Islamic Anti-Semitism

The Axis gained widespread sympathy in the Islamic world during the 1930s and 1940s because they were the enemies of the Western colonial powers and Western democratic values. Turkish, Arab, and Iranian nationalists admired German militarism. Nazi and Fascist propaganda helped familiarize educated Muslims with the vocabulary of modern anti-Semitism. Mein Kampf appeared in an Arabic translation in 1935 with its anti-Arab statements expunged. However, most of the Arabic literature that imitates Nazi Jew-baiting tracts dates from the postwar period.

No work has had a more profound impact upon modern Muslim anti-Semitism than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century for the tsarist secret police and allegedly the secret minutes of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. Although it was already being cited by Arab nationalists in Iraq and Palestine in the early 1920s, the complete text first appeared in Cairo in 1925 as Mu'amarat al-yahudiyya 'ala'l-Shu'ub (The Jewish conspiracy against the nations), translated by Antun Yamin, a Lebanese Maronite. This was the first of a long line of Arabic editions and translations, and the book has been a continual bestseller throughout the entire Arab and Muslim world. The Protocols have been quoted, praised, and recommended by politicians, academics, and religious leaders. The principal idea of the Protocols about an international Zionist-Jewish conspiracy is repeated in everything from television series to religious literature and has become a fundamental tenet of the Islamic fundamentalist worldview, both Sunni and Shiite. Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, writes in his Vilayet-i Faqih: Hokumati Islami (1971; The trusteeship of the jurisconsult: Islamic governance) that the true aim of the Jews "is to establish a world Jewish government." This and other notions from the Protocols may be found in the writings of Moroccan Islamist Sheikh Abdessalam Yassine, the Tunisian theologian Rached Ghannouchi, and in the publications of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbollah, al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya, and Al Qaeda.

Contemporary Islamists cite proof texts from the Koran and hadith to corroborate the Protocols. The widely disseminated writings of the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qub probably played an influential role in the spread of this harmonization of the Protocols and Islamic traditional texts.

The numerous humiliating defeats of Arab armies at the hands of tiny Israel, the strong relationship between the Jewish State and the United States, and the general social, technological, and political weakness of the Islamic world as a whole, despite the great oil wealth of some Islamic nations, have all contributed to the credence given by many Muslims to the notion of the invisible hand of a Zionist-Jewish cabal as depicted in the Protocols.

Though less a general belief among contemporary Muslims than the Jewish conspiracy for world domination, the blood libel has come to have wide circulation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially in the Arab world. Even ostensibly scholarly treatments of Judaism such as 'Ala 'Abd al-Wahid Wafi's al-Yahudiyya wa'l-Yahud (1970; Judaism and the Jews) and Hasan Zaza in his al-Fikr al-Dini al-Isra'ili: Atwaruhu wa Madhahibuhu (1971; Israelite religious thought: Its phases and schools) present the blood libel as fact. Zaza devotes a learned discussion to the blood libel observing that such a practice is forbidden by Jewish law, but then notes that the accusation has followed the Jews throughout history, that people often act contrarily to their religious teachings, and finally cites the confessions of one of the accused murderers in the Damascus Affair as proof of the veracity of charge. Blood libel stories appear from time to time in the mainstream Arabic press as both features and news items. Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas has written one of the best selling books promoting the blood libel, Fatir Sahyun (The matzah of Zion). The book went into eight editions between 1983 and 2002, with the last alone selling over twenty thousand copies. As with the conspiracy of the Protocols, blood libel stories have been featured in Arabic television dramatizations during the nights of Ramadan in 2003.