Muslim-Jewish Relations in a Moroccan City

Extract

In the present political climate of Arab-Israeli relations, arguments are frequently brought forth by disputants on each side concerning what each regards as the fundamental relations between Muslims and Jews, not as political but as social communities. Muslims insist that Jews who have lived in their midst have always fared better than those living in Europe and that their opposition is not to Jews as a religious, but as a distinct political, grouping. Zionists, on the other hand, consider as humiliating the treatment Jews have received in the Muslim countries from which most of them have emigrated, and often regard the Muslims as fundamentally anti-Semitic despite the latter's protestations to the contrary. Fact and myth, particularly in the hands of each side's propagandists, have become inextricably tangled, and attempts to tease them apart often fall victim to accusations that the author is less interested in a judicious presentation of the data than in serving some private and ulterior motive. Indeed, since most of the Jews have either left their homes in the Arab nations or found their positions drastically altered by the present conflict, it has become almost impossible to study first-hand the ways in which Muslims conceive of and relate to the Jewish minorities living in their midst as part of that society and not just as an extension of the Israeli nation or the community of world Jewry.