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- [00:01]
Bloomberg Narrator
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- [00:28]
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- [01:04]
Thomas Small
Muslims and Jews age old enemies locked in an eternal cycle of oppression and resentment. Or so we think. But what if Jews and Muslims are not intractable antagonists, but estranged relatives? Mark David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. In his new book, Children of the Story of Jewish Muslim Relations, he argues that Jewish Muslim history cannot be reduced either to a lost golden age of coexistence or to a story of eternal hatred. For more than a thousand years, their relationship was closer, richer and stranger than our present moment allows us to imagine. From the Prophet Muhammad's Arabia to medieval Spain, from the Ottoman Empire to colonial North Africa, and from the birth of Zionism to the aftermath of 7 October, Bayer shows how modern conflict has hardened memories that were once far more complicated. I'm Thomas Small, this is my conflicte conversation with Mark David Behr.
- [02:37]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Hello Mark. Very nice to meet you, sir. Thanks for coming on Conflicted. It's great to have you on the show.
- [02:42]
Mark David Baer
Hello Thomas. Thank you for having me.
- [02:44]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
You've come on the show, Mark, to discuss your excellent new book, Children of Abraham, the Story of Jewish Muslim Relations. At the outset, I'll say it is excellent, dear listeners. It is rich, it is packed with information. It tells an incredible story judiciously, objectively, neither romantic nor ideologically charged. It's a very balanced history and it tells a great story. You tell the whole story, Mark, of Jewish Muslim relations, which really involves kind of telling the whole history of the world for the last 2000 years. But you do it kind of largely from the Jewish perspective. And for a non Jew like myself, being reacquainted with that perspective on history shifts perspectives a bit, shifts the paradigm a bit, reveals the history in a new way.
- [03:33]
Thomas Small
I loved the book.
- [03:34]
Mark David Baer
Well thank you, Thomas. I appreciate the positive words. The point of the book is to center the discussion, center the history on relations between Jews and Muslims. Because so often we talk about Jews, Christians and Muslims. And there are good reasons for that. Of course, all three religions are related very closely. And also where I live in London, the Church of England is very engaged in interfaith relations. So it's not natural that they play a central role in bringing Christians, Jews and Muslims together. But the way I see it, Jews and Muslims, Judaism and Islam are closer than Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians or Muslims and Christianity. Islam and Christianity and Muslims and Christians.
- [04:19]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yes, and Jews and Muslims for so many centuries lived in very close proximity to each other throughout the Muslim world. And what your book reveals is how rich that proximity was for both sides of the equation. How the culture of medieval Islam, Dom, if you like, that we might have in our imagination. Sometimes it's romanticized, but we can imagine that culture easily. Your book reveals that it was to some large extent a consequence of an interpolination, of a fusion of the Jewish and Muslim spirit, Jews and Muslims, often elites living side by side, working together. Now, I don't want to romanticize it. And one of the things your book does not do is romanticize that past. Now, before we get into the book, I want to gesture towards the events of the 29th of April of this year in North London that to some extent overshadow the conversation. This is the knife attack that occurred in Golders Green in North London. A Muslim man, Issa Soliman, knifed two Jews, Shloime Rand and Moshe Schein. I hope I pronounced those names correctly. He had actually knifed a Muslim acquaintance earlier in the day. So it's a very complicated story, but it is yet another example of what is an unmistakable fact that in the two and a half years since the 7 October attacks in Israel, there has been a growing sense on the streets, in the media and just, you know, between people of anti Jewish hatred on the one hand, and these attacks show that, I suppose, but also anti Muslim hatred. There's this growing anti Jewish hatred and anti Muslim hatred at the moment in the Western world as a result of those attacks. It's kind of unmistakable. It's undeniable. I looked it up. I don't want to narrate lots of figures and facts, but they're there, I can see them. The amount of attacks on both sides have gone up. Now there are fewer Jews in a country like Britain and therefore per capita attacks are much higher on the Jewish side. But nonetheless, there is this growing anti Muslim and anti Jewish hatred. And you're a professor at the lse. You must have Jewish students, Muslim students, non Jewish, non Muslim students. Universities can be heady places at the moment. How have you navigated this new terrain since those terrible attacks on the 7th of October?
- [06:45]
Mark David Baer
Well, first of all, there are always going to be such episodes. There's always going to be negative events. And the question is, how do we respond to them and how do we talk about them? So it's important not to generalize. First of all, generalize about Jews, generalize about Muslims, and we could pick other examples of recent episodes of violence and hate to tell the story a different way. So there's a North London synagogue which was recently targeted by a firebombing. And the first people to come to the synagogue and say, hey, brothers and sisters, we've got your backs. We condemn. This was a Somali Muslim group. Now, these Somali Muslims had had their mosque burned to the ground by the far right in a hate crime. And when their mosque was burned to the ground, their prayer space, this same synagogue, this progressive Jewish synagogue, took them in and said, you could pray in our sanctuary. You can use our space for your events, for your break the fast and what have you because of that closeness between Jews and Muslims throughout history for 1400 years. So when Jews and Muslims know each other, when their neighbors, when there are attacks on either group, the other group stands by them. So we could look in history, we could look at 1941, for example, when there are riots against Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, and in Basra, Iraq, and Jews are killed, hundreds of Jews are killed, but other Jews are saved by their Muslim neighbors. So when Jews and Muslims know each other, it actually can lead to better relations. So again, it just depends on what our standpoint is and what story we want to tell and also what kind of relations we want to promote. Do we want to just talk about that Somali British Muslim man who went to Golders Green, which is where I do my kosher shopping, by the way, and he went looking for Jewish men to kill. Do we want to talk about that, or do we want to talk about these other Somali British Muslims who have taken refuge in a synagogue not too far away from where that other Somali British man was attacking Jews. These other Somali Muslims are showing their solidarity with other British Jews. So really, it's our perspective, and that's what I do in the book. I talk about violent episodes. I talk about centuries of cooperation, and then I let the reader take what they want from the stories.
- [09:22]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yes, that's right. And one of the great virtues of your book, Marc, is that it complicates a story that is complicated. It doesn't pretend that it's an easy question of either hatred or romanticized intercommunal relations on the other side. I mean, you really do tell the story objectively and it is complicated. As you've just said, it remains complicated. In the book, you basically argue and you show, you reveal that the story of Jewish Muslim relations over the centuries involves sort of similar themes. They come back again and again. The theme of the Jew as the ally of the Muslim, especially, you know, in comparison to the Christian, the Muslim and as the savior of the Jew. That is another theme that comes up again and again, especially saving the Jew from the Christian. And then once a Muslim polity is established, often with the aid of Jews who do act as allies, time and again of Muslims, Jews then become useful to Muslim rulers, rise through the ranks a bit, and then from that position of strength, then there's often an anti Jewish reaction to kind of put them back in their place. And then often Christians will get involved again. And the presence of Christians in the mix, powerful Christians, will often exacerbate tensions between Jews and Muslims. So there's a kind of dynamic that is repeated again and again. What underlies this dynamic? Why is it happening in that way? So repeatedly, you know, we're talking from Iran to Morocco to Europe to the Arabian Peninsula, it's always happening in that way. Why is that?
- [11:04]
Mark David Baer
Of course, the question is what are the themes that link Jews and Muslims together? And as you mentioned, they're allies. So from the very beginning of the story of Islam, from the very beginning, when Muhammad is fleeing what Muslims describe as persecution by the pagans in Mecca, they flee to this town which is called Yatrib, which later on is renamed as Medina. And when they arrive there, there's five Jewish tribes, five Arabs, Jewish tribes, Arabic speaking, and three of them are very, very powerful. And these tribes take the believers as they're first called. The Muslims are first called the believers. They take them in, they protect them, they help them. So from the very onset, from the very first encounters between Jews and Muslims, first of all, again, it's between Arabs, they're all Arabs.
- [11:56]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
It's one of the things you point out that Jews of Arabia were also Arabs, because though we now think of Jews on the one side, Arabs on the other side, for a lot of this history that wasn't the case. A Jew, which is a kind of ethnic religious marker, could be an Arab, which is a linguistic and a cultural marker.
- [12:13]
Mark David Baer
That's right. So they're natural allies. And this is a theme that we see throughout, especially because most Jews will adopt Arabic as their language. And this will facilitate those intimate relations on a daily level in the marketplace as trading partners, or at the philosophical level, the intellectual level, but also on the religious level. Now there's plenty of examples of that. So that's always there. For a thousand years, most Jews live under Muslim rule and are Arabic speaking, with some exceptions, of course, the Kurdish Jews speak, they keep to their Aramaic, but still Aramaic is quite close to Arabic. They're mutually comprehensible. So that allyship, you ask why that allyship? Because they're from the same lands, because they're living in the same economic and political culture, because they're sharing a language, because the religions of Judaism and Islam are going to develop together. And some of the greatest works in Jewish secular and religious thinking will be composed of in Arabic. So a number of years ago, an Israeli newspaper was letting its readers collect coupons to collect publications of the greatest Jewish books ever written in history. And something like six of the seven were originally written in Arabic. So this kind of thing is completely forgotten today. Even some of the prayers that we still sing today on the Friday, on Saturday, on Shabbat were composed in Muslim ruled lands. And some of these tunes would have been familiar to Muslims as well. So that's why the allyship is natural, Very, very natural.
- [14:00]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
And in geopolitical terms, that allyship was often established on having a shared enemy, which was the Christian polity, initially the Roman Empire. But in general, that allyship had a political dimension that often Jews and Muslims would ally together against Christians, who were understood obviously by Muslims as the great rival and as Jews, as oppressors. That Jews reckoned, I think rightly that they would have a better time of it under Muslim rule than they had under Christians. So they allied with the Muslims.
- [14:31]
Mark David Baer
And we see that in premodern and modern times. So even in modern times, it's completely forgotten today. But some Jews were in favor of the independence movements in North Africa. So in Algeria, in Morocco and in Tunisia against French rule. And so we have these interesting situations where some of the most important Muslim, Algerian and Tunisian independence figures took refuge. They had to flee the French in North Africa, they go to Cairo, and both Bourguiba, who became the first president of independent Tunisia, but also Ben Bella, who became the first president of independent Algeria, they took refuge in Cairo in Jewish homes, precisely because Jews were sympathetic to their independence movement and precisely because they were fellow Arabic speaking North Africans who were opposed to colonial rule. Now we could talk about that because it's relatively forgotten today. But it's also the case that when French and British colonialists, imperialists entered into the Middle east following the French revolution, right after 17, in 1798, 1800, when they take Cairo and Egypt, also when the French take Algeria in 1830, this will lead to the tragic separation between the two people. So we have to bear that in mind as well.
- [15:58]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Well, you know, the second dimension, the second theme that repeats throughout the story, as I said, is that once under the relative safety of Islamic governance, Jews rise up socially, culturally and politically. Often at that point there can be an anti Jewish reaction within that Muslim polity because of this thing, you know, dhimmitude, the dhimmi system of Sharia law which developed very early in Islam. What is dhimmitude, Mark? And how did it actually work in practice?
- [16:34]
Mark David Baer
It's a very important question. It's a question that people always bring up when I give talks on this subject. What is dhimmitude and what is the dhimmi status? So another way to explain it is simply to say it's a pact of protection that after the time of Muhammad, so after Muhammad passed away, in Muslim ruled societies across the Middle East, Christians and Jews, but also in South Asia, Hindus and Zoroastrians and Iran and other people were granted freedom of religion with restrictions especially on their public processions and public singing and the like, they were granted freedom of religion. They were also granted safety of lives, their lives and their property. They also were granted the right not to have to become Muslim. They weren't forcibly converted in exchange for accepting a second class status, mostly acting humbly in theory, and also the payment of a tax. Now in practice, these rules were most often not observed. So in every single Muslim ruled society that I discuss in the book, whether it's the Ottomans or whether it's the different kingdoms in medieval southern Spain and Al Andalus, Jews, despite the Vimi rules, wear fur. Despite the Vimy rules, despite elite, Jews are riding horses. Despite the dhimmi rules, Jews are bearing arms. So you have individuals in southern Spain who are Jews. They're poets, they're rabbis, they're also viziers. So they're ministers of government and they're armed and they're wearing fur and they're on horseback and they're inspecting the Sultan's troops before that Muslim Sultan is going to battle against another Muslim kingdom. So Most often the dhimmi rules are not obeyed. There is also restrictions on the building of new churches and synagogues. But in every society we see Jews are building new synagogues, Jews are repairing old synagogues. But you do mention that from time to time there is a backlash against the larger Jewish community when individual Jews are seen to be having power over Muslims. And some of the most violent episodes in the book occur in the Ottoman Empire, which on the whole for 600 years was a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in Christian Spain and Portugal, and which is a place whose ruler was described by Jews for centuries. Even today, Turkish Jews describe the Ottoman sultan in almost messianic terms. So you have Jews saving Muslims, at the same time you have individual figures rising and in the views of some Muslims having too much power. Then there can be a violent backlash in pre modern times. But these violent backlashes only arise precisely because of the intimacy between Muslims and Jews. So the massacre of Jews in Granada in 1066 occurs after a Jewish vizier is accused of poisoning a Muslim king, but the only way he can poison him is because that king always comes over once a week to dinner in the Jewish man's house.
- [20:10]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yeah, you know, the question of dhimmitude and the dhimmi status of non Muslims in sharia governed polities is so notorious. You know, it's always referred to as some terrible, terrible, terrible fact of Muslim history or something. And yet people, often Christians or whatever, Westerners, they don't really understand that. A similar arrangement prevailed throughout Christian polities where Jews, like in the Roman Empire up to the time of the coming of Islam and even after, you know, Jews were citizens. They were citizens of the empire that had continued from even before the empire was Christianized. They had rights. But some of the constrictions on them were similar. They weren't allowed to renovate synagogues, for example, they weren't allowed to proselytize, they were not allowed to accept conversion, they were not allowed to do public performance of their worship. Very similar constrictions that the dhimmi rules of Sharia impose upon Jews and Christians, except actually the Muslim rules were more formalized and less subject to the whims of any given leader. The leaders in Muslim states were expected to follow these rules, whereas in the Christian states, though generally rules like those applied at any moment. They could be withdrawn, all Jews could be expelled. I mean, I, I live in York in the north of England, in the shadow of the terrible massacre that occurred in 1190 on the way towards all the Jews of England being expelled the following century. So though the dhimmi arrangements are, are used by anti Muslim kind of, let's say racist inclined European supremacists as like an example of something absolutely unspeakably horrible about Islam understood in its proper context, that's not the case.
- [21:56]
Mark David Baer
Well, the dhimmi, the pact of protection allowed Jews and Christians to have a secure place in Islamic society, as you said, and there were hardly any economic restrictions. For example, if we're going to compare with Christian ruled Europe where Jews were not allowed to participate in a lot of the spheres of the economy and were pushed into those areas where they could only incur the hatred of the populace. I'm talking about usury. Right. Giving loans and so on, but that's another topic. So we often have the dhimmi rules not being applied. Sometimes they are applied. So in medieval Cairo there was one ruler who tore down a large number of churches and synagogues, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
- [22:47]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yeah, this is the notorious mad Caliph Hakim, who's actually a friend of the show of conflicted. We talk about him a lot.
- [22:54]
Mark David Baer
But again we have to tell the full story because he is an aberration in medieval Islamic history. And after his rule, what happened to him? He went off to Lebanon and disappeared or something?
- [23:07]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yeah, the Druze sect comes out of this episode.
- [23:10]
Mark David Baer
That's right. So after his rule, those synagogues and churches were repaired. So again we have to look at the big story. We have to look at the 1000 now 416 years.
- [23:23]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
The other thing that your book draws out very well, especially when it covers those vital medieval centuries, is how thimitude was not as it is often imagined. So it's often imagined that in almost modern terms that the Caliphate was like a modern state, which of course it was not. It was a patrimonial, military, aristocratic state. And within dhimmitud, each of the religious communities that were protected by Sharia law were kind of like mini patrimonial sub empires within the Caliphate. So your description, for example, of a 12th century Jewish visitor to Baghdad describing the Exelarch's great synagogue there, you really draw out how within the Abbasid Caliphate at least, the chiefs of the Jews were treated and styled themselves very much like caliphs themselves. And they had almost complete control over the Jewish subjects of the Caliphate. They governed them like the Caliph was governing his Muslim subjects. And I think that explains a little bit why the Dimitude situation was more complex than is often believed. Aristocratic Jews obviously often were exempted in practice from some of the dhimmi rules because they needed to have the markers of rulership, like swords, like riding on horses, in order to govern the Jews. The Caliph wanted them to do that.
- [24:50]
Mark David Baer
That's right. And that's also why in the book I also like to Talk about the 150 or 160 year period when Jews ruled over Muslims and Muslims were the dhimmi. And here I'm talking about the Khazar Kingdom in what is today Southern Russia.
- [25:04]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yeah, that's a great part of the book. Really illuminating. Tell the listeners about the Khazar Kingdom.
- [25:16]
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- [26:47]
Mark David Baer
So around 800, a Turkic ruler in what is today Southern Russia decided to convert to Judaism. And again, there's a lot of different stories about this episode. We don't know there are different competing stories, but the fact is that these pagan Turks went from worshiping the sky God Tanru to worshiping the one God. So this is a fascinating episode because they were a buffer kingdom, a very powerful kingdom that on the one side faced the Byzantine Christians and the other side faced the Abbasids and other Islamic kingdoms. So they were right in the middle as a Jewish kingdom. And the population of the Khazar Kingdom was made up of Jews, Muslims, Christians and pagans and Muslim travelers. Most of what we know about the Khazars come from outsiders, Muslim or Jewish. And Muslim travelers noted that there was a dual kingdom or a dual system of rule. And the Khan was like a caliph. So there was one Jewish ruler who was pretty much isolated in his palace and he's a symbolic ruler. But then there was the Bey. And the Bey was the head of the military and also running the day to day affairs of the empire was pretty much the only person who saw the Kaan. So they had these two rulers. And what's so important for the story to tell is that the elite military of the Khazars were known as the Arsiya. These were Muslims. So unlike in Muslim ruled societies in pre modern times where Jews normally were not given weapons, in this Jewish ruled kingdom, the Muslims were trusted enough to be the elite military force. Muslims also had their mosques, their schools, they had their imams. And the Muslim travelers, especially from the Abbasid empire and from Iran, just comment on this as if it's completely normal that a ruler will rule over a cosmopolitan society where each group will have their judges, each group will have their house of worship and their schools, their religious leaders. And there is hardly a hint of conflict between Muslims and Jews in the Khazar Kingdom when it was strong.
- [29:18]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Even though, you know, on paper a Muslim was never supposed to be subject to a Jewish ruler. That kind of goes against the spirit of Islam or at least the letter of Islam. And yet in the Khazar Kingdom it did. And the kingdom itself styled itself or, you know, adopted Muslim markers of rule. I mean, I have found it fascinating that the Khazar Kingdom minted coins modeled off of the Caliphate's coins, But instead of the normal shahada that appeared on the Caliphate's coins, in the Khazar Kingdom the coin said there is no God but God and Moses is the messenger of God. So it was a sort of Jewish Caliphate in that respect. And that involved a kind of inverse thimitude where Muslims were the second class citizens, but worked in a very creative way with their Jewish overlords. This is very early on in history. I think it's in your book also, you know, makes it clear that in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, especially after the trauma of the Mongol invasions, the extinction of the Abbasid system and the coming to power of that sort of Turkic slave soldier aristocratic system that we associate with the later empires, the Mamluks especially, But pretty much all Muslim empires for so many centuries were kind of governed by Turkic or Turkified slave soldiers. Very strange fact of history. Sharia law became a little bit more codified, a little bit more strict, and often that more creative, I think, period in the first centuries was attenuated a bit and maybe more conflict arose. Is that fair?
- [30:58]
Mark David Baer
I'm not sure about that. Because again, Sharia rules, the rules of thimitude could be imposed or not. It depends on the individual Ottoman ruler or the individual Mamluk ruler. Of course, we also have to remember that Muslims are continuing to play the role of the savior of the Jews in this medieval period that you're talking about. So we have the Ayyubid Kingdom, for example, and we have the famous Saladin, this Kurdish Muslim, Sunni Muslim ruler who conquers Jerusalem from the Crusaders. It had been a Crusader state for over a century and allows Jews once again to live in the city. And we see this over and over. Even the Ottomans, you talk about these Turkic rulers. So when the Ottomans build cities, they conceive of cities not as being purely inhabited by Muslims, but they cannot conceive of a city without Christians and Jews. So when they built Sarajevo, for example, in Bosnia in the 1400s, they build a mosque at the center and a market at the center. But very close to that mosque, they allow Jews to build the Grand Synagogue. And the Grand Synagogue is given a Spanish name because, of course, these are Sephardic Jews. These are Jews who fled persecution in Christian Western Europe, have come to the Ottoman Empire, and have been allowed to flourish.
- [32:23]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
And yet you do say in the. I mean, I just. I want to make it clear, because it seems in a way that from everything we're saying so far, that your book is one of those which presents what in your own book you describe as a sort of myth, one of the many myths of just perfect romantic harmony between Muslims and Jews. And speaking specifically of the Ottoman period, and that is your academic specialty, or an Ottomanist, really, you know, you describe in the book the myth of Ottoman salvation, and you are keen to make it clear that even though. So now in Jewish memory, the Ottoman period is seen often as this time of salvation for themselves. It wasn't so straightforward, it's true.
- [33:06]
Mark David Baer
I mean, myths are. What are myths, after all? Myths are exaggerated truths. So there is some truth to it. The Jews, perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews fleeing persecution in Christian Spain and Portugal fled to Morocco and then Italy and then ultimately to the Ottoman Empire, where they flourished for centuries. This is a fact. But then the question is, what do we do with these facts? And so today the Turkish Jewish community will talk about these facts, but will not talk about any negative episodes because they want to secure their place in that country. It's a dwindling community, and I understand that. I'm not opposed to people talking about, especially when there's strife, especially a time like today, when all we see in the news are stories of conflict and violence between Muslims, Jews. I'm not opposed at all to people saying, well, this is disturbing, this is sad, this is awful. However, it's not always been like that. And we've lived well together. We have all these common traits, all these common aspects in our culture and our religion and our food and our music. And it's nothing wrong with us getting together and emphasizing those things. So in London, for example, Jews and Muslims equally are on the receiving end of racist attacks by the far right. That is a fact. So that should give Jews and Muslims an excuse to revive that allyship and get together and say, together we're going to stand up to racist hate when the far right comes after us, when the far right comes to our neighborhood, because they hate us both. So we have our differences. We have our differences over Palestine, over Israel. There are people in our communities who hate the other group. There are people in our communities who sadly will abuse people from the other community. That is a fact. However, there's nothing wrong in saying we're better than this and we don't have to let that define us. So in the book, I put all the facts in there. There are the facts that can be taken by people, and they don't have to be racist or extremists, but they can be historians of whatever stripe. They could put the facts that I place in the book. They could put them together and they could tell their own story. And that story can be a mythical one of perpetual violence, all those violent episodes through history, including, as I mentioned, some of the. In fact, the most explicit, horrifying, violent scene in the book takes place in the Ottoman chapter. So you have conflict and cooperation together. It's a question of what we want to emphasize.
- [35:55]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
There are two sort of main myths that one encounters today. We could call it the utopian myth, and we could call the other one the antagonistic myth. And, you know, going back right to the beginnings of Islam. And myths are often founded in a kind of mythic past, you know, from the very lifetime of Muhammad himself. There are sort of two stories that proponents of both myths draw on, or one, you know, proponents will draw on one of these stories to justify their myth. So there's the Pact of Medina story which the utopian mythologizers tend to really emphasize as a sign that, you know, Islam just loves Jews, is just towards Jews, considers Jews to be more or less equal, etc. And then there is this terrible massacre of Jews following the battle of the Trench, which proponents of the antagonistic myth will say, you see, Muslims hate Jews. God has told them to kill them wherever they find them. They cannot be trusted, they're just barbarians. So because you do ground everything, in fact, explain those two episodes, describe them to us and how they are misused.
- [37:08]
Mark David Baer
Yeah, it's a very important point to point out because I'll read biographies of Muhammad that will not include the violent episodes and there will be other biographies of Muhammad that will go into great detail about those episodes. So I put them both in there. So the pact of what has been called later, the pact of Medina is this agreement between Muhammad and his followers who've arrived from Mecca and they've arrived in Medina and they form an alliance with the powerful Jewish tribes. Now if we looked at the pact that's come down to us, those powerful tribes names are no longer in it, so probably they've been erased in subsequent recordings. But be that as it may, when Muhammad arrives in Medina he needs help, he needs protection, he needs allies, he needs those Jewish tribes to be on his side. And so in this pact there's a word used in Arabic. The pact is obviously in Arabic. The word is Ummah. Now today, Muslims, when they think of the word Ummah, they think of their Muslim brothers and sisters. It can be here in London or can be across the world. But the way Ummah is used in that pact is to say all of us who are in this alliance, that's Jews and Muslims and even some pagans. So this is what, when people talk about the myth of interfaith harmony, they like to cite this usage of the term Ummah and this early alliance and this pact. But less comfortable for those people is the fact that step by step Muhammad had a falling out with those three powerful tribes. And all of the falling outs had to do with battles with the forces from Mecca and with accusations that these Jewish tribes were not fulfilling their end of the bargain and helping out the believers. So the first two tribes were expelled from Medina, but the fact is one of those tribes ended up in Syria. Later on after the time of Muhammad, when the Muslim armies went up to that Byzantine region, those Jews sided with the Muslims, not with the Byzantines. So that's also something we have to think about now, the third tribe, as you mentioned, after defeat, after they were besieged, their castles were besieged, all the men were taken out. And according to the first recorded, the first written Arabic language biography we have of the Prophet Muhammad, Muhammad personally executed. The numbers are very large, it's hard to believe but 600 or 700 men, even up to 900 men, okay, must be exaggerated. But the point is the story is that Muhammad personally, according to these Arabic biographies, Muhammad personally executed all these Jewish warriors. So this story is used repeatedly by people who want to say because Muhammad killed these Jewish men, this set the stage, this set the tone for the rest of Islamic history. And I would argue that's not the case.
- [40:17]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
It's, you know, it's just a sign though of how complicated these things are. You know, the Quran itself does include some pretty, you know, robustly stated anti Jewish passages. In fact, far beyond anything that appears in like the New Testament. I mean Christians throughout history have used episodes from the New Testament, obviously the crucifixion of Christ to justify extreme hatred against Jews, calling them God killers or invoking a passage where in one of the Gospels the High priest of Jerusalem says let his blood be upon us and upon our children. And interpreting that maximally to suggest that, you know, the High Priest's actions have cursed all Jews down the centuries, you know, the sort of blood libel myth, all that. But nowhere, you know, in the New Testament does it state as clearly as it does in some very few passages of the Quran to like murder Jews. So there are in the Quran verses that say, you know, very extreme things about Jews.
- [41:18]
Mark David Baer
We could also quote verses in the Quran which refer to Jews going to heaven. And you know, there's also very positive verses in the Quran about Christians and Jews, precisely the kind of verses that confuse Jews in Arabia. When Muhammad began preaching after around the year 610, because Jews had to ask him. So if you recognize all previous prophets and if you believe in one true God and if you're praying towards Jerusalem and if you're using the shofar, the ram's horn to call people to prayer and if you're dressing like we do and if you're not allowing people to eat certain foods, well, are you a Jew or what? Right, so there's that similarity at the very beginning. So there are passages in the Quran that would show that connection between what came before the previous prophecies that were delivered to Jews and what came after. And of course we can also talk about the connection and why I call the book the Children of Abraham. And there are other books called the Children of Abraham because when Abraham had a child, Isaac, with his wife Sarah, Jews tell the story that that is the son who was supposed to be sacrificed to God. Muslims tell the story that actually Ishmael was the one supposed to be sacrificed to God. Muslims, as your listeners know, tell the story that actually Abraham and Ishmael established the Ka' ba in Mecca, which later on was filled with idols that Muhammad had to come and clear out of idols, just as Abraham had to clear his father's house of idols. So there's all these connections, there's all these connections that we could find in the Quran and if we want to, we could read those passages. But as you mentioned, there are people who will find the hadith, right, the sayings attributed to Prophet Muhammad that refer to killing Jews. And those are the ones they'll quote, such as Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement in Gaza, will quote hadiths that are on that end, whereas other Muslims will quote the hadiths that tell a different story. So that's, that's all very important to set out there.
- [43:20]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
It's so complicated, especially given the fact that after the rise of the caliphate, as you show again and again and again in the book, Muslims and Jews lived peacefully and creatively alongside each other to create a new world straddling civilization, which we remember. You know, those of us who know about it remember it with great kind of admiration. You know, it's a really wonderful civilization. And that civilization is often seen as having reached a certain climax in Al Andalus. So this is another part of Muslim history, medieval Islamic history, which can be mythologized. And your book tells the story in great detail. So tell us about Al Andalus. This is the caliphate in Spain, which is often remembered as a kind of utopian paradise where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in perfect harmony. And Al Andalus is a huge topic, Mark, of course, but I just, you know, briefly at least, can you adjudicate between proponents of the myth of Al Andalus as a period of perfect harmony and others often now in Spain, often right wing, kind of Franco aligned Catholics who say, no, no, no, no, that myth is a complete lie. The period of the Muslim rule of Spain was a tremendous period of oppression for everyone, et cetera. So how do we adjudicate between these two myths?
- [44:42]
Mark David Baer
That's a good question. And if you visit Cordoba today, if you go to the mosque cathedral, you'll see that Christians, after they conquered the city in the 13th century, they drove a cathedral Right in the middle of the mosque and beneath the, or very near at the center of the mosque, they built a statue which shows the patron saint of Spain crushing the heads of Muslims. So there's no question that the Christians brought into southern Spain a kind of ferocity, whereas in southern Spain prior to that, Jews and Muslims were getting along quite well. Again, one of the reasons, as I mentioned before, was because Jews were Arabic speakers and Jews were as fluent in Islamic law and poetry and music and song as Muslims were. And the elite, certainly the elite, were very much enjoying those evening perfumed rose garden wine soirees when young men and young women would serve wine and these men would recite poetry, Muslims and Jews together until dawn. And then at dawn they'd go their separate ways. The Muslims would go to the mosque, the Jews would go to the synagogue, but they would take with them the memory of these hymns, these tunes. And it's actually true that Jews took secular tunes sung at these wine soirees and added Hebrew words to them and converted them to liturgy they used in the synagogue. So this shows the intimacy, but it's also the case with Muslims and Jews who weren't members of the elite. So they were engaged with each other in daily life. They actually engaged not just in trade. So that, let's say a Muslim woman goes to the Jewish shop owner and buys a bolt of silk from him. It was beyond that. They were partners in international trade. So they would together invest in ships that were traveling as far as India. And Muslims and Jews together, they had these relations of intimacy, relations of trust, relations of cooperation. But again, as you mentioned, sometimes these relations broke down precisely because they were so intimate. Jealousy arose, anger arose. There could be a Muslim vizier who believed that he wasn't assigned a post at the court because a Jew was assigned it instead. And then he could try to whip up animosity against that, that vizier, which is a very personal dispute and had to do with money and power, but he could use the fact that the person above him was a Jew to whip up other people, to say, look, the Jews have all the power. Why are we going to stand for that? And could whip up sentiment that could lead to violence also.
- [47:41]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
One thing that appears a few times in your book, which I found interesting, was that often those Muslims who spoke out against Jews and in times of tension between the two sides were in fact Jewish converts to Islam. Often converts to Islam, it seems, adopted a more anti Jewish rhetoric than the, you know, people who had been Muslim their whole life. Again, just a Sign of, you know, how complicated these things are. Now we can just get to the modern period. The modern period often, you know, symbolically represented by Napoleon's arrival in Egypt in 1798, you know, and the French Revolution and its transformative effects on the, on Western consciousness, the rise of liberalism and all these new categories which did not apply in the past. And you know, we have to remind the listeners that one of the reasons that any myth of perfect Muslim, Christian, Jewish harmony in the past is a myth is because the dhimmi situation always meant that non Muslims were technically second class citizens. There was never equality in the way that, that we liberal people assume there should be for any society to be just. But once the modern period arrives, am I right in saying that increasingly some, at least amongst many Jews in the Arab world, a reversal happens and suddenly it's like the newly liberal Christians of Europe who can be seen as the saviors of Jews and it begins to disrupt the previous paradigms.
- [49:16]
Mark David Baer
Absolutely, that's absolutely right. So when Napoleon invades Egypt, he conquers Cairo and he appoints Christians as governors, he arms Christians, the local Christians, the Copts, and this again, we've been talking this hour about the Dhimmi Pact, the pact of protection. Christians are supposed to be second class. Muslims are supposed to bear arms and have power, but, but Napoleon reverses that. The French will do the same in 1830 when they take Algeria, they'll elevate Jews and in 1870 the French will give French citizenship to most Jews of Algeria who are a minority. But most Muslims of Algeria, which has become a part of France, it's actually a state of France. Most Muslims are not granted citizenship. So it's not only that the French and then later the British would make Christians and Jews equal to Muslims in the territories they rule as colonial powers, but they would actually elevate Christians and Jews at the same time. The Ottomans themselves will abandon the dhimma pact, this pact of protection. The Ottomans themselves in the middle of the 19th century will make in theory and law, Christians, Jews and Muslims equal. The same will happen in Tunisia. So whether it's Muslim rulers or whether it's colonial European Christian rulers, we see this massive change. So a lot of people, again talking about the myths, a lot of people like to say that everything changed in 1948 when Israel was established as a Jewish country in the Middle East. But I like to say, of course, the establishment of a Jewish state, this is of course, this is a turning point in relations between Jews and Muslims. However, it's not the Whole story. We really have to go back and look at the period from the French Revolution because you mentioned liberalism. Another important idea is nationalism. So Jews in all these lands from Morocco to Iran will believe in the French Enlightenment and the ideas of liberty and equality and fraternity. And we'll say, well, why are we second class citizens? And it is French Jews who have been given equal citizenship in France who will establish schools, the alliance schools again from Morocco to Iran, where they will really change the mindset of Jews of the Middle East. And this will cause a further separation between Jewish and Muslim neighbors. But you asked about myths again. People like to talk about the creation of Israel in 1948 as a way to satisfy their view of the past. So people who talk about the utopian view of interfaith relations will say everything was just perfect, but then Israel was created and that ruined relations between Jews and Muslims forever, as if it was perfect beforehand. And other people will say, using the other myth of perpetual violence, will say Jews needed Israel to be created because they were always subject to persecution from Muslims. So it wasn't the Muslim who was the savior of Jews, but it was Jews saving other Jews through the creation of the state of Israel. So that's why people will deploy these myths to talk about the past.
- [52:40]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Yeah. And if the French Revolution and the Enlightenment in general in Europe gave rise to ideas like liberalism and others that then, you know, percolated throughout the world, transforming established patterns of meaning and understanding. You know, other things came out of Europe at the same time. You pointed out nationalism and in many countries throughout Europe, the dark side of nationalism, which was modern antisemitism, modern Jewish hatred, which I think it's now been very, you know, carefully examined by scholars. And we can say that, that modern antisemitism, which was not like the way in which any anti Jewish feelings within Islam had existed, it was a totally different kind of anti Jewish feeling based on a pseudoscience about, you know, fixed race and all this stuff. And also more tinged by a Christian deicide kind of inheritance which Islam never had. But that, that modern anti Semitism also percolated into the Muslim world in the early 20th century. And you know, so the modern period and the Western philosophical or ideological inheritance is extremely complex. You know, obviously I think we can all affirm liberal ideas like equality before the law and stuff, stuff are positive. But there's a dark side to all of this which has fed into modern, you know, a modern sense of Jewish Muslim antagonism.
- [54:01]
Mark David Baer
I agree, perfectly true.
- [54:03]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
And so, Mark, you know, we find ourselves now in 2026. At times it can seem like things could not get worse in terms of anti Jewish hatred on one side, anti Muslim hatred on the other side, a sense that these two peoples, these two communities, these two religions just could never get along, which surely cannot be the case. So I wonder, you know, just as a final flourish, if you want to end with a sense at all of hope, you know, how from the dark days of the present we might find maybe drawing on the scholarship, the historical scholarship, the resources from the past to forge a new Jewish Muslim kind of fraternity, if you like. I mean, that sounds so woolly and I know, but I just wonder, is there hope, do you think?
- [54:52]
Mark David Baer
Well, again, I'll return to your very first question, which is about students. So I do teach in London and I do teach a course called the History of Muslim Jewish Relations. It's a year long course and the course attracts students from all backgrounds. Right, this is London, this is the London School of Economics, but especially Muslim and Jewish students. And for a whole year we are able to talk openly, read and criticize and debate the past. You know, so I don't, you know, if we just sit and look at social media all day long and if we just sit and look at the press all day long, of course they're going to focus on the worst. And this isn't to deny any of the violence, any of the hatred, any of the fear, sadness and anger. I don't like it that there are police cars outside my synagogue, that there are police patrolling the street on Saturday where I pray. There are actually three synagogues on that street. I don't want the police there. I want to feel safe. I don't want to have to be protected. So this is all real and this causes a lot of anger, a lot of sadness. But despite that, I know that when you befriend people, when you engage with people, when people are willing to listen and talk and, and admit we are going to disagree on things, a Jewish person and a Muslim person, they don't have to agree on Palestine, Israel, they have their separate religions. That is totally fine to believe that their religion is the true one for themselves, that is all fine. If we can break bread, for example, after Passover, as they used to do in Morocco, in Morocco, after Jews spent 7, 8 days without eating any bread. At the end of that, their Muslim neighbors on the 8th, the 9th day would engage in a big celebration with them, welcoming them back to the community, welcoming them back with food, breaking bread, literally breaking bread. So there's Always that chance for us Muslims and Jews. There's always that possibility for us to again be allies, as I mentioned earlier, against far right hate, against racism. There always are issues that we share as religious people, whether it's circumcision or whether it's kosher and halal slaughter. Every year in Parliament there are people who want to end circumcision in this country as well as end halal and kosher butchery. So they sound like small things, but if you could get an imam and a rabbi together, which is a lot easier in fact than the congregations, but if you can start with the imams and the rabbis talking to each other, then they could bring other members of the community together. It's also the case that of course Jews and Muslims aren't only religious beings and secular Jews and Muslims also confine a lot to ally about.
- [57:58]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
I guess it's just, you know, the intractable Israel Palestine situation, that kind of, I mean obviously people will be reading this book with that in mind. You do tell the story of Israel and the conflict with Arabs and the tremendous kind of eruption that Jewish nationalism in the Middle east caused and all of these things. Again, it seems you lay it out very objectively. Do you think this history that you have so carefully told will could should play a role in forging a solution to that what's you know, seemingly intractable problem?
- [58:38]
Mark David Baer
Well, I think, I think there, there are so many interested parties in what happens in Israel and Palestine, whether it's the US or the EU or the, the Vatican or Qatar or the uae. I think, I think it's a much bigger global issue than just simply Muslims and Jews.
- [58:57]
Thomas Small (Interviewer)
Well, that good. That was a good night. Nice way of saying I don't want to go there. Mark David Bear, thanks so much for coming on Conflicted. Dear listeners, buy his book Children of the Story of Jewish Muslim Relations. You will learn a lot. No one can read this book and come out with blinkered views on either side. So thanks Mark, very much for coming on the show.
- [59:22]
Mark David Baer
Thank you for having me, Thomas.
- [59:24]
Thomas Small
That was Mark David Baer, professor of International History at the London School of of Economics. His new book Children of Abraham is available from all good booksellers. And remember for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host Eamon Dean. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message Heard production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
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