The Jew is Not My Enemy (23 page)

The author who detailed the Jewish rebellion against Rome is Flavius Josephus, a Jew who held office under the Romans. It is through his writings that we read of the tragedies that befell the Jews of Jerusalem and Masada between the years 66 and 73. In a strange coincidence, the number of Jews who died at Masada was around nine hundred, the same number reportedly slaughtered in Medina six centuries later. In another parallel to Medina, Josephus tells us that when the Jews reached the point of despair, they were addressed by their leader, Eleazar, who suggested they kill their women and children and fight to the last man. Later, he suggested a mass suicide; if suicide was considered a sinful practice, they should kill each other. In Medina too, the besieged Jews of Banu Qurayza are reported by Ibn Ishaq to have received similar advice from Ka’b bin Asad. These parallel stories, recorded six centuries apart, have led the scholar W.N. Arafat to conclude that the stories passed on to Muslim scribes about Medina came from Jews who had converted to Islam and who applied the earlier stories of Masada to what had happened at Medina. Arafat writes,

It is inconceivable that a people with such a deep sense of their history, who would document the story of the nine hundred dead Jews of Masada in the year 73, would have no record of a slaughter of nine hundred Jews six hundred years later. However, this is the reality of the Medina massacre: there are no Jewish records, not even fables or stories, about such an incident in the Jewish chronicles of medieval times.

Among contemporary Jewish scholars who have written about the contentious Jewish-Muslim relationship, historian Shlomo Dov Goitein’s work stands out as a model of scholarly argument devoid of the subjective passion that is often the hallmark of his Muslim contemporaries. Goitein, the German-born son of a Hungarian rabbi, studied Arabic and Islam at the University of Frankfurt at the time the Ottoman caliphate was crumbling after the First World War and Palestine came under the British Mandate. His landmark work,
Jews and Arabs: A Concise
History of Their Social and Cultural Relations
(1955), reflects little rancour against the Arabs, even though he was one of the early European Jews who moved to Palestine in 1923, when the arrival of the Jews was met with suspicion if not outright hostility, and even though he wrote in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war with its Arab neighbours.

In tracing the history of the interaction between Jews and Arabs, Goitein makes no mention of the supposed massacre of the Jews of Medina. In a passing reference, he writes: “It is very unfortunate that the struggle, which very specific historical circumstances forced the Jews and Muhammad, has left its mark on the Holy Book of Islam.”
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As the first professor of Islamic studies at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Goitein would of course have been familiar with the biography of Prophet Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq and the subsequent Hadith literature that corroborated the Jewish massacre at Medina as an act of retribution carried out with the Prophet’s approval. However, not only does he refuse to acknowledge that this seminal event took place, he states explicitly that there is no record of such a massacre in Jewish history. Goitein writes: “Concerning the fateful events and developments which took place at the time, during the three most decisive decades of oriental history (about 615 and 645 ad), not a single contemporary account has come down to us from Jewish sources.”
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It is possible, although highly unlikely, that an event of such magnitude as the extermination of nine hundred Jews escaped the attention of all Jewish historians, poets, writers, traders, and travellers, either at the time or in the coming centuries, especially when they held influential positions in various Islamic caliphates during the era Jews call the Golden Period. At the time Ibn Ishaq was putting together the
Sira
and writing in detail about the massacre, it was the second and third century of Islamic caliphates, governed first from Damascus and later Baghdad, and Jews were a part of Muslim society. It is improbable that the Jewish
community and their rabbis would not have been able to line up Jewish sources corroborating the said massacre if it had actually taken place.

Scholar Barakat Ahmad writes, “It is not normal with the Jews not to record their misfortunes.” According to him, the descendants of the Jews of Khaybar who had been expelled by the second caliph a few years after the supposed massacre apparently had no memory of the tragedy that had befallen their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

Abraham Geiger, a nineteenth-century German rabbi who spearheaded the founding of Reform Judaism, published an essay in Bonn in 1833 titled “Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judentum aufgenommen?” (What Did Muhammad Receive from Judaism?); it was later translated into English in India in 1896 as “Judaism and Islam.” Geiger was the first to make a passing reference to the expulsion of Jews from Medina, but made no mention of the massacre of the Banu Qurayza. Rabbi Geiger had access to Islamic texts that allowed him to dwell on the Jewish roots of Islam, but the story of the massacre seems to have struck him as too outlandish, and he passed over it.

Another Jewish resource is a sixteenth-century book by the Portuguese Samuel Usque,
Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel
. Barakat Ahmad refers to Usque as “this deft painter of Jewish suffering who caused the long procession of Jewish history to file past the tearful eyes of his contemporaries in all its sublime glory and abysmal tragedy.” Yet in his compilation of Jewish travails in history, Usque makes no reference to the massacre of the Banu Qurayza Jews. He does, though, write about an incident in Medina in 1163, when a group of Jews were accused of robbing the grave of Prophet Muhammad. “This report spread through all of Islam and the reaction was violent; merely on the basis of this rumor and supposition, the Moors killed many Jews and destroyed forty of their synagogues.”
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In his prologue, Usque quotes Socrates, saying, “When people found themselves in trouble they should compare their misfortunes
they had survived in the past with the present ones, and they would easily find consolation: for no past misfortune would prove to have been so small that it would not turn out to be much greater than the present one.” If this was Usque’s objective, why would he have omitted the Banu Qurayza massacre of 630, but include the less significant event that occurred in Medina in 1163?

Of course, there are contemporary Jewish authors and academics who do mention the massacre of the Banu Qurayza Jews and maintain that Prophet Muhammad was instrumental in that slaughter, but they rely on Islamic sources, not Jewish. Among them is Rabbi Reuven Firestone, a professor of medieval Jewish studies and Islam at Hebrew Union College and the author of
An Introduction to Islam for Jews
. That book depicts Islam’s Prophet as the destroyer of Medina’s Jews, but surprisingly has won praise from two of America’s leading Islamists: Ingrid Mattson of the Islamic Society of North America and Muzammil Siddiqi of the Fiqh Council of North America.

Firestone writes about how Prophet Muhammad “successfully divided the Jewish community of Medina and destroyed it.” About the actual killing, he writes, “According to the sources, the Jews of Qurayza surrendered. Trenches were dug in the marketplace of Medina, and Muhammad had the men’s heads struck off in those trenches as they were brought out in batches. Sources put the number of people killed that day between 600 and 900.”
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What Rabbi Firestone fails to mention is that the “sources” he cites are all Muslim, not Jewish, and that these Muslim sources surfaced a hundred years after the reported incident. It is interesting that both Mattson and Siddiqi ignore this depiction of Muhammad as a mass murderer. Mattson says, “Firestone’s book shines as a beacon of scholarship and humanity,” while Siddiqi calls the book “a valuable contribution toward making Islam understood and appreciated by the Jewish people.”

Another excellent book on Islamic history from a Jewish perspective is Norman Stillman’s
The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book
. Drawing on a treasure trove of medieval Muslim documents, Stillman provides his readers with a breathtaking view of Jewish life in the Arab world spanning several centuries. Unlike Firestone, Stillman goes into details about the fateful encounter between the Jews of Banu Qurayza and the Muslims of Medina, but he too relies almost entirely on Muslim sources and does not dwell on the absence of any Jewish version of the events. He does, however, speculate why the Prophet would have agreed to a mass slaughter of Jews when, earlier, he had simply expelled other Jewish tribes from the city. Stillman, a student of Shlomo Goitein, writes, “The slaughter of so many men was an extremely impressive act that enhanced Muhammad’s prestige throughout Arabia. Here was a man to be reckoned with. He was now absolute master in Madina.”
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Stillman acknowledges that even after the massacre of the Banu Qurayza Jews and the expulsion of other tribes, Medina was still home to many Jews. He does not explain why none of these Jews, the survivors or the travellers, ever mentioned the incident in any oral or written communication.

It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that a book written by a Jew made a passing reference to the Medina massacre. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, but Jewish authors began reproducing Islamic texts that showed Arabs identifying their own Prophet as a mass murderer just after the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1897, and as the quest for a Jewish homeland in Palestine was meeting resistance from the Arab world and the Ottoman caliphate. Until then, it was as if world Jewry did not take the Muslim bravado seriously. Perhaps they recognized the tale as nothing more than one example of exaggeration among many. Of course, in the modern era of propaganda warfare, if the Muslims were willing to depict their own leader as a mass murderer, why wouldn’t their Jewish adversaries oblige? Where else but in
the Muslim world would one run into a situation where the case for the prosecution is made by the defence?

The absence of the Medina massacre in medieval Jewish texts strongly suggests that the Jews had no record of this incident because it was merely a myth created by Muslims. That the Quran itself is silent on the subject should give Muslims pause.

As we have seen, Ibn Ishaq in his biography of Muhammad claims that God sent a message to the Prophet through the Archangel Gabriel commanding Muhammad to besiege the Jews of Banu Qurayza. Many verses in chapter 33 of the Quran relate to the Battle of the Trench, some asking Muslims to eradicate their fear of the enemy, others addressing the role of hypocrites among the Muslims, but nowhere does Allah command Muhammad to besiege or massacre the Jews of Banu Qurayza. Later, Ibn Ishaq’s story would be incorporated into the Hadith literature and sharia law. It would then make a back-door entry into Quranic studies when, in the fourteenth century, Ibn Kathir would write the multivolume commentary on the Quran that has become standard reading across the Arab world. This was followed by the twentieth-century exegesis by Syed Maududi, firmly embedding the massacre in the collective psyche of hundreds of millions of Muslims.

But let us look at some incongruities.

The Quran explicitly rejects the notion of collective punishment. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, the Indian scholar whose translation of the Quran into English is the world standard, says this about the Quranic doctrine of “personal responsibility”: “We are fully responsible for our acts ourselves, we cannot transfer the consequences to someone else. Nor can anyone vicariously atone for our sins.”
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Sura 6:164 of the Quran says:

For the Prophet to have inflicted a collective punishment on a people, even if it were proven that their leaders had conspired to attack the Muslims, would have been against the injunction of the Quran. It is unlikely that the Prophet would have violated the very book he said God had revealed to him. The above verse had been revealed to Muhammad long before he migrated to Medina, and if God had wanted his apostle to act in violation of his earlier commands, surely this would have been made clear in the Quran.

N.W. Arafat in his 1976 essay explores another gaping hole in Ibn Ishaq’s story. He says, “Had this slaughter actually happened, jurists would have adopted it as a precedent. In fact, exactly the opposite has been the case. The attitude of jurists, and their rulings, has been more according to the Quranic rule in the verse, ‘No soul shall bear another’s burden.’ ” Arafat quotes from the ninth-century jurist Abu Ubayd bin Sallam, who relates a significant incident in his book
Kitab al-Amwal
, which Arafat reminds us was a book of jurisprudence, not a biography.

Sallam tells of an incident in the ninth century in which a group of Christians in Lebanon rebelled against the authority of the caliphate. One Abdullab bin All was the regional governor, and after putting down the revolt, he ordered the rebels and the entire community to be moved elsewhere. However, the leading jurist at the time, Imam al-Awza’i, immediately objected to the verdict. His argument was that the revolt against the caliphate was not the result of the community’s unanimous agreement to rebel, and therefore collective punishment was not right. “As far as I know it is not a rule of God that God should punish the many for the fault of the few, but punish the few for the fault of the many.”
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