Chapter 2 - Jewish Perceptions of and Attitudes toward Islam and Muslims

Summary

Jewish perceptions of and attitudes toward Muslims and Islam during the latter’s classical age, when the vast majority of Jews lived in the lands of Islam, were always conditioned by the Jews’ status as a small religious community, widely dispersed yet overrepresented in the major urban centers of Iberia, North Africa, and the Middle East. During the ninth through twelfth centuries (corresponding to the High Middle Ages in Christendom) the Jews of Islam enjoyed full communal autonomy and achieved significant economic prosperity even as a subject minority. Rabbanites and Karaites alike vigorously built new communal institutions and produced singularly important cultural achievements that would transform and rival the inheritance of rabbinic Judaism. However, interpretation of the Jews’ experience under the orbit of classical Islam has been quite varied and is itself historically constructed. In recent years it has been dominated by two fundamentally adverse presentist scholarly paradigms, each with supposed implications for understanding conflict in the modern Middle East.