This Noble House. Arnold E. Franklin

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СКАЧАТЬ a much greater portion of the urban population, perhaps exceeding ten percent of the total.⁶⁶ The situation appears to have been similar in Muslim Spain. Eliyahu Ashtor estimated that Jews represented little more than one half of one percent of the total population of the country, but a considerably larger percentage in the urban centers.⁶⁷ Unfortunately, comparable statistics are not available for the Jewish populations in Iraq and Iran, though it seems unlikely that the situation there would have been considerably different.⁶⁸

      But Jewish minority status was not simply an issue of population size; it was also a matter of law. In the eyes of the Islamic legal tradition Jews were a dhimmī people, a category that applied to Christians and various other non-Muslim religious communities as well.⁶⁹ Dhimmī populations were to be protected in their person and property, were guaranteed the right to practice their religion, and were extended a wide measure for self-government. In return, they were expected to pay the jizya, an annual poll tax, and to comply with various discriminatory restrictions that are enumerated, in their best-known form, in the so-called Pact of ʿUmar. Collectively, these regulations reinforced Islam’s preeminence within the social order and established a hierarchical relationship between its adherents and the dhimmī populations.⁷⁰ More than a numerical inferiority to Muslims (as well as Christians), the Jews’ minority status thus involved a legislated subordination to the dominant faith. The subjugated yet protected status envisioned by the dhimmī system well suited Islam’s ambivalent theological stance vis-à-vis Judaism and Christianity, a position that combined elements of recognition and rejection.

      If the dhimmī system had recognizable social goals, its application nonetheless varied considerably over time and from place to place. Historians generally agree, however, that the Jewish minority fared well and experienced little in the way of systematic oppression before the middle of the thirteenth century. Geniza documents, for instance, suggest that many of the terms of the Pact of Umar were more or less neglected in Egypt and Palestine during the Fatimid (969–1171) and early Ayyubid (1171–1250) periods, and the same appears to have been the case in Spain as well before the Almohad conquests in the middle of the twelfth century. Rules requiring dhimmīs to wear distinctive clothing and prohibiting them from holding government office, which were applied with greater regularity in later periods, seem to have remained largely unenforced before the middle of the thirteenth century. At the same time, the documents make it abundantly clear that the Fatimids and Ayyubids routinely collected the poll tax from the dhimmī populations and that it constituted a major financial burden for the lower classes. And despite the generally stable conditions that prevailed during this period, violence and religious persecution were not entirely unknown. We hear, for instance, of episodes of Jewish suffering in Egypt and Palestine during the reign of the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim (996–1021), in Granada in conjunction with the assassination of the Jewish vizier Joseph Ibn Naghrīla (d. 1066), in North Africa and Spain during the Almohad invasions (1140s), and in Yemen under the Shīʿī ruler ʿAbd al-Nabī Ibn al-Mahdī (1160s).

      While dhimmī legislation sought to impose a marginal legal status on the Jews, the openness that prevailed in the economic and cultural spheres offered them opportunities to integrate more fully into their surroundings. Few if any limitations were placed on Jewish commercial activity during the classical Geniza period, permitting Jews and Muslims to interact on an equal footing in their business dealings. Jewish commercial activity was also highly diversified, underscoring the absence of the kinds of restrictive measures that emerged in Europe and confined Jews there to a limited number of professions. The Geniza demonstrates that Jews were employed as professionals, as skilled artisans, as manufacturers of goods, as retail and wholesale merchants, and even as landowners and agricultural producers. And commercial partnerships involving Jewish and Muslim businessmen, by no means uncommon in the Geniza period, provided regular occasions for members of the two groups to form close personal bonds as they jointly pursued profit.⁷¹ As a fourteenth-century Muslim jurist, evidently feeling some anxiety about the trend, put it: “Becoming partners with [dhimmīs] leads to intermingling, and that, in turn, to friendship.”⁷²

      Jews also succeeded in transcending the limitations of their dhimmī status through various intellectual and cultural pursuits that were facilitated, in turn, by their willing embrace of the Arabic language, the vernacular of scholarly discourse in the Islamic world. By the tenth century Jews had thoroughly adopted the language of their Muslim neighbors, relying on it not only for everyday communication but also as their primary literary medium, even when composing works of a distinctively religious nature.⁷³ When we find rabbinic authorities in the twelfth century discussing the permissibility of praying in Arabic we get a sense of how far the process of linguistic acculturation had actually gone.⁷⁴ The Jews’ easy embrace of Arabic was surely encouraged by their assessment of its close affinities with Hebrew and Aramaic.⁷⁵ Maimonides writes in Pirqei Moshe (Chapters of Moses), echoing what must have been a fairly common perception, that “all who know Arabic and Hebrew agree that they are without doubt one language.”⁷⁶ Through Arabic, Jews gained access to the vibrant intellectual life of the Islamic Middle Ages, to Arabic literature and to the flourishing study of Greek philosophy and science. The study of philosophy, especially, took place in an intellectual climate and in physical settings that were religiously integrated, allowing dhimmīs and Muslims to find common cause in the quest for rationally based knowledge. Describing the interdenominational circles of philosophical study that thrived in Baghdad in the tenth century, Joel Kraemer writes: “Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, reason, and friendship made possible the convocation of these societies, devoted to a common pursuit of the truth and preservation of ancient wisdom, by surmounting particular religious ties in favor of a shared human enterprise.”⁷⁷ And even when working in more religiously homogeneous settings, philosophers were nevertheless predisposed to a view of society that tended to minimize the significance of confessional differences, emphasizing, as they did, the value of man’s natural capacity for rational thought.

      Medicine was another important field in which Jews could participate relatively unhindered before the middle of the thirteenth century.⁷⁸ Jews and Muslims studied the medieval compendia of Galen’s works together, practiced their profession side by side, and valued one another’s scientific treatises. An illustrative example is Isaac Israeli (d. ca. 955), an Egyptian Jew who attended the founder of the Fatimid dynasty, ʿUbayd Allāh, trained Muslim students, and authored a number of well-regarded Arabic medical texts, including one on urine that was praised by an eleventh-century Muslim chronicler as “the most comprehensive work on the subject ever written, and by which [Israeli] gained superiority over all other writers.”⁷⁹

      There is even evidence, albeit of a more modest nature, of Jewish writers who composed belletristic works in Arabic, thereby earning reputations among contemporary Muslim poets and literary savants. Most of our information on these Jewish literati comes from the sixteenth-century Moroccan chronicler al-Maqqarī and reflects the situation in al-Andalus.⁸⁰ But there is also the intriguing example of Judah al-Ḥarīzī (d. 1225), the Spanish-born writer and translator who left his homeland, traveled through the Near East, and ultimately settled in Aleppo. An eight-page biographical entry in an encyclopedia of Arabic writers by Ibn al-Shaʿār al-Mawṣilī (d. 1256) praises al-Ḥarīzī for being a “talented and erudite” poet, revealing that Jews who wrote in Arabic verse could indeed find a place in Eastern literary circles as well.⁸¹

      But the adoption of Arabic was not simply a matter of exchanging one linguistic medium for another; nor, it may be argued, were forays into religiously neutral territory its most dramatic result. In espousing Arabic, Jews were also engaging in a wide-ranging process that produced “fundamental changes in the articulation of Jewish culture.”⁸² The scientific study of Hebrew grammar, for example, began among Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands who had internalized the linguistic pride and the systematic methods of linguistic analysis of their Muslim neighbors.⁸³ And the first efforts to work out a consistent presentation of Jewish theology commenced only after Jews began to think according to the conceptual paradigms developed by the scholars СКАЧАТЬ