Weekly Q&A: Does Islam teach anti-Semitism - that Muslims should hate Jews?

The Qur'an recognizes Jews as monotheists; Muslims & Jews got along remarkably well in premodern Muslim societies in contrast to the anti-Semitism Jews faced in Christendom

Question:
In light of the Palestine-Israel conflict, some of my colleagues are saying that the religion of Islam promotes anti-Semitism and teaches Muslims to hate Jewish people. Is this true?

Answer: The idea that Islam teaches anti-Semitism is a modern myth created and circulated in the aftermath of the creation of the nation-state of Israel and the Palestine-Israel conflict. The myth is easily put to rest by considering the historical facts.

A. Prophet Muhammad and the Jews

First, the historical teachings of the Prophet Muhammad - which are found in the Holy Qur’an and early documents like the Constitution of Medina - do not at all teach anti-Semitism or that the believers in Islam should hate Jews. The Qur’an refers to Jews as the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab) who are guaranteed religious freedom and protection from the Believers. An early verse of the Qur’an mentions the necessity to defend synagogues - Jewish houses of worship - from harm:

“And were it not that Allah checks the people, some by means of others, there would have been demolished monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of Allah is much mentioned.”
Holy Qur’an 22:40

Overall, the Qur’an refers to Jews as fellow monotheists - believers in the one true God (Allah) and the Last Day - who are eligible for salvation and entry into Paradise in the Hereafter:

“Indeed, the Believers, Jews, Sabians and Christians—whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good, there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve.”
Holy Qur’an 5:69 (see also 2:62)

“Yet they are not all alike: there are some among the People of the Book who are upright, who recite Allah’s revelations throughout the night, prostrating ˹in prayer˺. They believe in Allah and the Last Day, encourage good and forbid evil, and race with one another in doing good. They are ˹truly˺ among the righteous.”
Holy Qur’an 3:113-114

What about Qur’anic verses that are critical of the Jews?

A full list of Qur’anic verses about Israelites and Jews is here (on a Jewish website where any critical verses are in bold). The Qur’an criticizes many groups of people on account of their unethical actions; those critiqued include Believers, hypocrites, pagans, Jews, and Christians. The Jewish Bible also makes condemnations and criticisms of certain Israelites and Jews - for example, see the prayer of the Israelites in the book of Nehemiah Ch. 9: “But they, our ancestors, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and they did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery.” There are Qur’anic passages referring to the unfaithfulness of the Israelites that very much mirror the language of the Jewish Bible on this point.

The Qur’an makes no blanket condemnation of all Jews. Rather, the Qur’an criticizes specific groups of Israelites (referring to the distant past) and Jews (referring to the contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad) for specific misdeeds, broken covenants, broken treaties, unfaithfulness to God, etc. For example, Qur’an 5:78 reads: “The disbelievers among the Children of Israel (alladina kafaru min Bani Isra’il) were cursed upon the tongue of David and Jesus the son of Mary. That was for their disobedience and violations.” Notice the Arabic phrasing alladina kafaru min Bani Isra’il, which is language referring to a subset of Israelites, not the entire Jewish people. Likewise, Qur’an 98:6 refers to “the unbelievers from among the People of the Book and the polytheists” (alladina kafaru min ahl al-kitabi wa-mushrikin); this again only refers to a subset of the Jews/Christians as being “unbelievers”. The Qur’an does not ever blanketly refer to the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) as “unbelievers” (kafirun; alladina kafaru). Rather, the Qur’anic term kafir or alladina kafaru always refers to specific people on account of their violent, unrighteous or treasonous actions.

What about Prophet Muhammad’s relationship with the Jewish tribes of Medina?

In 622, after Prophet Muhammad was nearly assassinated by a coalition of Meccan tribes and leaders, he and his followers fled to the city-state of Medina where the Prophet was invited to be the leader and arbiter between several conflicting tribes. The Prophet, his community of Believers, and a dozen or so Jewish tribes of Medina all signed the Constitution of Medina where they all swore to protect each other from outside attack and provide mutual support; this Constitution recognized the rights of all religious groups in Medina including Jews and Christians and counted all the Jewish tribes as part of the community or umma of Prophet Muhammad. For example, the Constitution says about the Jewish tribes of Medina:

“And the Jews of Banu ‘Awf shall be considered as one community (umma) along with the Believers—for the Jews their religion, and for the Muslims theirs, be one client or patron. But whoever does wrong or commits treachery brings evil only on himself and his household.”
The Constitution of Medina (in Michael Lecker, The ‘Constitution of Medina’: Muḥammad's First Legal Document, 2004)

The early community (ummah) of Prophet Muhammad was inter-confessional and ecumenical: it included Believers (those who believed in Muhammad’s prophethood), Jews, and Christians – who were to practice and follow their own religious traditions. Two Qur’anic verses (Q 2:62, 5:69) explicitly recognize that Jews and Christians and all those who worship God sincerely and do virtuous deeds may attain salvation (see Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 2010)

The Meccans launched several attacks on the Prophet’s community in Medina in which the Meccan forces greatly outnumbered Muhammad’s defenses: the Battle of Badr (624), Battle of Uhud (625), Battle of Khandaq (627). Muhammad’s community won Badr, lost Uhud, and outlasted a Meccan siege in the the Battle of the Khandaq (Trench). During the years of these battles, two Jewish tribes of Medina collaborated with the Meccan, violated their oaths, and committed treason against the Prophet’s community of Medina: the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza. The Banu Nadir tried to assassinate the Prophet at least twice; after their plot failed they were expelled from Medina. The Banu Qurayza secretly allied with the Meccans during the Battle of the Trench and later attacked the Prophet’s community using military force. The defeated Banu Qurayza, having admitted to the crime of high treason, voluntarily submitted to the judgment of a former Jew who passed judgment upon them accordance with Old Testament law: their male combatants were executed and the rest of the tribe was expelled from Medina; however, the various narrations of this event are historically problematic and some historians such as Juan Cole question whether the Banu Qurayza event even occurred. In 628, several Jewish tribes including the Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayza and others gathered at Khaybar to form an alliance and attack Medina. The Prophet’s forces defeated them at Khaybar and he allowed the defeated Jewish tribes to live in peace, practice their religion, and have protection from the Prophet’s army as long as they paid a tribute-tax. Read more on the context and circumstances of each major battle here. Contrary to what is alleged by some today, the Prophet never expelled the Jews and Christians from Arabia.

B. The experience of Jews in pre-modern Muslim societies

“History is replete with illustrations where Muslims have entrusted their most treasured possessions, even members of their families, to the care of Christians. Muslim willingness to learn from Jewish erudition in medicine, statecraft and other realms of knowledge, is well exemplified by the place of honour accorded Jewish scholars at the court of the Fatimid Imam-Caliphs of Egypt.”

Imam Shah Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV, Keynote Address to the Governor General’s 2004 Leadership Conference, 19 May 2004

After the Prophet, when Islamic civilization had greatly expanded through the political reign of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, most Muslim empires treated non-Muslim religious communities - including Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists - as ahl al-dhimma (protected peoples) who enjoyed a degree of religious freedoms and legal rights in a form of second-class citizenship. This type of dhimmi status was quite progressive during the age of empires and granted religious minorities under Islamic rule far more rights than they would have in medieval Christendom - under which non-Christians were “slaves” (serfs) of the Chrisitan ruler and lacked the status of free people. In this context, Jews living under Muslim rule did far better than Jews living under Christian and European rule. The professor of Jewish history Mark Cohen writes:

“As any careful and systematic reading of the historical sources shows, despite the theological intolerance that Islam shared with Christendom, the Jews of Islam experienced far greater security and far more integration with the majority society than their brethren in Europe. During the first six centuries of Islam… the incidence of violent persecution, with great loss of life, was comparatively very low.”

Mark R. Cohen, “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” in Jews among Muslim, 50-63

The Jewish scholar Zion Zohar writes about how the Muslim entry into Spain greatly benefitted its Jewish populations:

“Thus, when Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711 CE and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Jews welcomed them as liberators from Christian persecution. The relatively small band of Muslim conquerors, in turn, entrusted Jews to watch over the cities as they continued their march through spain…. Later, they awared Jews positions of prominence in civic life and in some rare cases, high positions in the military as well. The relatively tolerant Muslim rulers welcomed and esteemed Sephardic Jews who were adept political advisors, skilled financial managers, gifted writers, learned scholars, and pioneering scientists.… Born during this era of Islamic rule, the famous Golden Age of Spanish Jewry (circa 900-1200) produced such luminaries as: statesman and diplomat Hasdai ibn Shaprut, vizier and army commander Shmuel ha-Nagid, poet-philosophers Solomon Ibn Gabriol and Judah Halevi, and at the apex of them all, Moses Ben Maimon, also known among the Spaniards as Maimonides.”

Zion Zohar. (2005) Sephardic & Mizrahi Jewry. New York, 8-9

The scholar Bernard Lewis, who was hardly sympathetic to Islam, even admitted the following about the status of Jews in medieval Muslim lands:

“Persecution, that is to say, violent and active repression, was rare and atypical. Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were not normally called upon to suffer martyrdom for their faith. They were not often obliged to make the choice, which confronted Muslims and Jews in reconquered Spain, between exile, apostasy and death. They were not subject to any major territorial or occupational restrictions, such as were the common lot of Jews in premodern Europe.”

Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 8

Mark R. Cohen also wrote the in The Jerusalem Post in “The New Muslim anti-Semitism” that antisemitism in Arab countries in modern times is relatively new and that Muslims and Jews enjoyed a far closer relationship before 1940s:

“AGAIN, TO understand the relatively decent Jewish-Muslim relations in the medieval period, one needs to contrast them with the Christian world, where, from about the 12th century on, Jews were subject to a shaky adherence to an older commitment to protect the Jews and to guarantee their freedom of religion, as well as their liberty to practice any economic walk of life they wished - all of these things, of course, a function of time and place and the policies of particular secular rulers or the Church. In Christian society, moreover, hostility was focused on one, "evil" non-Christian group, the Jews, paving the way for what was to become - beginning in the 12th century - anti-Semitism, understood as a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, later on infused, in its modern, secular form, with racism and the belief that there is a Jewish conspiracy against mankind. This kind of anti-Semitism did not exist in the medieval Muslim world. It did not make its appearance there until the 19th century, when it was fostered by European Christian missionaries living in the Middle East. ALL THIS adds up to one thing: Jews and Muslims got along better in the Middle Ages than they do today. But the co-existence of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages could not easily be maintained in the modern era. Colonial disruption of Muslim society, conflicting nationalisms, Arab belief that Zionism is just another form of European colonialism robbing them of their own right to self-determination in a modern state, and Jewish fear that Arab and Muslim enmity - and more recently, terrorism - might lead to something akin to another Holocaust, have dramatically degraded Muslim-Jewish relations. This has manifested itself in a new Muslim anti-Semitism, which is not, however, indigenous. It represents an Islamized version of its Christian roots. Muslim anti-Semitism has also provoked amnesia in Jews from Arab countries. They (or most of them) no longer remember the friendships with Muslims that Arab Jews knew in the "old country." They no longer remember the substantial exemption from Muslim violence that the Jews of the Islamic world enjoyed in most places until the events of the 20th century. And they have forgotten that until the 20th century, in some cases right up until the 1940s, many in the Arabic-speaking Jewish middle class were deeply embedded in Arab society and culture, much like their ancestors in the medieval world, who wholeheartedly embraced Arabic and the Islamic culture of philosophy, science, medicine, scriptural study, and poetry in what was not an interfaith utopia, but an era of co-existence that can stand as a distant mirror of what might yet be possible in our own time.”

Mark R. Cohen, “The New Muslim Anti-Semitism”, January 2, 2008

“Another, even more fundamental reason for the underlying inner affinity of the two civilisations is to be found in the shared point of origin of the three monotheistic religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. All are linked to a common ancestor — Abraham — whose mythical presence has survived in the citadel of Aleppo. Islam, the most recent of the three revelations, has always acknowledged and confirmed the older religious traditions and has also provided, through its various regional cultures, successful models for religious and ethnic coexistence.”

Imam Shah Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV,
(Preface to Stefano Bianc, Syria, Medieval Citadels Between East and West’, May 2007, Read Here)