by Simon Schama
It is entirely understandable, then, that just like later Christian critics of Talmud-based Jews, Muslim writers would insist that Islam was the true fulfilment of the Jewish Bible; that in its pages, especially in the epics of Abraham/Ibrahim and Moses/Musa, were to be found the promises eventually fulfilled by Muhammad, and that the religion to which contemporary Jews clung was a modern rabbinical-Talmud invention unauthorised by divine revelation. This, after all, was a view also held by Samaritans and the new congregation of Karaites who rejected any rabbinical additions to the laws laid down in the Torah.
So why did the Jews of the Hijaz not respond more positively to Muhammad, in fact reject him so abrasively that in Yathrib, at least, they invited their own uprooting and physical destruction? The answer lay in a rewritten version of the Bible, Genesis in particular, that offended against the now closed Torah canon. Had Muhammad appeared on the scene six centuries earlier, his variations would not perhaps have seemed so heretical, given that the Dead Sea Scrolls are themselves full of pseudepigrapha that fundamentally rewrite not just the stories of the patriarchs (and more dramatically the matriarchs) but the account given in Genesis of the very Creation. And as we have seen, that was also a time trembling with anticipation of a manichean drama of Last Days that was virtually a prototype for Islam’s account, not to mention room made for all kinds of latter-day prophets and celestially informed messengers from the Almighty. Like many of the prophecies and the literature of the merkavah, the mystic chariot that bore messengers into the heavenly realms and back, Muhammad claimed to have been in heaven, and he, like those travellers in Paradise, recited mantric prayers and cloaked himself in a mysterious mantle. Muhammad’s problem was one of timing, appearing before the Jews of Yathrib and the Hijaz long after the sages had categorically declared an end to the prophets.
For many of those Jews, and especially for those the Quran calls the rabban’iyun, their rabbinical establishment, Muhammad was a presumptuous, if not dangerous, pretender, all the more so since he came bearing only word of mouth of a personal revelation which he nonetheless insisted superseded the written authority of the Torah. Where was a written Book of his revelation, something comparable to that which had been ‘found’ in the Temple in the days of Josiah and miraculously preserved through the Babylonian exile, restored to Jerusalem by the scribe-priest Ezra? And by what right did Muhammad garble and alter the Torah and make Ishmael (Ism’ail), not Isaac, the object of God’s commandment to sacrifice his son, or have Abraham visit Ism’ail and Hagar in their desert exile to bestow his benediction? Even worse than this blasphemously cavalier rewriting was the shameless insistence that those who had written the Torah were frauds and forgers, requiring timely correction by the Quran.
Once they had taken on board all these affronts, the indignant guardians of Jewish tradition in Medina were not shy of making the magnitude of the heresy known. They did it, moreover, through the classically Arabic medium of public poetry, often recited in the open-air marketplaces which in Medina were still run by the Jews. There had long been a Bedouin tradition of such recitations, and along with other adopted Arabian practices, the Jews had slipped easily into the role of that declamatory versifying. Now they used their skill to biting polemical ends. The most fateful of those interventions was in 622 by the venerable poet (said to be 120 years old) Abu Afaq, when he poured scorn on Muhammad’s pretensions, and urged any believers in the one God to desert and steer clear of his message and person. The earliest biographies of the Prophet record the extent of Muhammad’s fury at the challenge. ‘Who will deal with the rascal?’ he is reported as asking, a request which was quickly taken up by one of his most devoted followers, Salim ibn Umayr. ‘A hot night came and Abu Afaq slept in an open place. Salim ibn Umayr knew it so he placed a sword on his liver and pressed until it reached the bed. The enemy of Allah screamed and the people who were his followers [the Jews] rushed to him, took him to his house and interred him.’ In some traditions a woman convert to Judaism, and also a poet, Asma bint Marwan, was so antagonised by the murder of Abu Afaq that she launched into her own public satirical denunciation and was herself murdered, surrounded by her twelve children, the smallest of whom had to be torn from her nursing breast before she was stabbed to death. Jewish women poet-singers – some of them like one Hirra al Yahudiya from the Himyarite southern region of Wadi Hadhramaut, where there may have been a tradition of their public performance – seem to have been among the most vocally hostile to Muhammad’s claims, and invariably paid a price for their temerity.10
Matters changed drastically in Medina. Provoked by the rejection of the Jews, Muhammad changed the direction of the qibla, the orientation of prayer, from Jerusalem to Mecca. Politically he had been welcomed in many quarters as a figure who might transcend the quarrels of the tribal clans – which, it should be emphasised, were not Jews versus Arabs, but several Judeo-Arab groups in temporary alliances or contentions with one another. Instead of the dispassionate arbitrator, Muhammad plunged – with a good deal of astuteness – into these intra-factional battles. But by 622 it was evident that he would take an increasingly hard line with the most senior and powerful of the Jewish clans, all of whom were dangerously allied one way or another with various of his adversaries. The fact that it was thought they could bribe non-Jewish clans to joining the anti-Muhammad alliance only made matters worse. In some cases, that economic prominence might have backfired against the Jews, for it may have helped recruit loyalists who could (and did) profit from their eviction – especially in the case of the Banu Nadir clan who dominated the date-palm groves around Yathrib and at Khaybar. The Banu Qaynuka were principally artisan goldsmiths, and their inventory might have been another incentive for hostility. Both were summarily driven from the city of their ancestry, moving north to Khaybar and, according to the Muslim chroniclers, on to south Syria, perhaps Palmyra. For the most dominant of the clans, the Qurayza – who made the fatal mistake of allying with Muhammad’s most obstinate enemies in Mecca (possibly because the clan had its own family members in that city), following an abortive siege that gave him control of Yathrib – the Prophet had a much more brutal response to the ‘treachery’. In an attempt at mitigation, the Qurayza claimed they had in fact contributed baskets and trench-digging spades to the defence of Yathrib, but their credibility had been fatally compromised. Asking a Believer from one of the local tribes, the Aws (which also had a Jewish clan), what should be the punishment of the Qurayza, it was determined that all the men (beween four hundred and nine hundred of them, depending on the historical source) should be put to death and their women and children taken into slavery and forcibly converted. Some of the slaves were sold to buy arms for the troops of the Faithful, others married off to Muslims, including one Rahaina who became the Prophet’s wife. The pitiless massacre was duly carried out.
Although the truth of the slaughter has been disputed in modern times, the brutal story was rehearsed and repeated in all the earliest biographies of the Prophet, and was not, after all, an especially unusual event in sixth- and seventh-century Medina. The Himyarite Jews had done as much to the Najran Christians a century earlier. But if we are to credit a document which also appears in those eighth-century biographies and which has generally been accepted to be historically authentic, the Qurayza were not the last Jews of Medina or the other towns of the Hijaz. Many of those remaining sub-clans were named in this document, known as the ‘Constitution of Medina’, which was a compact with submitting tribes setting out the basic structure of authority in the umma, the community of Believers. Of the fifty-nine articles of the document, no fewer than ten are made specifically with the Jewish clans presumably remaining in Medina following the massacre and expulsion of the major three tribes. But surprisingly, the document of the umma assumes a solidarity of military alliance between Jews and Muslims, specifying that the former would pay ‘their share of the expenses’ as long as they fought beside each other. The very next clause says something even more at odds with
the way Jews would eventually end up being treated as a People of the Book. It is complicated by the fact that the tribe it refers to – the powerful Banu Aws – had within it Muslims as well as Jews. But the text could hardly be more explicit in asserting that even were they to remain Jews they would still be considered not outside but inside the umma, in other words legally indistinguishable from Muslims. ‘The Jews of Banu Aws are a community with the Believers: the Jews have their religious law and the Muslims have their religious law.’11 This note of brotherly coexistence was made even more emphatic by the use of the word din – identical in Hebrew and Arabic to suggest the expression of religion in and through law. It was also evident from the ‘treaty’ that should the Jews choose not to fight alongside Muslims, they would be expected – as members of the umma – to compound for this by paying their share of the expenses of the campaign.
Solemn though this compact was between Muhammad and these non-Believers, it was not how matters unfolded (massacres aside) even during his own lifetime. The first city to be taken after breaking out from pacified Medina was, inevitably, multi-towered Khaybar, where the local Jews had been badly compromised by alliances with Muhammad’s enemies from his own tribe of Quraysh. Expelled from Medina the Banu Nadir had gone north to Khaybar where many of them already owned land. The place was armed to the teeth but, as it turned out, fatally divided between the three towers – Nataq, al Shiqq and Katiba – each of which lodged their own extended clan and who, in the siege which followed in 628–9, were concerned with their own survival. Muslim histories make the battle for Khaybar a decisive epic, Muhammad sending fake guests inside the walls who turned on their hosts at feasts and killed them assassinating the chief of the Banu Nadir, Huyayy ibn Akhtab, killing his son-in-law and taking his daughter Safiyya who became Muhammad’s second Jewish wife. The Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali takes on Marwab, the most formidable of the Jewish warriors, and splits the Jew’s helmet in two, piercing the champion’s skull.
Some Muslim sources have Muhammad deciding to expel the Jews of Khaybar for their temerity in allying with his enemies. Following the surrender, though, and perhaps mindful of other means of pacification, he is said to have agreed to their own proposal to be allowed to remain and practise their religion in return for a payment of half their harvest produce. Whether or not this is historically true, there’s no doubt that the submission of Khaybar became a template for the terms on which Islam settled with the populations it conquered with such stunning speed and force. But the most prodigious of the warrior caliphs, Umar I, in many ways the architect of Islam’s military-religious empire, overrode the Khaybar compact by declaring in 642 that before his death ten years earlier, Muhammad had insisted that there could be only one faith in Arabia itself. All unbelievers – Christians as well as Jews – had to remove themselves or be removed by whatever means it took. By official decree, Arabia was cleansed of the Jews who had lived there for at least half a millennium. Undoubtedly, many submitted to Islam; and especially in the erstwhile Himyar, Jews remained, probably until the mid twentieth century. Other small communities in the Hijaz – at Wadi Qura and Tayma – may have clung on as well, for letters from those towns dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries have been discovered amid the material found in the storehouse known as the Cairo Geniza in the Ben Ezra synagogue of Palestinian Jews in Fustat, Old Cairo. Though he had not seen them in person, the twelfth-century traveller Benjamin of Tudela described the ‘Rechabites’, peripatetic communities of Jews, warriors, cattle breeders and herders, with their own leader or nasi wearing black, eating no meat and drinking no wine but keeping the traditional feasts and fasts. At Khaybar, Benjamin even claimed there was a community of fifty thousand Jews. Less reliably, the traveller Obadiah of Bertinoro in the late fifteenth century claimed there was a tribe of Jewish giants calling themselves ‘Arabians of Shaddai’ (the name of the Almighty), so strong they could carry a camel on one shoulder. But apart from the communities that certainly did persist in Khaybar, Tayma and the Yemen, Jewish Arabia was a thing of the past.
Yet if the Jews lost Medina, they gained Jerusalem. In the generations after the conquests of Muhammad, his successor Abu Bakr and Umar, some went in one direction to Syria, Palestine and Egypt, some in the other to the Mesopotamian cities, conquered from the Persians, where the Talmud was being completed. And in all of these places, as well as the countless other towns and islands and countries over which Islam swept, Jews found a way to persist. The Arabian expulsion would turn out to be the exception not the rule. Nowhere else would be off limits to them; and unlike Christian Europe and Byzantium there would be no enforced confinement within a town to any particular quarter. Nor, again unlike Christendom, would any occupation be denied to Jews other than employment in the public administration and government of the umma. Most important of all, as ‘People of the Book’ along with Christians, they were protected in the practice of their religion, on the acceptance of certain binding conditions.
According to later Muslim historians those conditions were regularised in a ‘Pact’ or ‘Treaty’ said to have been drafted by Syrian Christians on their submission to Umar I. But it stretches all credulity to suppose that the conquered were in any position to lay down the terms of their surrender to the conqueror, and to do it, moreover, in the Arabic of which at that time they were entirely ignorant. It is far more likely that it was the eighth-century caliph Umar II who may have formalised the position of the People of the Book in the lands of the umma.
In many respects this must have promised an incomparably more benign existence than under Christendom. Jews had angered but not killed the Prophet so none of the stigma of God-killers was attached to them, nor were they ever dehumanised as living demons and consorts of the Devil. This made a difference. On the other hand they were not to be considered as equal to Muslims and incorporated within the community of Believers (as had been the case in the 622 document of Medina). They were dhimmi – the tolerated benighted. And on the precedent of Khaybar, their protection was conditional on payment of an annual poll tax – the jaliya (or jizya) – in gold dinar pieces, the number from one to four depending on both their fortune and where they lived.
Unbelievers, and the Jews in particular, were to be reminded of their humiliation and degradation in the sight of Muslims, in almost every aspect of their lives. It was one thing to forbid any public demonstrations of their religion (more of a trouble for Christians denied processional displays), or that their synagogues should never rise above the height of mosques; another to be banned from riding horses, and even when seated on donkeys ordered to ride side-saddle in the humiliating position of women (and with a distinctive saddle). More dangerously, Jews were banned from ever carrying weapons, which left them prey to harassment, assault and violent robbery (especially on the journeys they were habitually taking). Their second-rate status was further defined by their evidence being disallowed in Muslim courts, and a strict prohibition on Jewish men marrying Muslim women (while the reverse, the marriage of Muslim men with Jewish women, was perfectly legal). And precisely because it was impossible to tell who was a Jew and who a Muslim from their appearance, they were required to wear distinctive clothing in a honey-mustard colour and forbidden at the same time from wearing turbans or other forms of dignified Muslim dress (although enforcement of these requirements was far from universally applied). Their hats were to be of a particular shape and style; a yellow badge was ordered by the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad and extended throughout his realms; and Jews were required to wear not a belt but a loose girdle about their robes as a sign of their defenceless subjection.
It is of course hard for our contemporary minds to see yellow badges as anything except the inauguration of something which would assume murderous implications, not just in the twentieth century but in the Christian Middle Ages and beyond. See the Jew, despise the Jew, attack the Jew. And this did indeed frequently happen in medieval Islam. But it is equally important not to project backward
s too much and make episodes of brutality and massacre the norm, for they were not. What is true, however, is that the Jews who had been so deeply woven into the world of Arabia and the Near East were unpicked from that seamless coexistence. This does not mean, though, that amid the Believers they could not make a new, sumptuously rich cultural fabric.
II. Birds of Paradise, Pigeon-fanciers and Paper-pushers
What is the colour of flame? Orange? Gold? Blue? Red? All of the above, each tongue flickering in and out of the spectrum? What it was not was the dull yellow that Jews were supposed to wear in the Islamic world as an indicator of their baseness. At any rate, flame was the colour Salama ben Musa ben Isaac – originally from the port city of Sfax in Tunisia, but like so many others an immigrant to Egypt – insisted on wearing so that he might cut a figure on the Day of Atonement. Clearly, vanity was not one of the sins Salama was repenting, for the robe he was ordering sometime in the mid-eleventh century was the latest thing: ‘short and well-fitting, and of fine not coarse material’.12 But then other than the stringently exacted annual poll tax, the jaliya, the requirements for dhimmis (laid down centuries before in the ‘Pact of Umar’) bore little relationship to the way in which Jews actually lived in the vast Muslim world, which by the end of the ninth century stretched from Spain and the Maghrebi coast through Sicily and southern Italy to Egypt, Aden, Palestine and Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Business letters found among the hundreds of thousands of discarded documents in the Cairo Geniza of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, read at times like a fashion catalogue. The Jews of Egypt were heavily involved in the textile trade (when and where are they not?) of all kinds of fabrics – linens and silks, and many kinds of silks at that: the heavy ibrisim and the light khazz; lalas, the ‘fine red silk’, and lasin, the downmarket cheaper one.13 They bought and sold, and they dyed. Indeed, dyers specialised in one particular hue: sumac, purple, indigo or saffron. They spun, embroidered, brocaded and wove. The most menial of them spent their days disentangling flax fibres from the seeds that would be pounded into oil; others unwound fine, thin yarn from the cocoons of silkworms. The grandest bought and sold the fabric itself to be made into shawls and robes, scarves, cushions and rugs.
