History as Prelude: Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean PDF
Preview History as Prelude: Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean
History as Prelude History as Prelude Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean Edited by Joseph V. Montville LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History as prelude : Muslims and Jews in the medieval Mediterranean / [edited by] Joseph V. Montville. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-7391-6814-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-6815-8 (electronic) 1. Islam—Relations—Judaism—History. 2. Judaism—Relations—Islam—History. 3. Islamic Empire—Ethnic relations. 4. Andalusia (Spain) —Ethnic relations. I. Montville, Joseph V. BP173.J8H57 2011 200.9182’21—dc23 2011027867 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Introduction Recovering History A Psychodynamic Approach to Peacemaking Joseph V. Montville This book was conceived of as part of a larger project I launched several years ago at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. I had founded the Preventive Diplomacy Program at this well-known and long-established public policy think tank to provide a structure for introducing applied political psychology analysis and prescriptive intervention strategies in attempting to transform ethnic and sectarian conflict situations from violence to nonviolence, to peaceful coexistence, and, ideally, to some form of reconciliation through healing the wounds of history in the conflicted relationships. I had had a twenty-three-year career as a Foreign Service officer serving in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Morocco, and extensive service in the State Department in the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where I was chief of the Near East division. The political psychology approach to ethnic and sectarian conflict analysis was something I gradually became immersed in as a result of frustration with the ineffectiveness of the traditional diplomatic approaches I had witnessed as a career diplomat. I became convinced that apparently intractable ethnic conflict was a form of human pathology and it required a strategy created by political analysts working with psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, historians, and regional and cultural affairs experts to essentially take a history of the conflict the way a physician takes a history of a patient’s illness. This process required the active participation of representatives of the groups or nations in conflict through sustained dialogues of discovery of painful memory, wounds to collective self-esteem, justice denied, and justice demanded. The ultimate goal was to help elicit from the perpetrators or their descendants acknowledgment of the hurts and injustices they had inflicted on the victims, for them to express genuine remorse for their or their people’s violence and aggression, and to ask forgiveness of their victims. The task was complicated and extremely difficult as it was, but even more so because at certain points in history the victims might themselves have been the aggressors and thus incurred moral debts of their own. The larger project at CSIS of which this book is the fruit was called “Israel, the Palestinians and Reviving the Memory of Muslim Spain.” Part of the original plan was to organize historical tourism for high school and university students in Israel, Palestine, and the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa to Al-Andalus in Spain and to other sites in the Mediterranean that were linked historically with several centuries in medieval times when Muslims and Jews lived a life once called Convivencia —literally “living together.” It was a time in which merchants and traders, craftsmen and physicians, mathematicians and scientists, courtiers and statesmen, poets and philosophers, spiritual leaders, judges and military men lived lives of practical, everyday coexistence. The master historian, Shelomo Dov Goitein, author of the five-volume A Mediterranean Society, which most of the authors in this volume have consulted extensively, characterized the Arab-Jewish relationship as “symbiosis.” Sir Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, described this time in To Heal a Fractured World, saying: For centuries Spain had been the home of medieval Jewry’s golden age. Under relatively liberal regimes, Jews had risen to eminence in business, the sciences and public life. Their experience was sought in finance, medicine and diplomacy. They sustained a rich intellectual and cultural life. Jewish learning flourished. Spanish Jewry was noted for its achievements in Jewish law, mysticism and philosophy. But the Jews of Spain were also well versed in the wider culture and made significant contributions to its poetry, politics, astronomy, medicine and cartography. Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), considered by many to be the national poet of Palestine, idealized Al-Andalus in this poem: Andalus . . . might be here or there . . . a meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture . . . It is not only that there was Jewish-Muslim coexistence, but that the fates of the two people were similar. . . . Al-Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem. This edited translation appeared in Peter Cole’s The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950–1492 (p. vi). But, as our lead author Mark R. Cohen explained in the introduction to his signature study, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, the upbeat view of Jewish-Arab life in the medieval Mediterranean became caught up in the political whirlwind and ideologies surrounding the Israeli-Arab conflict with the June War of 1967 marking a turning point in the debate. Some Jewish writers, many nonspecialists but eventually even some scholars, began to call the “Golden Age” a myth, a time that was, in fact, one of oppression and suffering for the Jewish minority. Some went further saying that Jewish life under Muslim rule was just as bad as it was under Christian rule in Europe. After the defeat of the Arab countries and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, some Arab writers and political spokesmen praised Al-Andalus as an unqualified paradise of Jewish-Muslim coexistence that in the twentieth century had become impossible as a model for the two peoples today because of Zionism and the establishment of Israel. Polemics and propaganda cast a cloud over history and deprived peace diplomacy of a model of genuine, practical Jewish-Arab respectful Convivencia that most students of comparative religion, politics, and diplomacy believe can and should play an important role in creating an environment in public opinion of Palestinians, other Arabs, and Israeli—and Diaspora—Jews so that the people might imagine peace as possible, not least because of the remarkable precedent of the medieval Mediterranean. This collection of essays by seven scholars internationally respected as among the very top in their field is, on its face, a straightforward narrative of real world—intellectual, commercial, spiritual, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic—creative engagement among Jews, Muslims, and some Christians in daily life in Spain and around the Mediterranean. They possess dazzling skills in Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and multiple European languages that have permitted them to digest and assess the vast research literature and documents from the Cairo Geniza—that magical, dry air storage room in the Ben Ezra Synagogue—that preserved them for historians in the modern age. They do not do contemporary political analysis, psychodynamic assessments, or visionary statements of the possible in the Arab- Jewish relationship in the twenty-first century. They just do the historical facts as they see them as disciplined researchers and writers. Yet their work, from my psychopolitical and diplomatic perspective, is a major contribution to the Israeli-Arab peace process because it undermines— in fact blows away—the efforts of propagandists serving governments or political movements to negate the reality of the Arab- Jewish relationship in the medieval Mediterranean. Our authors, in their unassuming, superb scholarship, have erected a wall protecting historical reality from distortion, providing irrefutable—and often delightful—examples of creative coexistence. Without pretence or fanfare they demonstrate that Jewish-Muslim civilization worked at a time when Christian European life was in the darkest of ages. In terms of the identity and self-esteem of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages, our scholars recover a history that their descendants today can be proud of. For Jews of Europe and Arabs of modern times, the scholars have proven that there was a time their predecessors together set the standard for science and culture that actually made the Renaissance in Christian Europe possible. Our scholars recover this memory of good —indeed great—self, of distinction of Arab and Jewish culture, learning, and economic skills. They have performed an act of forensic scholarship that reveals in extraordinary detail a history of great achievement. In doing their standard, highest quality work, they have also given peacemakers a platform on which to construct a vision of twenty-first-century Abrahamic community and culture. Here is a brief précis of what they have done. We begin with Mark Cohen’s “Jewish and Islamic Life in the Middle Ages: Through the Window of the Cairo Geniza.” A geniza is a burial place for worn pages from Hebrew books used by traditional Jews around the world even to this day. Cohen’s chapter is the most appropriate introduction to this collection since the Geniza, the closed storage room in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue with a narrow opening to deposit pages that could not be destroyed, is the treasure trove also of nonsacred documents that made possible much, if not most, of the research in this book. The Cairo Geniza documents are an unparalleled source of information on economic, social, and cultural life of Jews and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean. The Geniza attests to the cultural similarity between the two religious communities. Documents uncovered within it contained information on Jewish activities stretching from Spain to India and describe a Mediterranean-wide society, similar to today’s European Union. Thus, S. D. Goitein, the preeminent Cairo Geniza scholar, called his five-volume study A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. The vast majority of the Cairo Geniza documents are pages from books—biblical codices, rabbinic sources, poetry, legal texts, and prayer books, for example. But there were also found pieces of Arabic belles lettres and Muslim religious texts, that is, pages of the Arabic Qur’ān written in Hebrew letters. And many of the documents were from everyday life—contracts, divorce decrees, wills, and business papers, most written in Judeo-Arabic, that is, Arabic in Hebrew letters. Some of the official documents were in Arabic. In sum, the Cairo Geniza stands as an irrefutable monument to the creative coexistence of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages. Notwithstanding this, the Geniza documents also reveal certain hardships of Jews under Muslim rule, especially of the jizya, or head tax imposed on non-Muslims. There were also episodes of terror and destruction of synagogues and churches, and forced conversions to Islam in direct contravention of the Qur’ān under the notorious eleventh-century Caliph al-Ḥakīm in Cairo. After he died, religious buildings were again allowed to be repaired and rebuilt. Those Jews and Christians forced to convert to Islam were allowed to revert to their religious faiths. Then there was the well-known repression of minorities under the Almohad leaders in North Africa and Muslim Spain, Al-Andalus, in the twelfth century. This led the young Mūsa ibn Maimūn, or Maimonides, to flee with his family from Córdoba to relative safety in Fez in Morocco and then to Cairo where he thrived and was appointed by the Caliph as head of the Jewish community. There was the infamous murder of the leader of the Jewish community in Granada in 1066 CE followed by a pogrom in which many Jews were killed. This was the only incident directed solely against Jews from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. Other moments of repression were directed against Jews and Christians together. As shocking as these examples of Muslim oppression against religious minorities were, there was a great contrast with the more or less constant misery and episodic terror of being Jewish under Christian rule in Europe in the same period which became a permanent condition through the twentieth century. Mark Cohen’s Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews and the Middle Ages, translated into Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, French, and Romanian, and with a Spanish version in the pipeline, is considered by most scholars to be the definitive history of this subject. The Cairo Geniza documents describe a unified, nonsectarian economic community. In the atmosphere of “live and let live” portrayed in these documents, Jews participated thoroughly in Arabic culture from Spain to Persia. The core feature was Jewish assimilation of the Arabic language. Jews became Arabized. There is extensive evidence of Jewish cultural embeddedness in the Islamic world. Hebrew and Arabic are similar Semitic tongues. The great head of the Babylonian yeshiva of Sura, Sa’adya Gaon (d. 942), is credited with having made Arabic the dominant literary mode. He translated the Torah into Arabic and wrote a commentary on the translation in Arabic. About sixty thousand leaves of Hebrew poetry using Arabic rhyme and meter patterns were found in the Cairo Geniza. To wrap up this summary, Cohen notes that numerous biographical fragments and writings of Maimonides were found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue Geniza. This giant of Jewish scholarship and teaching who, in Cohen’s words, “in many ways . . . represents the acme of Andalusian Jewish-Arabic culture,” wrote his greatest works, the commentary on the Mishna and the “Guide of the Perplexed” in Arabic. Thomas Glick’s “Sharing Science: Jews, Muslims, and the Practical Science in the Medieval Islamic World” is a straightforward, factual account of collaboration in the elaboration and uses of mathematics based on the author’s meticulous scholarship. It also is cognitively a falsification of the modern myth of Jewish misery under Muslim rule. Glick writes that the expansion of Islam created a structure for interaction among the cultures of the ancient world, one of the most important results of which was the recovery of most of the scientific knowledge of classical Greece, with the admixture of Indian astronomy and mathematics. Muslim and Jewish scholars and professionals met, taught each other, and enriched intellectual and practical life. The dominant Aristotelian framework allowed people of differing religious and ethnic identities to study, work, and create new knowledge together. Glick provides a fascinating account of how this engagement worked in the area of numeracy and mathematical culture. And how advances in mathematics strengthened the activity and increased wealth in the common market Muslims extended from Spain through India and China. The expanded uses of efficient math also greatly facilitated calculation of shares in inheritance matters and, with astronomy, in ascertaining dates of Muslim and Jewish religious holidays. Then there was the challenge to logical thinking and also the pleasures Jews and Muslims took in playing chess with each other, a game invented in India. In “‘The Battle of Alfuente,’ by Samuel the Nagid,” Raymond Scheindlin gives us a unique experience in a matched set of gifts. Most prominently there is his own translation of an eleventh-century CE riveting poem by perhaps the highest ranking Jew in the court of a medieval Muslim ruler. He precedes this with a framing essay that puts the poem—ostensibly an account of a major battle in Al-Andalus—in the context of the enduring dilemma of Diaspora Jewry dependent for security and survival on a gentile king. What is so impressive in this short chapter is Scheindlin’s analysis of the sophisticated introspection of Samuel the Nagid, head of Granada’s Jewish community and chief minister in the court of Ḥabūs and then his son, Bādīs. It is inconceivable that a Jew could have had such power under a Christian ruler. But while Samuel might have been the most powerful minister in a Muslim regime, there were many others in the medieval Muslim world, including through the mid-twentieth century in Iraq. This fact underlines the historical truth unimaginable in Christendom where the dogma of collective and permanent guilt for the murder of Jesus Christ was the burden of being Jewish. Samuel the Nagid is considered the leading poet of the Hebrew Golden Age. And he was steeped in the stories of the Bible and the endless challenge to Jews of survival against episodic enemies. It was just not easy to be a politically powerful, gifted Jew, even in Al- Andalus. But the Battle of Alfuente may have been one of the moments that made it worthwhile. Ahmad Dallal’s “On Muslim Curiosity and the Historiography of the Jews of Yemen” is a subject he has been working on for many years. This carefully researched chapter may seem somewhat exotic—a matter of esoteric and highly specialized scholarship and not as straightforwardly descriptive of Muslim-Jewish interaction as the others in this collection— but in many ways his essay goes to the heart of the quest for accurate history of the Jewish experience under Muslim rule. The case of Yemeni Jews is particularly appropriate for examination because of the position of many European scholars, and not a few polemicists, that Jewish life under “sectarian” Zaydī Shiite rule was as bad as Jewish life under European Christian rule. Dallal delves deeply into the conflicting sources. As for arguments that Muslims showed little or no interest in Jewish religious sources, he cites thirteenth-century Muslim scholar al-Shawkānī’s fascinating analysis of the deviations from Abrahamic sources of the “liberal intellectuals,” Maimonides and Avicenna, on the issue of bodily resurrection. Al-Shawkānī cites Torah and biblical reference to make his case that they were mistaken. What comes across most strongly in Kathryn Miller’s “Doctors without Borders: Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean World,” a lucidly informative chapter, is how seriously Muslim, Christian, and Jewish physicians in the Middle Ages took their responsibilities. Their sense of high professional calling quite consistently obscured differences in religious identities. Medical doctors were of a class by themselves, consulting on best practices and setting high standards for care delivery. They worked to set equally high standards for pharmacists and the drugs they prepared. It was not at all unusual for Muslim rulers to have Jewish court physicians; Maimonides, in Cairo, is the best known. Miller flavors her chapter with a quote from Maimonides describing his typically exhausting workday, traveling from Fustat (Old Cairo) to the sultan’s palace in Cairo to care for him and his extended family, and then returning to Fustat to his private practice where he was swamped with patients until late at night. He conducts his final consultation flat on his back from exhaustion. This story from real life enriches Miller’s almost encyclopedic narrative of how the knowledge and practice of medicine in the medieval Mediterranean and farther East thrived on the respectful relationships, especially of Muslim and Jewish professionals. In “Merchants and Cross-Cultural Commerce in the Medieval Mediterranean World,” Olivia Remie Constable draws a lively portrait of real life interaction among Muslim, Christian, and Jewish merchants in their home cities, on board ship, and on the road in the Mediterranean market place and beyond. Drawing on the richness of the Cairo Geniza documents, she shows how the risks of trading and trust among far-flung partners enabled commerce in staples and luxuries—such as jewels, perfumes, and exotic spices—from the East. Jews and Muslims for the most part traded with their coreligionists, but there was inevitable commingling in the bigger ports. Business was not always smooth. Goods could be spoiled in shipment. Customs agents and middlemen sometimes took larger “commissions” for permitting the entry of products for sale. Bad weather en route sometimes caused major losses of goods. But Constable provides a touching account of noble decency on the part of King William of Sicily who personally organized the rescue of Muslim and Christian passengers shipwrecked off the port of Messina. When William saw that some of the Muslim passengers did not have the money to pay the small-boat Sicilian rescuers, he paid for their trips to safety with his own funds. We conclude the book with Diana Lobel’s “Sufism and Philosophy in Muslim Spain and the Medieval Mediterranean World.” The chapter is a precise and detailed assessment of tensions between spirituality and the rational among Jews and Muslims, and an impressive finale to this collection of essay-portraits of the two peoples in their time and place. But it is also much
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