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• Monday, January 5, 2009 03:45 PM

  The Zeek Account

  The Zeek account of how Jews were treated under Muslim rule is accurate to a degree, but leaves out a couple of crucial points: first of all, the restrictions were not Jewish specific, they applied to Christians too. Christians & Jews, as Peoples of the Book, were not supposed to face forced conversion (unlike say Zoastrians or Hindus), but they did have to pay extra taxes, deal with a different court system, etc. The Christian and Jewish populations in Palestine, outside of the Crusading period, were treated pretty much the same. (The crusaders were no great friends of the jews, to put it mildly; and after the Muslim reconquest, the Christian population faced a degree of retribution that the Jews escaped.)

  Secondly, we are talking about 1300 years of history here, wherein there were a lot of ups and downs. There were periods where there was no noticeable discrimination at all; there were periods when intolerance flared. Generally speaking, the Ottoman Empire, which was extraordinarily ethnically diverse, was, compared to most other multi-ethnic states through history, pretty good at maintaining a fairly harmonious community.

  That started to change with the Young Turks, under whose rule Arabs (including Muslim, Christian, and Jews, yes back then the Jews living in Arab areas were regarded as being Arabs) were extensively distrusted and generally mistreated. In Palestine specifically, Arab-Jewish relations remained fairly harmonious up until about the 1920s, when Jewish immigration had become a much more prominent feature, and the Jewish community had pretty much stopped being identified and self identifying as Arab.

  —Canuckistan Bob Read Canuckistan Bob's other letters
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