Islam and anti-semitism

Islam and anti-semitism relates to Islamic theological teaching against Jews and Judaism and the treatment of Jews in Muslim countries.

With the origin of Islam in the 7th century AD and its rapid spread in the Arabian peninsula and beyond, Jews (and many other peoples) came to be subject to the rule of Muslim rulers. The quality of the rule varied considerably in different periods, as did the attitudes of the rulers, government officials, clergy and general population to various subject peoples from time to time, which was reflected in their treatment of these subjects. Reuven Firestone notes that, negative assessments and even condemnation of prior religions and their adherents occur in all three scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This article looks at the Muslim attitude to, and treatment of, Jews in Islamic thought and societies throughout history, and explores the ramifications of these attitudes in the contemporary world.

The nature and extent of anti-semitism in Islam and the Muslim world are hotly-debated issues among students of the Middle East and Islam. However the use of the word anti-semitism in the context of Islam is somewhat inaccurate in etymological terms, since Islam and Arabic, its language, is essentially semitic itself. The more appropriate term to describe this phenomena would be "anti-judaism".

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Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism (alternatively spelled antisemitism) is hostility toward or prejudice against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group, which can range from individual hatred to institutionalized, violent persecution. The highly explicit ideology of Adolf Hitler's Nazism (National Socialism, German: Nationalsozialismus) was the most extreme example of this phenomenon, leading to a genocide of the European Jewry.

Anti-Semitism takes different forms:

• Religious anti-Semitism, or anti-Judaism. Before the 19th century, most anti-Semitism was primarily religious in nature, based on Christian or Islamic (see Islam) interactions with and interpretations of Judaism. Since Judaism was generally the largest minority religion in Christian Europe and much of the Islamic world, Jews were often the primary targets of religiously-motivated violence and persecution from Christian and, to a lesser degree, Islamic rulers. Unlike anti-Semitism in general, this form of prejudice is directed at the religion itself, and so generally does not affect those of Jewish ancestry who have converted to another religion, although the case of Conversos in Spain was a notable exception. Laws banning Jewish religious practices may be rooted in religious anti-Semitism, as were the expulsions of the Jews that happened throughout the Middle Ages.
• Racial anti-Semitism. With its origins in the early and popularly misunderstood evolutionary ideas of race that started during the Enlightenment, racial anti-Semitism became the dominant form of anti-Semitism from the late 19th century through today. Racial anti-Semitism replaced the hatred of Judaism as a religion with the idea that the Jews themselves were a racially distinct group, regardless of their religious practice, and that they were inferior or worthy of animosity. With the rise of racial anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories about Jewish plots in which Jews were somehow acting in concert to dominate the world became a popular form of anti-Semitic expression.
• New anti-Semitism. Many analysts and Jewish groups believe there is a distinctly new form of late 20th century anti-Semitism, called the New anti-Semitism, which is associated with the Left, rather than the Right, borrowing language and concepts from anti-Zionism. Some of these analysts identify anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, arguing that anti-Zionism "advocates denial of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people."

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