I was glad to read the review of my new book, The Islamic Moses, in Law & Liberty, penned by Dr. Jeffrey Bristol. I was also glad to see that he praised at least half of the book, where I explored the religious connections between Judaism and Islam. Yet he also raised several criticisms of the other half, where I examine the shared history of Jews and Muslims. Here is my response to those criticisms.
One key objection Dr. Bristol raises to my book is that it “paints a rosier picture of Jewish Islamicate life,” by highlighting the friendlier episodes between Jews and Muslims instead of the antagonistic ones. On that, I will plead partially guilty, but with a reason: My book does not claim to present a comprehensive and exhaustive history of Jewish-Muslim relations in history. Many academic books have already done that. My book rather presents the “Judeo-Islamic tradition,” and the “creative symbiosis” of Jews and Muslims—concepts introduced by prominent Jewish historians of the past century. That lost heritage is worth highlighting today, precisely because it is all too forgotten; now many people can imagine only enmity between the Jews and Muslims.
This does not mean that I deny or neglect the dark chapters in the same shared history. I do note them, indeed, and more than what Dr. Bristol seems to have noticed. They include the Jewish persecution under Almohads as well as the Mamluks, and the “expelled Jewish tribes from the Hejaz,” which I actually revisit. That includes the thorniest episode in this whole story, the Prophet Muhammad’s conflicts with the Jewish tribes in Medina, which is scrutinized in two separate chapters of my book, “What Really Happened in Medina,” I and II, with some uncommon viewpoints.
Another objection raised by Dr. Bristol is that my book “overplays anti-Jewish European bias.” But his own evaluations can be challenged for “painting a rosier picture” about Jewish life in premodern Europe. For example, he defines ghettos as “Europe’s answer to the millet/millah system” of the Ottoman Empire, as if they were similar models. Yet the European ghetto was an open-air prison for Jews, whereas the millet system, despite legal inequalities, allowed much broader freedom. Generally, as the late great historian Bernard Lewis compared in his classic, The Jews of Islam,
Dhimmīs [Jews and Christians ruled by Muslims] were not confined to ghettos either in the geographical or in the occupational sense. Though Christians and Jews tended on the whole to form their own quarters in Muslim cities, this was a natural social development and not, like the ghettos of Christian Europe, a legally enforced restriction.
Lewis also observed that, for Jews, “in medieval Western Christendom, massacres and expulsions, inquisitions and immolations were commonplace; in Islam they were atypical and rare.”
Such comparisons between Jewish life in Christendom and “Islamdom”—none of which were preferable to modern liberal democracies, as I also note in my book—would require a much longer discussion. For now, I will just point to inaccuracies I see in Dr. Bristol’s other criticisms.
I was surprised to see my call for nuance on Orientalism—which appreciated the “Islamophilia” of Jewish Orientalists such as Gustav Weil and Ignaz Goldziher—got depicted as a typical anti-Orientalist tirade.
First, I actually do not tie the modern-day antisemitism problem in the Muslim world solely to infection with an “unremittent, entirely European antisemitism.” This “infection” has examples that I do point out, such as the transmission of the blood libel. There is also the influence of Russian antisemitism, as seen in the spread of The Protocols. But I discuss homegrown roots of the problem as well, such as antagonistic interpretations of certain passages in the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira (biographies of Muhammad), against which I offer alternative readings.
Second, I also do not blame “colonial endeavors fueled by an intellectually corrupt Orientalism” for transmitting antisemitism to the Muslim world, as Dr. Bristol claims that I do. That transmission happened in various ways, including Muslims themselves “absorbing” it, as I describe in my book. Meanwhile my chapter, “The Good Orientalists,” has a different aim: to show that not all Western scholarship of Islam was stimulated by colonialism, as many Muslims believe today. I was surprised to see that call for nuance on Orientalism—which appreciated the “Islamophilia” of Jewish Orientalists such as Gustav Weil and Ignaz Goldziher—got depicted as a typical anti-Orientalist tirade.
Third, Dr. Bristol’s review could make one think that I totally ignore the Jewish emancipation in the modern West—a strawman he pushes against by reminding the successful Jewish integration in the UK and the US. But, alas, I have a whole chapter—“The Jewish Haskalah and The Islamic Enlightenment”—which praises that integration and even presents it as a model for Muslims today. I show how liberalism came as a blessing to Western Jews, to which they adapted with historic reforms pioneered by luminaries like Moses Mendelssohn, whose ideas I find parallel to reformism in contemporary Islam. (Also, I mention Benjamin Disraeli not as “an avenue to introduce alleged [British] antisemitism,” but to reveal the connection between antisemitism, anti-Ottomanism and pro-Russianness in late nineteenth-century Britain—a fascinating episode also stressed by Bernard Lewis in his noteworthy essay, “The Pro-Islamic Jews.”)
Fourth, Dr. Bristol criticizes my “Ottoman bias,” asking why a whole chapter is devoted to the Jewish experience in the Ottoman Empire. The answer is not that personal, and not that complicated either: Until its collapse in the aftermath of World War I, the Ottoman Empire held the seat of the Caliphate, the leadership of Sunni Islam, which makes its friendship with Jews paradigmatically important. It challenges the presumptions of both the Islamists and the anti-Islamists of today, as I recently argued in a Law & Liberty article: “The Caliphate and the Modern Middle East.”
Finally, perhaps Dr. Bristol’s most off-the-mark criticism is that my book may help “replace one unity-in-opposition (Judeo-Christianity vs. Islam) with another (Judeo-Islam vs. Christianity).” That sounded all too surprising, as it is neither suggested nor insinuated in my book. What I rather suggest is that if Christianity has been able to overcome its antisemitic teachings and practices—a healing I acknowledge and commend—the same thing can happen in Islam. It could happen even more easily because of theological similarities if the political conflict in the Middle East—the only burning problem between Jews and Muslims—can be peacefully resolved.
That prospect would not make Christianity the nemesis of a new Judeo-Islamic alliance unless Christianity itself goes back, God forbid, to the dark days of the Crusades and the Inquisition. Rather, it would usher a brighter era of Judeo-Christo-Islamic peace—an “Abrahamic” reconciliation—where each religion will have outgrown the troubling elements in its own complex heritage.
That really is the main goal of The Islamic Moses. I am at least happy to see that, despite our divergences, it is a goal that Dr. Bristol and I would agree on.
