Islamic Anti-Semitism

As in the case of Christianity, fundamental Islamic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism go back to the historical circumstances surrounding the founding of the new faith and are sanctioned by scripture and tradition. Jews figure into traditional Islam's theological worldview, and Jews lived as a subject population under Muslim rule, sometimes under better, sometimes under worse conditions. However, because Islam did not begin as a sect within Judaism or claim to be verus Israel (or the "true" Israel), as did Christianity, the Koran and later theological writings (with the exception of the Sira, or canonical biography of the Prophet Muhammad) do not exhibit anything comparable to the overwhelming preoccupation with the Jews that one finds in the New Testament, patristic literature, and later Christian theological writings.

Traditional Islamic thought had its own store of negative stereotypes of Jews. According to the Koran (Sura 2:61), "wretchedness and baseness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with wrath from Allah." The Koran, exegetical, Edition of Mein Kampf translated into Arabic. In the late nineteenth century, anti-Semitic tracts and books began to appear, many of which were translations of existing works. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was translated into Arabic in 1935, after careful editing removed the anti-Arabic sentiments within. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS and hagiographic literature brand the Jews of Medina as having been the principal opponents of the Prophet along with the idolaters and as a treacherous lot. But they were also people who had received a genuine divine revelation, like the Christians and Zoroastrians, and like the latter deserved tolerance as long as they accepted the status of humble tributary dhimmis ("protected peoples"). Though the image of Jews was on the whole even more negative and condescending than that of Christians, they shared the same legal status within the traditional Islamic social system, and throughout most of the fourteen hundred years of Islamic history were rarely singled out for greater discrimination than other non-Muslims. The relatively rare instances of specifically anti-Jewish violence often occurred when a Jew was perceived to have egregiously transgressed the boundaries of proper conduct by rising too high in the bureaucracy. Anti-Jewish rioting only became a more frequent phenomenon in the twentieth century in the Arab parts of the Muslim world with the anti-Jewish sentiments generated by Zionism and European colonialism.