Antisemitism in Islam: Difference between revisions

According to many modern, critically-oriented and source-skeptical historians of Islam, it is likely that Muhammad himself was not hostile to Medinan Jews. These historians argue that many verses in the [[Qur'an]] (which is generally considered a source contemporary to Muhammad) that directly address the fate of Muhammad's contemporary Jews are rather tolerant and that truly violent intolerance would have been unlikely to emerge from the highly cosmopolitan environment of pre-Islamic Arabia. This, they argue, contrasts sharply with the much later [[hadith]] sources which are frequently intensely vitriolic in their address of Jews and record such events as the expulsions, persecution, enslavement, and [[The Massacre of the Banu Qurayza|execution of Medinan Jews]] en masse. Historians who incline towards this line of reasoning argue that this content found in the hadith was only invented later by Muslim authorities as polemical material to employ against Jews and Judaism. Not all historians are convinced by these arguments, however, as indirect mention of the Jews in the Quran itself is often highly critical and at times straightforwardly insulting. This debate is, however, a strictly academic one, and mainstream Islamic scholars stand firmly by the narrative found in the hadith literature.

Any notion of Islamic antisemitism must be distinguished, through both comparison and contrast, from the  form of antisemitism which has, and in a few places continues to, oppress Jews in the (usually Christian) West. The English term of antisemitism is usually used to refer to the Western hatred of Jews by Christians which, at least historically, was deeply rooted in Christian religious beliefs about the status of Jews as a people responsible for the murder (deicide) of God in the form of Jesus Christ. There was also the idea of the failure of the Jews to embrace the New Testament and the new covenant with God advanced by Christians. These two ideas, coupled with historical allusions to the religious failures of early Jews according the Old Testament and stereotypes about Jews (such as their financial cunning and exaggerated physique) which accreted in the centuries after Jesus' demise, worked together to constitute a uniquely acute and religious hatred of the Jewish people which in some ways, if not formally than practically, almost amounted to a Christian religious doctrine.