Report, “Both 9/11 and four years of intifada chilled relations between American Jews and Muslims, which had warmed notably during the Oslo period. Now dialogue is showing new signs of life. ‘And as the situation in the Middle East improves—which I think it will do now, please God,’ says Rabbi David Rosen, director of Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, ‘there will be greater willingness on the part of the Jewish community to take more risks.’”

Dialogue has resumed, often sparked by individuals or groups not in leadership positions in either community, according to the Report: “After Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, his father, Judea Pearl, began a series of unscripted public dialogues with Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, DC. Since an initial dialogue in Pittsburgh in October 2003, the two have appeared at gatherings around the U.S. and the United Kingdom, with Canada and several U.S. cities on the schedule for this year. Audiences are typically one-third Muslim and most of the rest Jewish, according to Pearl, an Israel-born professor of computer science at UCLA.”

Pearl says: “My main reason is to convince Muslims that we are not their enemies. We try to stress the commonalities, though we don’t shy away from friction.”

Another example of dialogue is the Children of Abraham organization, co-founded by a Jewish man and a Muslim woman in 2004 in New York and London to offer “internships” to Jewish and Muslim young people around the world. The interns’ task is to photograph Jewish and Muslim life in their communities and then dialogue with each other via the Internet. The first group of 60 interns from 27 countries took about 2,000 photographs last summer and posted 3,000 messages on the organization’s Web site in discussions that continued after the internships ended.

Other groups include the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, started by Zhudi Jasser, a Phoenix-area physician, which believes in the compatibility of Islamic and American values. In the Boston area, Judith Obermayer, a retired mathematician, hosted the first meeting of a Jewish-Muslim dialogue group about two years ago. From a handful of organizers brought together by the head of the local branch of the American Jewish Committee, the group—which includes academics, doctors, businesspeople and ordinary Muslims and Jews—has grown to the point where 75 people attended a recent dinner.

The American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi Rosen declares: “The Talmud asks, ‘Who is a hero?’ and answers: ‘He who makes his enemy into a friend.”

Jews being harshly persecuted in Christian Europe often found a Golden Age in Muslim lands.

Last September, Jordan’s King Abdullah told a gathering of American rabbis in Washington, DC that Jews and Muslims are irrevocably “tied together by culture and history” and that he is willing to take radical measures to combat Muslim extremists. He declared: “We face a common threat: extremist distortions of religion and the wanton acts of violence that derive therefrom. Such abominations have already divided us from without for far too long.”

Rabbi Marc Gopin of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University presented the king with a copy of the Hebrew Bible in both English and Hebrew. Secular leaders, he said, “need to learn from your [the king’s] example, learn from true heroism of one who confronts his adversaries.”

While some have argued that Muslim-Jewish enmity is a long-standing phenomenon, the historic record tells a far different story. Indeed, when Jews were being harshly persecuted in Christian Europe, they often found a Golden Age in Muslim lands.

In her book, The Ornament of the World, Prof. Maria Rosa Menocal of Yale University explores the history of Jews under Muslim rule in Spain: “Throughout most of the invigorated peninsula, Arabic was adopted as the ultimate in classiness and distinction by the communities of the other two faiths. The new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive but, following Qur’anic mandate, by and large protected them, and both the Jewish and Christian communities in al-Andalus became thoroughly Arabized within relatively few years of Abd al-Rahman’s arrival in Cordoba…In principle, all Islamic polities were (and are) required by Qur’anic injunction…to tolerate Christians and Jews living in their midst. But beyond that fundamental prescribed posture, al-Andalus was, from these beginnings, the site of memorable and distinctive interfaith relations. Here the Jewish community rose from the ashes of an abysmal existence under the Visigoths to the point that the emir who proclaimed himself caliph in the l0th century had a Jew as his foreign minister.”

Living in the heart of the Arab world, Jews first served their apprenticeship in the sciences of Islamic intellectual masters and, in time, became their collaborators in developing the general culture of the region. A striking example of this breadth of interest was Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, ll35-l204), a native of Cordoba. What chiefly characterized Jewish thought in this period was its search for unity—the attempt to reconcile faith with reason, theology and philosophy, the acceptance of authority with freedom of inquiry. In Arab countries in the Near East and North Africa, where there existed this free intermingling of cultures, there blossomed a rich and unique Jewish intellectuality in Arabic. Beginning with the l0th century, especially in the kingdom of Cordoba under the enlightened Omayyad caliphs Abd al-Rahman and his son, Al-Hakin, there appeared a galaxy of Jewish scholars, historians, philologists, grammarians, religious philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, doctors and poets. During the 11th century, Ubn Usaibia, a Muslim scholar, listed 50 Jewish authors writing in Arabic on medical subjects alone.

As Karen Armstrong notes in A History of God, “The destruction of Muslim Spain was fatal for the Jews. In March l492, a few weeks after the conquest of Granada, the Christian monarchs gave Spanish Jews the choice of baptism or expulsion. Many of the Spanish Jews were so attached to their home that they became Christians, though some continued to practice their faith in secret…Some l50,000 Jews refused baptism, however, and were forcibly deported from Spain; they took refuge in Turkey, the Balkans and North Africa. The Muslims of Spain had given Jews the best home they ever had in the diaspora, so the annihilation of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews throughout the world as the greatest disaster to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in CE 70.”

Jane S. Gerber, in her book The Jews of Spain, points out that, “In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries…it was the Ottoman Empire, then at the zenith of her power, that alone afforded exiles a place where ‘their weary feet could find rest.’…Her sultans—Bayezid II, Mehmet II, Suleiman the Magnificent—were dynamic, farsighted rulers who were delighted to receive the talented, skilled Jewish outcasts of Europe…Bayezid II, responding to the expulsion from Spain, reportedly exclaimed, ‘You call Ferdinand a wise king, who impoverishes his country and enriches our own.’ He not only welcomed Sephardic exiles but ordered his provincial government to assist the wanderers by opening the borders. Indeed, the refugees would find the Ottoman state to be powerful, generous and tolerant.”

On a recent visit to Andalusia—Cordoba, Seville and Granada, among other places—this writer observed the many remaining reminders of this Golden Age of Muslim-Jewish cooperation and amity. They serve to illustrate the lack of historic understanding of those who present the current impasse over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the latest in a long history of strife and conflict. The real story is far different—and far more hopeful. It may provide us with a genuine road map for the future.