Children of Abraham: A review
Published this year, its author Marc David Baer attempts to apply much-needed nuance to a topic, Jewish-Muslim relations, that usually veers into myths of interfaith utopia or perennial antagonism. Spanning the period from Islamic rule to the present, Baer largely succeeds in this endeavor when covering the period of Islamic rule in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the advent of European colonialism. However, it is when addressing Israel that Baer largely abandons that nuance.
The relevance of the Mufti
It starts with the chapter where Baer addresses the Shoah. While he decides to focus on examples of Muslims helping and saving Jews – he provides the interesting statistic that, during the Second World War, the small Jewish community in Albania actually grew – Baer devotes some time to discuss the role of Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini as well.
Baer does not deny his Nazi collaborationist past, nor does he try to apologize for the Mufti. However, Baer argues that Zionists focused on the Mufti to discredit the Palestinian cause. And he ends his brief description of the Mufti and his role by stating that “enough ink has been spilled” on him.
The comment is surprising, as Baer himself will return to the Mufti several times in subsequent pages. In addition, he remarks that historical research has not been able to give an answer concerning the Islamic world’s attitude to Nazi ideology. This comment, in and of itself, is odd. First of all, it is impossible to treat the Muslim world as a monolith, as Baer himself shows that Jews were treated differently in Albania, while in Iraq the Mufti-inspired pogrom known as the Farhud was carried out against Jews in Baghdad in 1941. Second of all, a closer inspection of the sources Baer has used reveals that while he does consult David Motadel’s Islam and Nazi Germany’s War, he ignores the contributions made by Jeffrey Herf, Klaus Gensicke, Klaus-Michaël Mallman, Martin Cüppers, and Matthias Küntzel. Indeed, in Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East Küntzel has shown that Nazi Germany supported, both with funds and arms, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It is also known that Nazi propaganda is still very much vibrant across the MENA region, as Gensicke mentioned in The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis already in 2007 that Mein Kampf was a bestseller in the Arab world and the late Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi once called for another Shoah.
As for the Mufti himself, his power started to wane rather rapidly after 1949, but was that simply the consequence of the Arab world disavowing him or was that, at least partially, explained by the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular pan-Arab nationalism as well as the secular Baathist movement? Gensicke argued that Nasser sealed the Mufti’s political fate in the Middle East, due to his connection with Islamists. Moreover, he was a relevant factor that deserves attention, considering the development of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was connected to acts of anti-Jewish violence from the 1920s onwards in the British Mandate era, until he fled during the Arab Revolt in the late 1930s; he was directly involved in the Farhud; and he collaborated closely with Nazi Germany, by using German radio stations to spread his antisemitic propaganda and helping to form a Muslim SS division.
Finally, he and his followers used violence against any Palestinian Arab willing to negotiate with the Yishuv, from those who advocated a binational state to Arabs supporting the Partition Plan, which is referred to by Jeffrey Herf in Israel’s Moment. Thus, he had a powerful influence on making Arab rejectionism of Jewish statehood the position of Arabs in Palestine. He was the leader of the Arab Higher Committee which attacked the Yishuv the day after the Partition Plan had been accepted by a UN majority. Moreover, the Mufti should have been included in the Nuremberg Trials, yet it was the French government that put him up in a villa where he received guests from which he finally “escaped” to Egypt in 1946; as Motadel and Herf show, the Allies received numerous pleas from the Arab world to release the Mufti, including a letter from Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was already a powerful organization from the 1930s onwards; and it was the United States and Great Britain that refused to charge him, despite the fact that American authorities had compiled a large file on the Mufti and his activities during the war.
Due to the above, as well as the United Nations’ acceptance of him as the highest political representative for Palestinian Arabs, the Mufti remains an important factor to mention. Most certainly, it cannot be argued that “too much ink” has been devoted to him.
Israel, Arab Israelis, and Mizrahi Jews
Throughout the book, Baer is very critical of what he terms political Zionism – he contrasts this with an ancestor of his who was a spiritual Zionist and moved to live in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this and he provides examples of Jews who opposed Zionism, as well as examples of Jewish-Muslim symbiosis in Ottoman Palestine and the early British Mandate era, for instance by describing the festivities attended by both Jewish and Muslim residents in Hebron concerning the Cave of the Patriarchs. Indeed, he mentions how Jews and Muslims historically used to coexist peacefully in Palestine.
However, several examples of antagonism are surprisingly ignored. So, Georges Bensoussan’s fairly recent article on anti-Jewish violence in Ottoman Palestine, including an 1834 pogrom that lasted more than a month in Safed carried out by Muslims against Jews, in response to the latter receiving more rights from the Egyptian ruler Mehemet Ali, is not mentioned; the documented humiliation of Jewish residents of Jerusalem, which could include beatings by Muslims, in the nineteenth century, as mentioned by Ashkenazi visitors and even decried by Karl Marx, is not mentioned either; and Baer’s example of the Cave of the Patriarchs does not mention that Muslims forbade Jews from entering – a decision made by the Mamluks in 1267, which continued until the Six Day War. Instead, they were only allowed to ascend to the seventh step of the cave and pray there, which Muslims considered an example of tolerance – however, as mentioned by Hillel Cohen in Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929, who also described coexistence between Jews and Muslims in Hebron, it was not uncommon for Muslim youths there to throw stones at Jews, pull their beards and sidelocks or engage in other degrading acts.
As Baer’s approach is rather nuanced concerning the topic of Jews under Islamic rule, it sometimes seems as if this specific piece of territory in the Middle East receives treatment close to the interfaith utopia Baer usually rejects, while the analysis of Israel sometimes borders on the lachrymose. At one point, Baer unconvincingly tries to argue that Arab Israelis are dhimmi. While he cannot ignore the citizenship and thus political rights of Arab Israelis, he tries to argue that Israel invented dhimmitude with a twist. Just to reflect, these are some of the rules associated with Jews’ dhimmi status under Islamic rule, as referred to by Georges Bensoussan in Jews in Arab Countries:
- Jews needed to pay the jizya and kharraj taxes
- Jews could convert to Islam, but not the other way around
- Jews were not allowed to give Muslim names to their children
- Jews could not bear arms
- Jews could not build houses higher than Muslim houses
- Jews could not construct Jewish houses of prayer in Muslim neighborhoods or reconstruct those which existed there previously
- Jews could not bury deceased Jews in Muslim quarters
Furthermore, a Muslim man was allowed to marry a Jewish woman, but a Jewish man could not marry a Muslim woman; the testimony of a Jew was invalid in an Islamic court; and certain arduous and unpalatable professions were reserved for Jews. The dhimma did not mean that overt violence against Jews could be applied because of their lower status; it meant that it could be applied, if they tried to liberate themselves from their position in society.
But, even if the historical record shows that the dhimma was not enforced to the same extent in every region and by every ruler, the above shows the weakness of Baer’s analogy. And while Arab Israelis were subjected to military rule in Israel until 1966 – a harsh rule, as described by Anita Shapira in Ben-Gurion – left-wing parties in Ben Gurion’s governing coalition, as well as members from the right-wing Herut, Likud’s predecessor, repeatedly pleaded with him to rescind it. On the other hand, while many Jews chose to Hebraize their names, Arab Israelis were not required to do this, nor were they prohibited from speaking Arabic. And while Baer calls Arab political participation marginal, he omits the fact that the Joint List once became the third party in Israeli elections. Of course, that does not mean that criticism of Israel is impossible and it is important to address issues, such as discrimination of Arab Israelis or the need to reduce economic inequality.
In addition, Baer mentions that interfaith marriage is not possible in Israel – however, Islamic rule precluded equality in interfaith marriage. Moreover, Baer ignores the fact that a debate continues to rage in Israel about civil marriage. Thus, numerous Israeli Jews who refuse a religious marriage have decided to marry abroad – Cyprus is a popular destination – because foreign marriage certificates are accepted under Israeli law. In fact, this makes interfaith marriage possible in Israel via a different route, as shown by Israeli model and Arab Christian Huda Naccache who married her Jewish Israeli husband in Cyprus; another prominent example is the marriage of Israeli Jewish actor and singer Tzachi Halevi and Arab Israeli and Muslim journalist Lucy Aharish – sadly, they chose to keep their ceremony in Israel a secret, for fear of Jewish and Muslim extremists arriving in protest.
Finally, Baer criticizes Israeli treatment of Mizrahi Jews. He refers to the discrimination of Mizrahi Jews upon arrival in Israel, the overwhelming majority of whom spent time in ma’abarot and quotes Jews who were deeply affected by the discrimination applied to them by Israeli authorities. While there certainly was much discrimination in the 1950s, for example against Jews who continued to speak Arabic, one could point to the endeavor of Israeli nation-building. Within this context, the promotion of Hebrew as the official language, the fostering of unity, and the emphasis on a positive image could affect Ashkenazim as well. So, in Israel: A History Anita Shapira refers to the aggressive Israeli Legion of the Defenders of the Language, which took it upon itself to challenge Israelis speaking Yiddish in public – in the 1930s, some Hebrew-language activists even scolded German Jews and told them not to speak the language of the Nazis in the street; and until the Eichmann trial, Israeli society did not provide much room for Shoah memory, because it was deemed an example of humiliation as described by Omer Bartov in 2019, in The Holocaust and North Africa, edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein.
Furthermore, in 2000, Steven M. Lowenstein argued in The Jewish Cultural Tapestry that modern Israeli Hebrew was created by secularized Ashkenazi Jews who wished to break with the Diaspora past – Yiddish, for instance. As for the State of Israel, Lowenstein pointed to the fact that government officials and educators worked hard to acculturate all Jews through the process of shelilat hagola (rejection of the Diaspora) and mizug aliyot (mixing of immigrant groups) in the 1940s and 1950s, out of a desire to create a relatively homogeneous and unified Jewish population. While Jewish vernaculars – Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Djudezmo – for instance, could divide, Hebrew was a unifier. The downside, obviously, is that this meant that Mizrahi Jewish cultures were discouraged as primitive.
While Israel’s absorption measures have been understandably criticized by scholars, not to mention the discrimination most heavily experienced in the 1950s, Baer’s treatment of Mizrahi Jews is static. No room is provided for analyzing the evolution of Mizrahi Jewish communities in Israel. In fact, he does return to Israel with the adoption of November 30th as a national day of commemoration by the Knesset in 2014, which is focused on the expulsion and flight of 850,000 from the MENA region. However, Baer – and I consider this truly astonishing – turns it on its head by calling it an attempt to strip Arab Jews of their identity. What Baer omits is that the law was sponsored by Shas’ Nissim Ze’ev, an Israeli politician born to Iraqi Jewish parents from Baghdad, and Yisrael Beitenu’s Shimon Ohayon, a Mizrahi Jew born in Morocco.
As for Israel today, even Bartov acknowledged in 2019 that Israeli culture has been transformed in radical ways, as cuisine and music are heavily influenced by Mizrahi cultures. Moreover, Haim Saadoun of the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem mentioned in The Holocaust and North Africa that during the 1990s, Yad Vashem became deeply involved in research, exhibitions, and conferences concerning North African Jewish communities, while Israeli laws regarding compensation for Shoah survivors started including Jews from Libya and Tunisia for the first time. As for November 30th, Israel does not demand that all Jews from the MENA region identify with this commemoration. But most Mizrahi Jews in Israel do consider this day important, as it is an Israeli recognition of the suffering of Mizrahim who fled or were expelled from the MENA region. And, on a personal note, this day carries deep meaning for me, a descendant of Iraqi Jewish grandparents on my father’s side, who arrived in Israel stripped of their rights and almost all of their possessions by the Iraqi government in 1951.
A useful and lacking source
Baer’s book provides numerous examples of historical Muslim-Jewish symbiosis, while trying to apply nuance as opposed to the extremes of interfaith utopia and perennial antagonism. While largely successful concerning the eras of Islamic rule and European colonialism, its structure looks like a collection of case studies and provides much less attention to Yemen and Iran, while ignoring interaction in countries such as Sudan and Afghanistan. The book makes extensive use of secondary sources in English, French, German, and Turkish, while sources in Arabic and Hebrew are largely absent. Moreover, the absence of several sources, such as research on the reception of Nazi ideology as well as its continued use and impact in the Arab world or the role of the Mufti, are conspicuous, while the discussion of Israel in several instances borders on the lachrymose. While Muslim-Jewish symbiosis is analyzed by Baer concerning Islamic rule, yet not in the context of Israel should be considered a weakness, too. One example that comes to mind is the story of Amos Yarkoni, a Bedouin and Muslim Israeli, who was born Abd al-Majid Hidr and would later Hebraize his name. He dedicated his life to Israeli national security and commanded the Shaked unit. He is buried at the Kiryat Shaul military cemetery in Tel Aviv. Finally, in the case of Mizrahi Jews, Baer stresses discrimination in the 1950s, while ignoring their increasing presence in the following decades throughout Israeli society.
Historical research is filled with debates and Baer’s book is a useful source that provides readers with an interest in exploring the history of Jewish-Muslim relations with a good starting point. But that is exactly what it is. Its size and scope prevents it from in-depth analysis of any time period or region; and while the flap argues that it is free from earlier accounts riddled with myths and countermyths, I would argue that Baer comes close to creating myths of his own concerning Israel. It is why the subtitle symbolizes the problem with this book: “The story of Jewish-Muslim relations.” Calling it “A story of Jewish-Muslim relations” would have been much more apt.
Just as this is simply a review and not the review.
