Ismail Faruqi Online

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  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: Zionism as Religion

    Reading Time: 8 minutes

    From CHAPTER VII:: “Zionism as Religion” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. The Romantic Base of all Zionists

    Born out of Europe’s Romantic lapse and anti-Jewish pogroms, Zionism might have occupied itself entirely with the question of Jewish security. At its genesis and for a long time afterwards, Zionism did little else besides seeking the real estate wherein to set up refuge from the dim future it foresaw. There is no evidence in early Zionist writing of any concern with the kind of problems faced by the Reform movement, and in search of a solution of which, the movement was born. The first leaders did not think in terms of the problems science and modernity posed to the application of the laws of the Shulhan Arukh, which dominated Jewish observance and living since its codification by Joseph Karo in 1567. The whole problem of “religion and modernity” did not occupy them at all. The Zionists were men and women nursed culturally and spiritually by a secular Europe which has been weaned away from religion. They were as immersed in romanticism and secularism as their fellow Christians; and a number of them were in fact leaders of the movement in Europe. It was therefore natural that, once renewed persecution blocked their self-identification as European, the Jews would seek their identity in their tradition, and that they would do so under the only categories they knew, namely, those of European romanticism.

    A return by the West European Jew to the letter of the Bible was forever closed by the ravages to the text of revelation which Biblical criticism had brought about. Based on feeling and will, romanticism provided easy escape. With ease and readiness, it combined itself with the tendency to secularise to which most educated Europeans were prone, and it provided a stance from which even the letter of scripture could be reinstated as religiously significant. This stance – the romantic interpretation of religion and history – was buttressed by a modernist epistemology of relativist cultural intuitionism. All history, romanticism held, was a reflective mirror in which the author and his ethnic entity read themselves, their wishes and hopes; and there is no historical reality to be sought or established outside this figuration. History, in short, is a moment of self-reflection in the stream-of-the-manifold of group consciousness. Its products, the books of history, are interpretations, as it were by definition, whose veracity depends not on their correspondence with the past itself, but on the adequacy of their rendering of the blik of the generation in which they are written. Every generation, indeed every writer, may have his own blik from which to view the past, and every blik is legitimate. In accord with this theory, Zionism could afford to be literalist, accommodating the fundamentalist orthodoxy’s position by adhering to the verbatim validity of scripture while rejecting the doctrine of verbatim revelation in favor of the vague and woozy theory of the “God Who Acts in History.” Christian Protestant theologians had previously done so for the same reason. The Biblical scribe, the theory holds, was not a recorder of revealed text but the “redactor” of a vision experienced by his contemporaries and ineffably felt by them to be the truth ofthe moment of history in question. Hence, Zionists agree with the naive that every letter of scripture is true; but, unlike the naive, they hold its truth derivable from the reality ofthe feeling of those whose feeling it expressed.

    This romanticism goes beyond the dispute between the religious Zionists such as Yehiel Pines and Abraham Kook, and the secular Zionists, such as Herzl, Jacob Klatzkin, Ahad Ha’am, Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Indeed it is the common ground on which all ofthem stand. For all ofthem are, properly speaking, romantics. Their vision envelops the whole past and future of the Jewish people. It is refined by the lessons they learned from Romantic Europe. The function of history, the relativism of truth, the roles of feeling and will, the Weltanschauung and its comprehensiveness; Volkstum and its place in culture, the Lebensraum and Blut und Boden mystique, the here-now populist salvation, the idealisation of nature – ail these lessons the Zionists have learnt only too well, for the insights they provided were to be utilised as a filter screen through which Jewish history and religion are to be seen and apprehended.

    The “religious Zionists” looked upon Zionism as a program of socio-political, economic and military action designed for the purpose of actualising an essence which is the religious content of Judaism. Monotheism, the Law, justice and peace, a world order based upon them symbolically expressed by the restoration of the Jews within that world order but at its center, is their ultimate goal. The conservative orthodox Jews who rejected Zionism, did so not because they did not share the goal, but because they regarded it as eschatological, as something to be brought about by God alone, at His desire as well as by His efficiency, not those of men. The religious Zionists agreed with this, but held what appeared blasphemous to the non-Zionists, viz., that the miracle of God needed man’s work for it to happen. Religious Zionism is really religious nationalism, the will to preserve and promote the ethnic entity for the sake of the content of Judaism. Nationalism here remains the means; spiritual content of the religion, the end. Romanticism cemented the two, and made them interdependent. Its guilt in Islamic religious terms is exactly what the Qur’an has meant by “shirk,” or associationism, i.e. the associating of other beings with God as Ruler of Creation and hence, Maker of History.

    B. Secular Zionism

    Secular Zionism defined the religion in terms of nationalism, claiming that the religion is merely an expression of the nationalist spirit. “Judaism is nationalism,” it exclaimed, and it sought to reduce the religious dimension of Judaism to phenomena of a subjective group consciousness determined by its own vision of itself. As the living condition of a subjective consciousness, Jewish nationalism does not depend upon sharing of the content of religion. It is perfectly possible even among committed atheists. It rests on the objective fact — consciousness predetermined by past Jewish history — and an act of willing to continue to be part of the Jewish People. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are at the same time its twin bases, and both have nothing to do with religion except a loose, accidental and severable association. Jewishness, according to the secular Zionists, depends upon “form,” not “content;” not whether God is worshipped and what law is observed, but how religion is practiced. “Form” as a constitutive modality is of the essence of romanticism. Secular Zionism agrees fully because under this modality it can give priority and preeminence to the political will, and relegate to unimportance the God and Torah of Israel in which it does not believe anyway, but to which it can nonetheless assign a useful function. Repudiating the classical content-definition of Jewishness as belief in God and observance of His Torah (law), secular Zionism redefined it in terms of “form.” What makes a Jew Jewish, it maintained, is neither his belief in God nor observance of His law, but how he lives his Jewishness. The only “how” secular Zionism recognises as fulfilling its ideology is the “territorial-political definition of Jewish nationalism” by which it does not mean the possession of a base for national life, but the be-all and end-all of nationalism, for “living on the land is ipso facto the national life”.Jacob Klatzkin, “Boundaries” in The Zionist Idea, pp. 318-319

    Obviously, God and Torah are superfluous here and can be dispensed with, though they can do no harm if they exist. The masses, always naive and “religious” may even need them. Henceforth, they are to become symbols expressing the only facta romanticism holds dear: soil, blood, and the feeling of community and destiny. Obviously, too, God and His law are here dethroned and the ethnic entity has replaced them. It is to the thought of Martin Buber that Zionism owes this theological transformation. In his view, revelation is not what God has given, but what an individual man has experienced and communicated to his fellows who have understood and appreciated. This makes revelation equivalent to lived group experience in which God, the prophet and the revealed content are all instruments of an ethnic entity’s coming into self-consciousness. Indeed, for Buber, revelation is history and history is revelation. But he has the Hegelian temerity to call this “humanity touched by the divine.” Indeed, he regarded the ethnic identity convertible with God Himself (subhanahu wa ta’ala ‘amma yushrikun!. The “Song of Deborah” he regarded as the perfect mirror of this thought of his because it “expresses a fundamental reality by repeatedly alternating the name of this God with the name of Israel, like a refrain.” To make things still worse, i.e., to dispel any spiritual understanding of the concept “Israel” so as to make it in any way include all the righteous members of humankind besides the Jews, Martin Buber, the most “spiritual” of the Zionists, claims that Israel is itself impossible without the rocks, sand and water that are Palestine. For, he asserts, the very “being” of Israel lies in “the holy matrimony of land and people.” With still greater bravado, Buber goes on to claim for this connection of “real estate” with Israel “a unique category…touching the universally human, the cosmic and even of Being itself”.Israel and Palestine, p. x

    Buber’s case is not one of simple shirk or association of other beings with God. It is a sin unknown to the pre-Islamic Arabs, a sin condemned so vehemently by the Old Testament itself, namely, the identification of God with nature, of the Creator with the creature; the predication of transcendence to nature. The Ancient Egyptians, the Philistines, Canaanites, Assyrians and Babylonians, and finally the Greeks and Romans, were condemned by Judaism, its prophets, or scripture for doing precisely this. Modern time is witness to the Zionist Jews perpetrating identically the same sin a la Georg Friedrich Hegel.

    C. Zionism: A Strictly European Experience

    Evidently, both the religious and the secular Zionists share the Romantic Weltanschauung and do not differ from each other except in degree. Both of them equally hold to the view that feeling, or subjective consciousness, is the ultimate determiner of reality, that the ultimate category in this determination of reality is the ethnic entity, whether dis-enlandised but in process or re-enlandisement, as in religious Zionism, or imperfect and inexistent until enlandised, as in the secular variety.

    Evidently Zionism, the consequence of European persecution and European romanticism is an experience of European Jews alone. Only reluctantly one might yet accept the claim that American and Russian Jews are heirs to European history and share in it, though the former have known no persecution But one cannot accept this predication of Russian Jews. For. they have known neither real enlightenment nor extensive emancipation until the Communist Revolution. In another direction, no one in his senses would accept predication of such experience to non-Western Jews, whose history and experience have known neither persecution, nor mass pogroms, neither enlightenment nor romanticism, neither the French Revolution nor Hegel. Of these, the Jews of the Muslim World who have produced the Golden Age of Jewish thought and philosophy, of Hebrew literature and linguistics, and did so under the aegis of Islam, are especially remarkable. That Zionism had by agitatation, luring appeal or subversion, attracted two million of these Oriental Jews, uprooted them from their traditional homes and brought them as refugees to Palestine, can in no way be ever condoned. For, the experience out of which Zionism was born, and to which it came as answer; the Romantic cultural phenomenon under the aegis of which it was conceived, and under which the Zionist reinterpretation of Jewish religion, culture and identity has taken place – all this is foreign to them. It is anything but justice to impose this “Europeanism” upon them. And it is a sinister crime to “re-educate” and “acculturate” — or better, to “Westernise” — them into it. It contains all the important elements of a spiritual genocide. The wonder is all the greater that this is happening under the guise of “restoration”, of “religious messianism.” If Western Jews may be entitled to their own disease, a fortiori Oriental Jews must be entitled to their own sanity. The Islamic atmosphere in which they have lived for centuries which encouraged and helped nourish their notion of divine transcendence and of election as morality and righteousness, should continue to do so if Judaism is to remain a member of the Semitic family of religions.

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Romantic Relapse of Europe

    Reading Time: 6 minutesFrom Chapter 4: “The Romantic Relapse of Europe” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Russian Pogroms

    The prognosis of the last paragraph (Chapter III) was the reality on the American scene. Most of the rabbis ministering to the Jews of America were educated in the Reform seminaries of Europe, and the first seminary in America (Cincinnati, Ohio) belonged to the same group. The absence of persecution and of ghettos and the religious freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution promoted acculturation and assimilation of Jewish immigrants from Europe. In America, it was hard to be anything but a Reformed Jew. The voice of orthodoxy, of traditionalism, was certainly present; but it was overwhelmed by the universalism and secularism of American society in the matter of religion. The situation radically changed in the nineties when a wave of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe sent a flood ofjewish immigrants to America. The demography of American Jewry was turned upside down. In a decade, American Jewry became overwhelmingly orthodox and the voice of Reform Judaism became that of a minority. What happened in Russia to bring about this Jewish exodus happened in various degrees in the rest of Europe.

    The Enlightenment never took root in Russia. Enlightenment ideas relevant to science, to trade and industry, did. These ideas mixed with deep mystical hopes for national restoration and produced the Europeanising industrialisation of Peter the Great. The outcome of this nineteenth century process was a surge of “Mother Russia” feeling coupled with a secularising will to progress. As to the Jews who up till then were living as strange aliens in city and village, the surge could only lead to their Russification. The movement produced some strong advocates — Peretz Smolenskin, Leo Pinsker, etc. — to persuade the Jews to russify themselves — a transformation as difficult to achieve for the Russian Jews, as it was for Russian Christians to promote perseverently.

    The main reason why the Enlightenment proved to be a very indigestible novelty was the unpreparedness of the Russian mind. Russian experience was radically different from that of Western Europe. At last as far as the intelligentsia is concerned, if not the majority of the people, the Russian Church was as guilty as the Catholic Church in the exercise of her dominion. That is why the forces of progress could countenance neither courtship nor alliance with the Church. Moreover, the Church – saw – and did so rightly – that the new movement for progress threatened her own power and therefore did everything it could to oppose and retard it. That is why the new movement leaned farther away from the Church, toward secularism. Furthermore, Christian Russia had no tradition of religious reform, no tradition of Renaissance, scholastic, Cartesian or Enlightenment rationalism. Whatever Enlightenment ideas the Russians of the nineteenth century had were borrowed from Western Europe. And since the whole of Napoleonic Europe was pitted against Russia, the borrowed ideas had to be adopted if and only after they have been fused into the overall “Russia” feeling. As for the Jews, the overwhelming majority of them were, like their Christian neighbors, still living in the crass ignorance of the Dark Ages. It was as if modernity had suddenly burst upon them. It is not surprising therefore that they neither understood nor accepted the Christians’ half-hearted emancipation of them. The event of modernism was dazzling to both Christian and Jew.

    This context explains why the Russian Christian’s demand for Russification was not an “invitation,” not an “emancipation,” but rather an ultimatum. When heeded, it brought quick results, as when Jews quickly rose to highest rank in the service of Czar and country. But when it was received with hesitancy, no time was lost in patient acculturation. The Enlightenment’s ideas of tolerance and reasonableness were quickly transformed into resentment and hate. In little time, even as the Jews were russifying themselves, the most violent pogroms broke out against them without apparent reason or cause. This sad Russian outcome was equally that of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe, but not for the same reason.

    B. European Persecution

    1. The Ideational Groundwork

    Ever since it triumphed over paganism, the Christian Church had stood for the ideal of the universal community. It expanded itself as religion as well as wordly dominion under the aegis of that ideal; and, in fact, it was well suited toward that objective ever since Jesus had decreed: “God is indeed capable out of these stones to raise children unto Abraham” and Paul, “By one Spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free”Matthew 3:19; I Corinthians 12:13. The Reformation gave the coup de grace to Christianity’s ideal of the universal community. In fact, the Reformation was the result of a storm which, gathering long before, was only triggered by Luther’s proclamation of the 95 theses. The numerous peoples of Europe rallied around their princes in order to shake off the authority of the Catholic Church, an authority which had become a “Byzantine” yoke, full of corruption, full of evil, bearing little or no resemblance to the universalist ideal it claimed itself to be.

    Instead of this worthy Christian ideal, the emerging Protestant leadership tilted toward Congregationalism to justify its breaking away from the Mother Church. But Congregationalism itself needed justification, and this was sought in something outside the Church when ecclesiastical history could not be found to support it. The Renaissance had already impressed the leadership with naturalism and the road lay open for a justification of the new religious autonomy with values intrinsic to the congregation as a distinct and separate human unit. These feelings constitute the germs out of which nationalism grew in Europe. In its prince and dynasty, each new autonomous Protestant congregation began to see a focus around which the people could rally to form the “nation” as a super-entity destined to carry out a “holy” mission of self-realisation. This contributed heavily to the growth of the centralised monarchies, and, in turn, gave the social cohesion necessary to keep the burgeoning European city together and its population attached to the “national” government. European nationalism grew as the universalism of the Church receded; and, by the end of the eighteenth century, it was strong and mature enough to give the Enlightenment and its political offspring — the world-order of the French Revolution — the most violent counter-action.

    The Enlightenment preached its rationalism to Europeans already committed to Christian dogma as well as to Renais¬sance naturalism. These were too ingrained in Europe’s consciousness for pure rationalism to succeed. Hence, practically all Enlightenment thinkers compromised rationalism to make room for both the Christian faith and naturalism. If this compromise could not be effected on the level of pure reason, then it was done on that of practical reason and judgment. Immanuel Kant, the prince of the Enlightenment, lectured on geography and international relations where universal rationalism did not stop him from predicating a “natural” inferiority to the Asian races, nor from asserting that to be black is an argument. Instead of purging it of such compromise or aberration and hence making the Enlightenment more viable and stronger, the next generation of Europeans suspected and repudiated it altogether. Theirs was a failure of nerve; for they could not countenance what lay at the end of the road the Enlightenment opened, namely rationalist repudiation of Christian dogma along with the Church’s authority which the Reformation had attacked, and universalist repudiation of ethnocentrism in favor of a world order founded on the equality of all mankind. Against the Enlightenment therefore, they levelled argument after argument which sought to redefine man in terms of ethnic history, language and race. Blood or life, the earth with its plains, mountains, rivers and forests, and a vague past in the myths and legends of the Middle Ages, became the elements out of which the new ideology was constituted.

    Evidently, such elements are not properly conceived by reason. They are the object of feeling and human instinct. A worldview built upon reason has no room for them; but one built upon them cannot only satisfy the trend toward naturalism (what could be more empirical than nature?) but allow plenty of room for accommodation of Christian dogma on the experiential basis of immediate feeling. The genius of Friedrich Schleiermacher was one of exchanging a crumbling foun¬dation of the faith — universal reason — for the solid one of per¬sonal experience, of ineffable feeling. The “Romantic” revolution was in full swing. The arts — literature, painting, sculpture and music — were already filling the European mind with visions of a new order in which each ethnic group saw itself as the vortex of human history, a manifestation of the absolute on earth. Pregnant with the hopes engendered by a century of rationalism and universalist humanism, the conscience of Europe welcomed the Revolutionary army of Europe as a genuine “emancipating” force. But it turned cynical when that force disclosed the ugly head of France’s imperialism, and surrendered itself with spite to its romantic enemy. The national wars which engulfed Europe in the sequel were the insane attempts of a sick man trying to cure himself of his disease with more of the same.

    How could the Jew fit into this new order? Under a universalism based on reason rather than religious affiliation, the Jew was given a place where he could contribute to the public welfare, the commonwealth or universal utility. But under a nationalism based on the romantic feeling of unity, of sharing in a mystical experience of common history, of communion with a particular “mother earth,” of participation in a Chris¬tian tradition of values, he was most definitely an alien. The European Jew himself oft led and contributed to this romanticism, for its affinity with an age-old ethnocentrism of his own, the “Chosen People” complex. But his service only accelerated his own doom. For in the eye of the European Christian, the forces of a new rejection of the Jew as a foreign body were gathering momentum. It was only a matter of time before these would explode into political action. The transformation brought about by romanticism presented the European to himself as rooted in a given blood and soil and grown under a legacy of Christian values. Whether believer, secularist or atheist, he acknowledged the legacy to be constitutive, regard substance, nor to return them to their ghettos devoid of civic liberties, but of bringing about a “final solution” to their problematic existence in Europe.

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: Apercu of Jewish History in the Christian West Prior to the Emancipation

    Reading Time: 8 minutesFrom Chapter 2: “Apercu of Jewish History in the Christian West Prior to the Emancipation” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    The Christians understood, or misunderstood, the career of Jesus as one of a god sent down to earth to suffer the most ignominious death as an atonement and oblation for the sins of man. In consequence, they reinterpreted the whole history of the Jews as a propadeutic for this great event. If there is to be a crucifixion of a god, there had to be a historical situation in which a savior-god could be expected, accused to be the false savior, and then crucified. There had to be a religion, Judaism, which develops so as to reach the fossilized state of literal legalism, in which rabbis had plunged their faith in the “fullness of time,” and into the context of which the god to be crucified could enact his reform and be prosecuted and condemned in the process. The whole of the Jewish past and present was reduced to the status of an instrument, complex and winding, but still an instrument, for the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus.

    The Christians did not, in the main, reject or chastise the Jews on account of that pre-crucifixion history. On the contrary, they adopted it wholesale as their own and, through eisegesis, interpreted it as the gradual unfolding of the divine purpose in history. This adoption however broke down at the very crux of that history. The vilification, calumniation, false accusation, condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus, the Christians could not perceive as steps necessary for consummation of the divine drama. Their conscience could not absolve the Jews for their active instrumentality in these events. Instead of thanking them for their role, as the logic of their claim would require, they indicted them with the supreme sin, that of deicide. As they remembered the passion of Jesus at every Easter — indeed at every mass and communion, at the mere sight of the ubiquitous crucifixes which stood ever-ready to remind them of the death of their savior-god – their hearts seethed with hatred and resentment for the Jews as evil perpetrators of deicide.

    Had the Jews all converted to Christianity, the Christian conscience would have been satisfied to ascribe deicide to a people that once was. The Christians would have vented their vengeance and resentment against beings present only in their imagination. But as it turned out, the Jews continued to exist, to reject the Christians’ claim concerning Jesus — nay, to denounce Jesus as an impostor. Obviously, their existence as Jews was a blaring challenge to the Christian claim that Jesus was Messiah and God. Their survival was for the Christians a constant and living reminder of the passion of Christ.
    Two more elements pressured the Christian mind to jump from the living Jewish presence as a reminder of Christ’s passion, to indicting that presence as itself guilty of that hideous crime. The first was supplied by scripture which reported that the prosecutors of Jesus acknowledged the indictment of Jesus as their deliberate work and accepted responsibility for it (Matthew 27:1,12, 20, 22). It reported them as willing and ready to assume that responsibility then, in their own persons, as well as on behalf of all their future generations (Matthew 27:25). The Jews may deny that they have ever rendered such confession. Since the source is Christian, another prior element in the Christian mind must have made such futuristic indictment possible. That is the Christian doctrine of vicariousness of guilt, of suffering and of merit. Vicariousness is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. First, the sin of Adam, it is claimed, has passed to all his descendants and his guilt has vicariously become theirs, in the flesh. All men are necessarily and universally sinful, fallen and guilty; and no effort or moral striving on their part will ever save any of them. Original sin, Christianity holds, is in the flesh, innate and in¬evitable. Because it is so, it took God Himself to pull man out of his predicament of doom. That is why God had to send His only son to ransom man from this necessary despair. Ta’ala Allahu ‘amma yasifun (Glorified be Allah above their descriptions of Him)!

    Secondly, the suffering of Jesus is vicarious too. As agony and merit, it too passes mysteriously from Jesus to all men. Because Jesus died on the cross, so their argument claims, this or that Christian man living two thousand years later is personally deserving of Jesus’ merit; for that merit has passed vicariously to him. It took a mind governed by such category of vicariousness on the moral level to jump to the conclusion that the contemporary Jewish neighbor is personally guilty of deicide, of rejection of Christ, of continuing “perfidy,” as the contemporary Christian is personally saved, because he has personally deserved the merit Jesus had incurred in his atonement.

    Indeed, it was the Pope himself who assumed official responsibility for protecting the Jew as a specie of satanicness, a living example of perfidy and unfaith, an archetype of the deicidal crime, as an antichrist. He established a special quarter for the Jews in Rome as a kind of horror museum in which to keep and show off these specimens of ungodliness for the enlightenment and education of the Christian community.

    The list of social, legal and religious incapacities of the Jews of Christian Europe was long, and practically every Christian monarch added to it. Its highlights are that the Jews may not employ Christians, own Christian slaves, disinherit their children who convert to Christianity; that they must convert to Christianity if they marry a Christian; that they shall be ruled by Roman law rather than Torahic law; that they shall not criticise Christian doctrine nor give evidence against Christians; that they shall not celebrate Jewish feasts, practice circumcision, refrain from eating pork; that they must submit to baptism and refrain from reading the Torah in Hebrew or listening to its interpretation by their rabbis; that Jews shall refrain from practicing their customs, from preparing unleavened bread; that they be punished if they work on Sunday and not on Saturday; that they should marry according to Christian custom; that their children be brought up by Christian teachers; that Jews must pay special taxes, not appear in public between Holy Thursday and Easter, not hold any public office, not practice medicine on the Christians, etc. etc. Justinian ordered all Jews to be forced to listen to Christian teaching, their synagogues destroyed, and he prohibited them to read the Mishnah. Indeed, he prohibited the Jew under penalty of death “to raise his impious voice to contradict the evident purpose of God… the resurrection … the judgment … the work of God”.E. A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages. New York, Macmillan, 1965, p. 17ff

    The Jews lived under such conditions in Europe for nearly two millenia. Often, they were banished from their cities for no crime other than being Jewish or for practicing Judaism. Following the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, they were forcefully evicted from those countries or baptized and counted as Christians. They were also evicted from Britain and were not readmitted until Oliver Cromwell, though with great restrictions to their civil rights. When the Crusades were launched, the Christian armies fell upon the Jewish population of every Christian city on their way, robbing, terrorizing and slaughtering them as helpless prey while the monarchs and lords of the land looked on.
    Naturally, there was no one to receive them except the Muslim World. The Jews of Spain poured into North Africa where they found their fellow Jews free and prospering. They were admitted on equal par with the Muslims banished from Spain. Muslim countries from Morocco to Egypt did their utmost to welcome and rehabilitate these refugees from Christendom. To this day there are whole villages in North Africa composed of the descendants of these refugees, Muslim and Jewish.

    Under such limitations, it was natural that the Jews of Europe would at least live together in the same quarter to provide themselves with a measure of security. Since they were prohibited to employ Christians, agriculture was impossible for them; and so was public office. They had to make a living in trade and moneylending and, where possible, in medicine, pharmacy, astronomy and “magic.” Individually, the Jew was an outlaw whenever he ventured outside of his ghetto. He was an un-citizen because the king or government of the land never recognized him as individual. Only as a member of his ghetto community did he exist legally, or did he pay any taxes. To an ignorant and superstitious people as the Europeans were in the Middle Ages, the Jew’s medical practice, astronomy and other sciences which they preserved from antiquity or learned from the Muslims, were regarded by the Christians as “black magic.” Their money-lending operation was abominable usury. Since the ghetto could not grow in area, the natural increase of population aggravated the health hazards and made the situation still more repulsing. Extortion, secret dealings, blackmail, pawnbrokerage and moneylending, persecutive and repressive measures which could be lifted only through bribery, blackmail or prostitution, made the quality of human life in the ghetto sordid and ugly.

    The religious base of this Christian hatred was only to be reinforced by the Jews’ success as pawnbrokers, traders and moneylenders. The Jews quickly became the moneyed middle class of Christian cities, living parasitically on the production or consumption of Christians. Naturally, their wealth was envied, often forcefully confiscated, but they managed on the whole to emerge from every crisis stronger and richer. Many a pope and many a prince dealt with them, borrowed their money, used their trade connections or benefited from their medical knowledge. The Jew’s contacts with the gentiles increased noticeably as the cities grew and trade and communications developed. As early as the Renaissance, these contacts with Christians were to influence and help Europeanise the Jews, as the diaries and letters of Rabbi Leon da Modena testify. However, many Jews could not resist the temptation to migrate to the Muslim World, if migration were at all possible. More often the only way out of their misery was conversion to the faith of their enemies.

    Those that resisted the temptation to convert and persisted in their Judaism, became still more attached to their faith and to one another in the process. From their terrible fate, the Jews derived a great advantage, namely, increase in communal awareness which diaspora conditions had first nearly dissipated. Christian persecution, denial of civil rights and incarceration within the bounds of the ghettos, could not but help reinforce the Jews’ ethnic solidarity. The local governments did not deal with the Jews singly, as legal persons, but collectively. In consequence, Jewish rabbis acquired increased authority, and set up among themselves the essential rudiments of a ghetto government, of public and social services. Thus a sort of “state within the state” gradually emerged, the former assuming responsibility for enforcement of Jewish law and representation of Jews before the officials of the latter. Taxes were imposed upon the Jews as a collective and the rabbis took upon themselves to portion out the levy among individuals. This arrangement consolidated and buttressed their authority and disciplined the individual Jew into communal loyalty. Outside the collective, the individual Jew was by and large an outlaw whom any powerful Christian could legitimately overcome, kill or dispossess of his property. Any false accusation of blasphemy or of merely following a Jewish custom could only bring up the Christian neighborhood or countryside against him.

    Envy for the Jews’ accumulated wealth, or for his secret wisdom and knowledge, was not only common, but the rule. However it may have contributed to the Christian’s hatred for and persecution of the Jews, it cannot serve as explanation of the Western phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Religious hatred is certainly prior and it, rather than envy, is the source which constantly replenished the Christians’ resentment. What the Christians took to be ultimate reality or God was not only denied, but declared an “impostor.” What they regarded as summum bonum or salvation was scoffed at as hallucination. The ignominous crucifixion of their “God” was declared fully deserved by a pretender who denied the holiness of “the Law.” Moreover, the Christians had a mind bent on sacramentalism and vicariousness, naive enough to believe the Church’s claims for ontological passage of guilt, suffering and merit. It would seem as if all the ingredients were there to produce the most violent religious hatred; for Christian consciousness to vent itself against the only helpless scapegoat in their midst.