Under Crescent and Cross. The Jews in the Middle Ages

The exacerbation of Arab-Israeli conflict at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 gave birth in some quarters to a radical revision of Jewish-Arab history. At stake was the long-standing, originally Jewish, myth of the interfaith utopia, in which medieval Muslims and Jews peacefully cohabited in Arab lands - a utopia that many Arabs claimed had continued until the emergence of modern Zionism. Some Jewish writers challenged this notion with a countermyth of Islamic persecution, suggesting that medieval Jews fared not much better socially and politically under Islamic rule than they did under Christendom. Full of implications for Jewish, Islamic and European historians, both myths form the backdrop of this provocative book, aimed at enriching our understanding of medieval gentile-Jewish relations. It offers an in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, although not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West. The author presents a systematic comparison of the legal, economic and social situations of Jews in medieval Islam and Christendom, offering fresh insights on issues of hierarchy, marginality and ethnicity, persecution and collective memory. His analysis includes differences in theology that helped influence the way Muslims and Christians treated Jews.