Volume 31, Number 16 · October 25, 1984
Peaceful Coexistence
By Norman A. Stillman
The Jews of Islam
by Bernard Lewis
Princeton University Press, 245 pp., $17.50
Barely a generation ago, large, important Jewish communities could be found across the Islamic world from Morocco to Afghanistan. Today, except for a few remnants, they have largely vanished as the result of mass emigration, and there is no reason to expect the demographic trend among those who stayed behind to go anywhere but down. Many of these Jewish communities had their roots in antiquity going back long before the Islamic conquests, before most of what today are called the Arab countries had any Arabs, before Turkey had any Turks. The Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries and the subsequent Arabization and Islamization of the Middle East, North Africa, and for a time. Spain as well, provided the political and—no less important—the cultural environment in which these jews developed their distinctive forms of diaspora Judaism. Indeed, during certain periods, such as the high period of medieval Islamic civilization between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, and the Ottoman revival of the Middle East during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Jewish creative centers were to be found in the Muslim lands rather than in Christendom.
Review, 2844 words
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