[lbo-talk] Saudi anti-Semitism

[sharif islam]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:10 AM, andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This is disgusting, of course. You'd never know that from about the 7th century to 1920 it was Islam that was liberal and tolerant towards Judaism, that the Moorish Enlightenment, exterminated by the Inquisition and the Expulsion under their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was as Jewish as it was Muslim, or maybe 1/4, anyway, that when the Crusaders held pogroms against the Jews of Europe on their way to "reclaim" Palestine from its native inhabitants it was the Muslims who provided refuge, and that even up through the turn of the last century across central Europe the Moorish style, consciously modeled on Islamic architecture, was the style of choice foe building synagogues. The age old hatred was between Christians on one side against Jew and Muslims equally, infidels both.

Don't forget the Almohads. The myth of andalusian interfaith utopia
and the other myth of Islamic persecution of Jews are both highly
distorted and have been politically used. I will suggest Mark Cohen's
book  _Under Crescent and Cross:  The Jews in the Middle Ages (1995,
Priceton University Press) that deals with this issue.

--sharif