Is Anti-Semitism an Arab Phenomenon?

Question: Is Anti-Semitism an Arab Phenomenon?

The question is offensive. It should be. Anti-Semitism was never part of the Arab, Muslim or Middle Eastern landscape until it was imported there toward the end of the 19th century and made worse by Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Nevertheless, there's no denying that virulent anti-Semitism has been a common and repugnant part of the Middle Eastern landscape since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. It has been intensifying over the course of the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and is often wrapped up with anti-Americanism. But the original question deserves a detailed answer.

Answer: It’s true that the Quran features several verses bitterly critical of and offensive to Jews. "Because of their iniquity," we read in the Quran (sura 4:160-1), "we forbade those who followed the Jewish faith wholesome things which were formerly allowed them; because time after time they have debarred others from the path of God; because they practice usury--although they were forbidden it--and cheat people of their possessions. Woeful punishment have we prepared for those that disbelieve." Those verses are reflective of mostly political, or at most ideological, rather than racial, animosities that existed between the Prophet Muhammad’s community and Jewish tribes at the time of the Quran’s “revelations.” The book features many verses that show Jews in a reverent light, from Abraham to Moses and other prophets, as “People of the Book.”

But "the intoxicant of anti-Semitism," as Philip Roth so aptly put it, is a scourge of which Arabs and Muslims were largely unaware until relatively recently in history. As the liberal historian Karen Armstrong wrote in Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, “[a]nti-Semitism is a vice of Western Christianity not of Islam. […] In the Islamic empire Jews like Christians had full religious liberty; the Jews lived there in peace until the creation of the State of Israel in our own century. The Jews of Islam never suffered like the Jews of Christendom. The anti-Semitic myths of Europe were introduced into the Middle East at the end of the [19th] century by Christian missionaries and were usually scorned by the populace.”

The interpretation of anti-Semitism's history along those lines doesn't diverge according to ideological perspectives. The conservative historian Bernard Lewis concurs with Armstrong: “The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among the Christian minorities,” he writes in What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford, 2002), “and can usually be traced back to European originals. They had limited impact, and at the time for example of the Dreyfus trial in France, when a Jewish officer was unjustly accused and condemned by a hostile court, Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors. But the poison continued to spread, and from 1933 Nazi Germany and its various agencies made a concerted and on the whole remarkably successful effort to promote and disseminate European style anti-Semitism in the Arab world.”

That said, there's also no question that anti-Semitism is now a virtually routine pollutant in Middle Eastern discourse from Northwest Africa to South Asia (as one of the two Indian protagonists of Salman Rushdie's [The Satanic Verses (Viking, 1989) puts it revealingly, "I was brought up to have views on Jews"). Although seeded by Nazis in the 1930s and exploited by Arab nationalists since, it is an anti-Semitism inseparable from Middle Eastern animosity toward Israel--and Israeli brutality toward Arabs. As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in a review of Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew Hatred (Telos Press, 2007), it is a disservice to accuracy to oversimplify the Arab-Israeli conflict down to victims on one side and anti-Semites on the other: "Jews today have actual power in the Middle East," Goldberg wrote, "and Israel is not innocent of excess and cruelty."