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: Zionism, The European Jew’s Counsel of Despair

    Reading Time: 10 minutes

    From Chapter 5: “ZIONISM: The European Jew’s Counsel of Despair” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Between the Two Horns of a Terrible Dilemma

    The Jews of Europe found themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century tossed on the horns of a terrible dilemma. If they pursued the gains of emancipation, they must assimilate; and the more they did so, the more their Judaism would have to be reformed, the more dilute it would become, the less Jewish they would finally turn out to be. If, on the other hand, they restricted their pursuit of the gains of emancipation and hence, the less they assimilated and lost thereby their Jewishness, the more they would stand out as strangers in a society bent on not granting them its identity. On either count, they stood to lose. But which loss was greater? Jewishness, or freedom, and often, life? It was not the conservative orthodox Jew of Russia that asked this ominous question, for he had never known freedom and the centuries had taught him that it is his fate to remain true to every letter of the Torah and to suffer — even die — because of it. Rather, it was the Reform Jew of Western Europe who had tasted the joys and acquired the gains of freedom, who enthusiastically accepted the invitation to become English, French or German but, at the same time, had to suffer new waves of persecution and hatred for doing so. Was it possible that Christian Europe had gone mad? The hyphenated Jew (English-Jew, French-Jew, German-Jew, etc.) could not understand what was happening to and around him.

    Such a hyphenated Austrian-Jew was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a correspondent of the Vienna-based Neue Frei Presse newspaper. Herzl belonged to Reform Judaism and was completely Westernized. The dilemma of Jewish existence did not haunt his mind, convinced as he was that his personal destiny as well as that of his people was ‘Europe.’ Certainly, he knew of many lapses by Jews of their Judaism, and by Christians of their tolerance. But these did not bother him. Assigned to cover the tiial of Dreyfus in Paris, he travelled thence with the intention of discovering new ways for Jewish-Christian cooperation and understanding. The facts glaring out of the case, however, taught him otherwise. The Dreyfus case established beyond doubt that the Christians were not at all committed to accepting the Jews in their midst no matter how Europeanised they may become. Who could suspect Dreyfus’ Frenchness? his loyalty to the Republic? And yet, the very guardians of the Republic were precisely the first to reject him. Adding insult to injury, Maurice Barres, leader and spokesman for this anti-Jewish sentiment, had boldly defined patriotism as love of the past, France as a “collective being” which lives and speaks in the conscience of its sons, and national identity as communion of personal will with this Hegelian God-state and as harmony with it.

    B. Zionism: Attempted Escape from the Dilemma

    The Dreyfus episode, the upheaval it caused in France and Europe, and the awesome popularity of the anti-Jewish sentiment, left Herzl utterly dazed and dismayed, his hopes shattered and his ideal in ruins. It convinced him that the “European-Jew” ideal is impossible and futile. Since he himself was a European, educated under the same Hegelian romanticism dominating the university and cultural life of Europe, he really believed that the tendencies reflected at the Dreyfus trial were real and necessary forces of history which could not be stopped. No amount of assimilation was going to win for the Jew a European identity as long as he remained something to be assimilated, i.e., a Jew. In that direction, only conversion to Christianity would do, provided the milieu still believed in Christianity. Where that milieu had become scientific, skeptical and atheist, where it had replaced God with the state or “la nation,” the ultimate base was blood and soil from which the Jew was excluded ex hypothesi. On the other hand, no amount of self-preservation could guarantee the Jew’s survival in the midst of lands infested with this enemy mentality.

    The solution of this dilemma readily presented itself to Herzl, the European romantic. There could be no return to the ghetto of the past. Therefore, the Jew must pick up his roots from Europe and leave. He must find for himself a place on this globe where he could be both a Jew and a free man; where he could exercise his Jewish identity in security; where he could allow his peculiar ethnic genius to blossom and maintain his dignity. For Herzl, it did not matter where this Jewish state was to be. In fact, he thought the Jewish state could be founded in Argentina; and he seriously considered Uganda, as well as Russian Central Asia, as possible sites. Palestine did receive a mention but on par with all those other possible areas of the world. Any place on earth or on the moon would do, provided it assured security and freedom for the Jew to be a Jew. The Jewish state which Herzl envisioned was not based on religion. It was to be a copy of the European secular national state, the only state he knew. Such a state would carry its own mystique, like the European original; it would enthrone a Jewish collective, and pursue a Jewish community-destiny (Schicksalsge-gemeinschaft). A religious state, or a messianic restoration a la Isaiah of the Kingdom of David, was at the farthest possible remove from his mind. He expressly denied that the present predicament of the Jews in Europe was caused by Christianity. Though true of the past, this was not true of the present attitude which Herzl regarded as due in the main to the socio-economic success of the Jews in the modern industrialised city. It is the Europeans’ persecution of the Jews, he held, that makes the Jews a people; their persistent hatred of the Jews that creates the cohesiveness of the Jewish people. Herzl’s Jewish state was an ideal born out of the gentiles’ hatred and persecution of the Jews and the Jews’ acculturation by the gentiles’ romantic, nationalist, secularist God-state idea which dominated Europe at the time. His famous statement, “The [Jewish] state is already founded, in essence, in the will of the people of the state” is a perfect embodiment of that gentile, non-Semitic, indeed pagan god-state idea. This was equally the way Max Nordau, Herzl’s successor, thought. “Zionism,” in A. Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea, New York, Atheneum, 1971)

    It is difficult to say which of the two parent conditions gave more than, or was prior to, the other in bearing Zionism as a solution to the tragedy of the European Jew. Certainly, persecution and hatred are negative. What they give birth to is of the nature of a reaction; and it is natural herd-feeling to withdraw into the group in face of danger. Necessarily, this is not creative; it is an “un-vision.” It is otherwise with the God-state, collective being idea of romanticism. It is a vision of reality, new and positive, which has the power to fascinate as well as to transform. It spread in Europe like wildfire; and the Jew, in his effort to Europeanise himself, fell into it with gusto. Herzl’s mind which first articulated the vision of a Jewish state was thoroughly trained in it. But the first to envisage it were those Jews who lived in areas of Europe where the craving for a national entity was at its fiercest — namely, the Balkans and Poland. Yehudah Alkalai witnessed the movements of the Balkan peoples for national independence and sovereignty and envied them for their success. Zvi Kalisher participated in the struggle of the Poles and convinced himself that the Jews ought to do likewise to achieve an identical goal. The revolutionary movements of the mid-century which called for social justice in the name of national collectivism inspired Moses Hess, another leading Zionist thinker, to mix up the Jew’s yearning for egalitarian justice with a fatherland on the European model. Running against the grain of all Semitic wisdom through the ages in its assertion that “the People” has always meant solely the humans composing it, Moses Hess declared that “A common native soil is a precondition for healthier relations between capital and labor among the Jews”. “Comments,” in The Zionist Idea, p. 136

    The same despair which characterised Herzl and the Jews of Western Europe filled the hearts of Eastern European Jews after the pogroms of 1871 and 1881. Peretz Smolenskin, while advocating with one side of his mouth that “every Jew is a citizen of the land in which he dwells, and it is his duty to be a good citizen … {a citizen upon whom fall] all the obligations of citizenship like all other nationals,” advocated with the other side of his mouth the theory that the Jews already had a “national identity” whose essence was culture. He claimed that the Jews “have always been a spiritual nation, one whose Torah was the foundation of its statehood.” After 1881, Smolenskin dropped the European citizenship idea to advise his fellow countrymen to pull out their roots and emigrate to Palestine, for “only in the Land of Israel…can the Jews find truth and lasting peace”.“Let Us Search Our Ways,” in The Zionist Idea, p. 151

    Likewise, Leo Pinsker advocated more than any Russian the total russification of the Jews of Russia, and founded societies to bring about such assimilation. His dedication to the task and devotion to Mother Russia was noticed – and rewarded – by the Czar himself. Indeed, he was so blindly committed to Russification that even the pogroms of 1871 did not shake him. But the pogroms of a decade later did it. His assimilationist ideal was shattered and he fell headlong into abandonment of Europe for the sake of a Zionist kingdom-to-be.

    C. Europe’s Failure of Nerve

    The above-mentioned cases leave no room for doubt that the emancipation of the Jews was, as far as the Europeans are concerned, a half-hearted affair. It came “too little,” and “too late” to establish itself securely in the legal and political systems of Europe whose people had been only “half-baked” by the Enlightenment. As to those Europeans who used their reason and were convinced of emancipation as a necessary corollary of their rationalism, their hearts were never won. For too long, the European stood unaffected by any sentiment of universal humanity or fraternalism. Equally, the emancipation of the Jews had come too late; for, the forces of ethnocentrism, nationalist self-assertion and egotism were too deeply impressed upon the European soul for the Enlightenment to undo. Though temporarily silenced by the military and political might of Revolutionary France and fastened securely by legislation, this European ethnocentrism reacted violently once these stops were removed by the retreat of Napoleon.

    Furthermore, there is no room for doubt that the Emancipation of the Jews came too little and too late as far as the Jews were concerned. It came too little because the Europeans could not sustain it for more than a generation; and where they did sustain it at all, they did so reluctantly. The Jewish claim is certainly sound that whatever gains the Jews acquired were achieved by superior Jewish effort, never gratuitously given; that Jewish superiority in the various fields of endeavor was only the obverted facade of the Jews’ ever-denied equality. On the other hand, the Emancipation came too late because the ghetto had reshaped the Jewish soul beyond the possibility of universalist reform; even beyond that of relaxing ethnocentrism to enable the Jews to coexist with their European hosts. The ghetto had built separatism into their flesh, as the diaspora had built it into their bones; and Biblical ethnocentrism had built it into their marrow. It was inconceivable therefore that Emancipation would efface Jewish collectivism, or that this would happen within a generation.

    The European thought he had fooled the Jews. When he began to discover that he was fooled by them, he lost his temper! He thought he could wipe the Jews off the map of Europe by Europeanising them; but he did so only for a moment, and he seems never to have been truly convinced of it. The Jew, too, thought he could wipe off European hatred by merely changing his name and language; but he did everything he could, working thrice as hard as anyone, to achieve quick mastery over his fellow Europeans, both as affirmation of his racial superiority and protection against insecurity. Each of them knew in his depth that the other was only fooling. The European’s loss first of his “Enlightenment” nerve and, subsequently, of his “reason” in the romantic outbreak, convinced the Jews that their fears- which never left them – were certainly justified. Hence, the disillusionment and despair on both sides.

    If, under the circumstances, the Jew opted for the Zionist solution of pulling out his roots and exiting from Europe, his decision is certainly understandable, though we may criticise it as one of despair. The plain truth was that the European soul was sick. The cure did not lie in a Jewish exodus. Europe had nursed and sustained the ideal of the universal community for a millennium of Church ascendancy. This left an indelible, though temporarily submerged, mark upon its soul. What it needed was a restrengthening of the Enlightenment nerve that failed it. That is what the emancipated Jews of Europe should have helped restore and promote until it could blossom forth again. What they did, however, was the reverse. From their new positions of leadership in European life, they helped fan the very fires of romanticism which were later to consume them and ruin Europe.

    No one will doubt that romanticism made the souls of Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Poland and the Balkan countries sing and dance with delight — nay, intoxication! No one will doubt that the arts of Europe blossomed as if in a hothouse; or that romanticism did something to promote science and technology under the heat of national defense; or to institute accord and harmony, social justice and welfare, between the members of the national group. Nor can it be denied that these were in some sense human gains as well, indirectly relevant to the welfare of humankind.

    But it cannot be denied that from the purview of human history, these songs and dances of romantic Europe were macabre; that the hothouse atmosphere engendered by romanticism detracted the soul of Europe farther away from God and His law. Romanticism dethroned God and apotheosised the state and the nation. It granted absolute priority to the common will because it is “common” and “actual.” It agreed with John Stuart Mill that the only evidence that a thing is desirable is that it is desired, and went on to mix up the success of nationalist egotism with divinity. It relativised all past history and destroyed its normativeness, while it absolutised the present which is no less dated than the past. With Schleiermacher, it dethroned “reason” and replaced it with “feeling.” The religiously oriented were relieved that the new base of “feeling” and personal ineffable experience provided far sounder support for Christian dogma, then in peril from the attacks of rationalists as well as scientists and other secularist “despisers of religion.” The secularly oriented, on the other hand, saw in “feeling” a new epistemological base for their romantic claims. They were thus emboldened to absolutise their particularist theses for “Volkstum,” “national genius,” race and Historismus, and they sought inspiration in a mystical experience of empirical nature. The innate contradictions of human tendencies and passions were enthralled as visions of the sublime. Romanticism asserted that the highest and ultimate expression of the human soul was a tragedy — and Wagner! Fascism was romanticism’s proudest offspring; secularism was his throne. Hitler came down in the very flames it quickened, but not before Europe lay scorched and in ruins.

    The greatest pity is that the victims of romanticism’s holocaust of the last one hundred years, namely, the Jews, had become infected with the disease, and helped fan its flames by their literary, artistic and philosophical contributions. But the pity that is greater than the greatest is that their walking skeletons should emerge from the Nazi ovens singing — as Zionists — an adapted romantic song of their own, whose materials may perhaps be Jewish but whose essence is Romanticism all over again, both a la Treitschke and a la Wiesel!

  • 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.

  • Islam and the Problem of Israel: The Three-Cornered Nature of the Problem

    Reading Time: 7 minutesFrom Chapter 1: “The Three-Cornered Nature of the Problem” in Ismail Raji al Faruqi, “Islam and the Problem of Israel”, Islamic Council of Europe (1980)

    A. Historical Preview

    The problem of Israel confronting the Muslim World today has neither precedent nor parallel in Islamic history. The Muslim World has tended to regard it as another instance of Modern colonialism, or at best, as a repetition of the Crusades. The difference is not that Israel is neither one of these; but that it is both and more, much more. Unfortunately, there is no Islamic literature on the subject. The need for this analysis of the problem is, therefore, as great as the present moment which calls upon the Arab World in particular and the Muslim World in general to accept Israel as an integral member of a world-of Muslim-nations in Asia-Africa.

    The “Problem of Israel” is a three-cornered affair, involving the Muslim World, Western Christendom and the Jews. The first two have been locked in struggle ever since the rise of the Islamic state in Madinah in 622. Indeed, even earlier. Christian commercial interest had pushed Abyssinia into launching a colonialist venture in South Arabia in 560 A. C. and an attempt to destroy the power of Makkah in the “Year of the Elephant,” or 570 A. C., the year of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu `alayhi wa sallam). Even as early as that time, Western Christendom saw fit to use the religious zeal of Eastern Christians in order to exploit both them and the pre-Islamic Arabs for commercial profit.

    Pre-Islamic Arabia was a religious vacuum at the time, and the Christians of the West who held the reins of power in their hand were not concerned with preaching the faith. Rather, they were immersed in political struggles on the internal front, and economic and military struggle on the external. Arabia had no significance for them except as a trade route. When the new Islamic state began to raise its head following the integration of Makkah and most of the tribes of Western and South Arabia, Byzantium saw fit to mobilize its puppet armies in South Palestine and Jordan, a move which brought about the first military encounter between Islam and Christendom, the Campaign of Mu’tah (9 A.H./631 A. C.).

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  • Review of “Islam and the Problem of Israel” by Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi

    Reading Time: 4 minutesIslam and the Problem of Israel

    “Islam and the Problem of Israel” by Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi
    Review by Haniffah Abdul Gafoor

    The issue of Israel is an emotive one, irrespective of individuals’ affiliations (‘neutrals’ included). Bearing in mind the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Islam today, a work analysing the two (Islam and Israel) has the potential of being an explosive read.

    This new edition of Islam and the Problem of Israel is a succinct and thoughtfully organised reader. The author, though Palestinian himself, offers a reasonably fair appraisal of the issue at hand from a Muslim’s perspective. Some readers might find the strong vocabulary makes the read challenging, and this may sometimes be burdensome. The topic is approached in an organised and sequential manner. The historical, religious and political perspectives of the state of Israel are described before the relationship between Israel, Judaism, Zionism (all quite distinct entities) and Islam is discussed. The author briefly clarifies the distinction between Judaism as a religion, Zionism as a political concept of statehood (for a given race), Israel as nation-state, and the Jews as a race. He describes the problem as three-cornered, involving the Muslim world, Western Christendom, and the Jews.

    The book begins with a brief historical discourse on the Jews, touching on their persecution by the Christians, their community living in ghettos, their emancipation (with the French revolution) allowing the Jews equality in European society, the assimilation of Jews in Europe, and the birth of Reform Judaism as a liberated sect of Judaism (which, among other things, legitimised liturgical use of the vernacular language instead of Hebrew, and allowed choirs and musical instruments in synagogues).

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