THE LONG HISTORY OF ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM: Andrew G. Bostom, the author of The Legacy of Jihad, is coming out with a new book in November: The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. More information on the book is available at Bostom's web site.

According to the book jacket:

This comprehensive, meticulously documented collection of scholarly articles presents indisputable evidence that a readily discernible, uniquely Islamic antisemitism—a specific Muslim hatred of Jews—has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam. Debunking the conventional wisdom, which continues to assert that Muslim animosity toward Jews is entirely a 20^th-century phenomenon fueled mainly by the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict, leading scholars provide example after example of antisemitic motifs in Muslim documents reaching back to the beginnings of Islam. The contributors show that the Koran itself is a significant source of hostility toward Jews, as well as other foundational Muslim texts including the hadith (the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters) and the sira (the earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad). Many other examples are adduced in the writings of influential Muslim jurists, theologians, and scholars, from the Middle Ages through the contemporary era. These primary sources, and seminal secondary analyses translated here for the first time into English—such as Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid-1880s essays on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina and George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 study of the hadith—detail the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous complementary historical accounts illustrate the resulting plight of Jewish communities in the Muslim world across space and time, culminating in the genocidal threat posed to the Jews of Israel today. Scholars, educators, and interested lay readers will find this collection an invaluable resource for understanding the phenomenon of Muslim antisemitism, past and present. [emphasis added]

The foreword to the book, by Ibn Warraq details the persecution that Maimonides suffered in Muslim lands. He then details Antisemitism as reveal in the Quran, Islamic commentaries on the Quran--and as practiced in Islamic countries:

Here are examples of the persecution of Jews in Islamic lands: the massacre of more than 6000 Jews in Fez (Morocco) in 1033; of the hundreds of Jews killed between 1010 and 1013 near Cordoba, and other parts of Muslim Spain; of the massacre of the entire Jewish community of roughly 4000 in Granada during the Muslim riots of 1066. Referring to the latter massacre, Robert Wistrich writes: “This was a disaster, as serious as that which overtook the Rhineland Jews thirty years later during the First Crusade, yet it has rarely received much scholarly attention.”

Following on the heels of busted myths about the Palestinian population in Israel and Muslim population of the US--it becomes clear that Islamic Antisemitism is a homemade phenomenon and not something that can be blamed on Christians or the West.

Technorati Tag: Antisemitism and Islam and Andrew Bostom and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.