Were Jews Really Better Off Under Islam?

"...on the whole, Jews fared better under Muslim rule than Christians did"

Bernard Lewis, "The New Anti-Semitism."


Andrew Bostom does not see eye-to-eye with Bernard Lewis, although he has enormous respect for him. Bostom quotes Lewis from 1974 on the issue of Dhimmitude, which Lewis doesn't think was all that bad:

The dhimma on the whole worked well. The non-Muslims managed to thrive under Muslim rule, and even to make significant contributions to Islamic civilization. The restrictions were not onerous, and were usually less severe in practice than in theory. As long as the non-Muslim communities accepted and conformed to the status of tolerated subordination assigned to them, they were not troubled. The rare outbreaks of repression or violence directed against them are almost always the consequence of a feeling that they have failed to keep their place and honor their part of the covenant.

Bostom brings a number of sources to counter Lewis' assessment, including S. D. Goitein, who was a contemporary of Lewis. Goitein wrote:

Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to them. They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws…As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence…In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the minorities.

Mitchell Bard has an online article, The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries, that gives the details.

There is also a talk that Bostom gave last month which covers how Jewish dhimmis were treated in historical Palestine--it can both be viewed and heard as audio at The Heritage Foundation web site.

One claim that is made in defending the treatment of Jews under Islam is that they suffered less in Moslem countries than in Christian ones.

I wonder if to the degree that this may be argued, it might be because whereas in Christian countries there were generally no laws differentiating between Jews and non-Jews (with the major exception of Nazi Germany), under Islam the inferior status of the Jew and the racist sentiment was institutionalized--hard-wired into Islamic law itself--and so the daily humiliation of the Jew took the edge off any Moslem desire for violence, at least until Jewish success put Jews in a more equal footing with Moslems, at which point Moslems were just as capable of the mass-murder of Jews as the Christians were.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Dhimmis and Islam and Bernard Lewis and Andrew Bostom.