The Jew is Not My Enemy by Tarek Fatah Read Free Book Online Page B

the Middle East, and it was easy to inflame Arab passions against the Jews. Lewis writes that anti-Semitism “was actively encouraged by Western emissaries of various kinds, including consular representatives on the one hand, and priests and missionaries on the other.” 5 A famous example was the 1840 Damascus blood-libel case, in which the French consul backed the Capuchin monks who had accused the Jews of blood libel.
    By the end of the century, there were calls for Christian-Muslim solidarity against the Jews. Soon, the allegations against the Jews of blood libel were coming from Muslim quarters, not Christian.
    In 1856, another event inside the Ottoman caliphate caused Islamic clerics to suspect the hidden hand of the kuffar. At the end of the Crimean War, Turkey implemented the Reform Act, which gave equal status to all Ottoman subjects, irrespective of religious background, and forbade discrimination against non-Muslims. This was a huge step forward in the Ottoman effort to modernize as a European power and not remain the “sick man of Europe,” as the Russians had referred to the six-hundred-year-old empire.
    The old order, premised on the supremacy of Islam, yet providing protection to Jews and Christians as wards of the state, had stood for more than a millennium. Suddenly, however, Jewish citizens were deemed equal to Muslims, and the Islamist clergy as well as theprivileged classes resented this. Murmurs of a Jewish conspiracy began to circulate. A memorandum by an Ottoman official reflects the angst of the Muslim population: “Today we have lost our sacred national rights won by the blood of our fathers and forefathers. At a time when the Islamic community is the ruling community, it has been deprived of the sacred right. This is a day of weeping and mourning for the people of Islam. As for the non-Muslims, this day, when they gained equality with the ruling community, was a day of rejoicing.” 6
    Decades later, when the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908, their opponents, in order to discredit the supporters of constitutional reform, accused the revolutionaries of being supported by Jews. Even today, the Islamic world is rife with rumours that the father of the modern Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk, who abolished the caliphate in 1924, was secretly a Jew. While the Ottomans were adjusting to the reality of an awakened and industrialized Europe, and attempting to modernize their society, the doors were meanwhile opening to all sorts of European ideas and philosophies: nationalism, Marxism, and, yes, anti-Semitism.
    The first modern anti-Semitic literature in Arabic appeared in 1869, in the form of the confessions of a Moldavian rabbi who had converted to Christianity. Members of the Christian Arab community in Beirut published the Arabic translation, which supposedly revealed “the horrors of the Jewish religion.” Later, in 1890, a Christian author, Habib Faris, published a book in Cairo called
The Talmudic Human Sacrifices
, accusing the Jews of ritual sacrifices, which were attributed to Talmudic teachings. Jews had lived among Muslims for nearly fourteen hundred years, yet it seems no one in Baghdad, Cordoba, or Cairo had heard of these “human sacrifices” until the Europeans came to enlighten us about our cousins. It must be added that the caliph was totally opposed to the distribution of these anti-Jewish texts; authorities closed down publishers and shuttered newspapers to prevent public disorder.
    However, the publication that firmly established anti-Semitism in the Muslim consciousness was
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. The forgery was first translated into Arabic by an Arab Christian, and published in Jerusalem in 1926. From Jerusalem’s Christian quarters to the offices of the city’s Mufti (the spiritual and religious head of the city’s Muslim community) was not too far a distance, and soon this piece of fiction became the ideological tool that motivated