The Impact of Islam by Emmet Scott

Author:Emmet Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780988477889
Publisher: New English Review Press
Published: 2013-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

6

Persecution of the Jews

It is a fact that the first mass murder of Jews to be carried out in Europe occurred in Spain, in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066.[1] But these pogroms were not the work of Christian fanatics: They were carried out by Muslim mobs. Thirty years after the Granada slaughter, at the start of the First Crusade, Christian mobs on the Rhineland carried out similar attacks. These were the first mass-murders of Jews ever carried out by Europeans.

From these two bare facts we may deduce the following: The peculiarly violent anti-Semitism which characterised medieval Europe seems to have had its origin in Spain; and the rise of this new and virulent anti-Semitism in other areas of Europe is intimately connected with the clash between Islam and Christianity.

Christianity was of course always anti-Semitic, or, more accurately, anti-Judaistic. Christians blamed Jews for the murder of Christ; and right from the beginning relations between the two religions were fraught. However, Christianity did not invent anti-Semitism; nor were Christians, for a long time, a threat to Jews.

Anti-Semitism, or hatred of the Jews, in fact predated both the rise of Christianity and Islam. Relations between Gentiles and Jews were volatile as far back as Hellenistic times, and the antagonism between Jews and Gentiles in Egypt, for example, during the second and first centuries BC led to a lively and polemical debate amongst authors such as Apion, Manetho and Josephus. In the early years of the Roman Empire, the attempts of the Jews to free themselves from Imperial rule led to a series of bloody uprisings which were suppressed with great ferocity. The Roman authorities, as a rule, were exasperated by the Jews, but tolerated what they saw as their peculiar customs, and granted them certain unusual privileges, such as an exemption from the requirement of offering sacrifice to the Emperor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.