David B. Shemano wrote: > > Undoubtedly true (as Bernard Lewis emphasizes, and I am unaware of > any Zionist coverup), but its akin to saying that Blacks were better > treated in the North than the South.
No, it's not. I have about a hundred pages to go in Thomas Sugrue's "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North" and it is good reminder that everything south of Canada was the South, as Malcolm X put it. Blacks could not buy houses in suburbia. Levittown not only refused to sell houses to them, but openly defended its decision on the basis that they were unruly. I would suggest that unless Shemano has some knowledge of the actual history of Jews in the Arab and Muslim world based on scholarly material, he should be a bit more modest with his sketchy generalizations. http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/jewish/andalusia.htm Under Andalusian Skies On April 11th a gasoline truck exploded in front of an ancient synagogue on the resort island of Djerba, which is part of Tunisia. At first considered an accident, it was subsequently revealed to be a terrorist act. This event--along with synagogue desecrations in Europe attributed to Arab or North African immigrants--have given ammunition to Zionist commentators who view anti-Semitism in essentialist terms. They are trying to reduce Islamic peoples to eternal foes of the Jews, just as Daniel Goldhagen did for the Germans. A careful reading of press coverage reveals a different reality. In the April 15th NY Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr. reports that the Jewish district in Djerba, called a 'hara', was never a ghetto: Tunisia's Jews have never been walled in. Police cars have been constantly present for years, but are there to protect this island's tiny Jewish enclaves. Tunisia, a center of Jewish life since the Roman Empire, was a refuge for those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, Greek persecution and Sicilian raids on Libya. "We're the shop window," said Rene Trabelsi, a tour operator whose father is president of the Ghriba Synagogue. "We prove to the world that there's religious freedom and tolerance in Tunisia. We're the favorite minority, like a girl in a family of seven boys." We also learn from McNeil that Jewish life in Tunisia absorbed Islamic culture: "Boys do not expect a bar mitzvah, party because religious law does not call for it, the rabbi said. Young men wear blue jeans and skullcaps, but older men often wear baggy-bottomed Turkish shorts, slippers and a sort of mashed red fez called a kabous." Describing the relationship of his community to Tunisian society, the rabbi of the Djerba synagogue said the community felt "integrated, not assimilated." One of the greatest tragedies of the Zionist project was the destruction of this historic amity between two peoples with so much in common. In an important article titled " Arabs and Jews Can Live in Peace" that appeared in Socialist Worker, John Rose wrote: Last month I was in Egypt, where I had the good fortune to spend a morning with the truly remarkable Youssef Darwish, a 91 year old Jewish Communist veteran of the post-war workers' struggles that formed the backcloth to Nasser's coup in 1952. Youssef, all faculties intact and chomping away at cigars, waxed lyrical on many issues, not least the rich texture of Jewish life in Egypt in the early part of the 20th century. It's standard in these sort of discussions to debate the prominent role Jews played in the Communist movement throughout the Arab world. And of course we did. But what struck me more was something else. It was the long historical Jewish attachment to and involvement in Egypt--one of its greatest medieval synagogues still stands--and the way this blossomed in the early 20th century, with now forgotten cultural expressions in painting, books and later film. As Youssef says, the banner of independence was being raised, and the idea of achieving equality among the different social groups was vigorously pursued. Later Zionism sucked nearly all the Jews out of Egypt and told them they were coming "home". It told the same nonsense to Jews from all over the Arab world, and helped them to forget their long history as it recruited them to build the Iron Wall against their new Palestinian Arab neighbours. Recovering that history someday soon will be an important part of showing just how Arabs and Jews can live together in peace. (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/1795/sw179512.htm) Not only were Jews sucked out of Egypt, they were also sucked out of Tunisia. Only about 2,000 Jews remain there, down from more than 100,000 in 1948 -- and about 1,100 of them live in Djerba. They were ripped out of a society that valued them and placed into one that now suffers permanent warfare while visiting atrocities on the Palestinians. Despite Zionist attempts to paint Muslim and Jew as eternal enemies, there is an important trend *within* Jewish scholarship that depicts Muslim Spain and North Africa as a Golden Age for Jews from 950 to 1150 AD. Three names stand out: Heinrich Graetz, a nineteenth century trailblazer from Germany; a contemporary Princeton scholar named S.D. Goitein; and Eliyahu Ashtor, an Israeli and also a contemporary. Goitein is the author of a two-thousand-page study titled "Mediterranean Society" that is based on so-called 'genizah' (storeroom) archives retrieved from a synagogue in medieval Cairo. Observant Jews were prohibited from destroying documents with God's name on them, so they ended up in such archives. They include personal correspondence, commercial contracts, tax records, etc. For the casual reader, Goitein's "Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages" makes more sense even though it is out of print. In a chapter dealing with Jewish culture under Islam, Goitein writes: "The basic fact about Jewish-Arabic thought is that Greek science and Greek methods of thinking made their entrance into Jewish life mainly through the gates of Arab-Muslim literature. With the Arabic-writing Jewish doctors, mathematicians, astronomers and philosophers of the ninth and tenth centuries, science, in the Greek sense of the word, for the first time became known and practiced among the bulk of the Jewish community. All genuine Jewish reasoning before that time consisted either of simple, practical observations and conclusions, or of mythological conceptions, no matter how profound." Liberated from the heavy hand of orthodoxy, the Jewish denizens of Spain could now rise to the highest levels of the professions and the arts. The concluding paragraphs of V.1 of Eliyahu Ashtor's "The Jews of Moslem Spain" evoke the warm and supportive environment Jews found themselves in. It is part of a lengthy account of a reading by famed Jewish poet Ibn Khalfon. It is important also to consider that Jewish poetry was strongly influenced by the Arab style. Ashtor writes: At last the host gestured to the poet to declaim his verse, and Ibn Khalfon recited a florid poem in which he proclaimed all the qualities of the new officeholder, his deeds in behalf of his coreligionists, the alms he gave to the poor, and the merits of his forefathers, who were nobles in Israel. Not all those present understood the beautiful biblical Hebrew, but all listened intently; not a sound was heard. When the poet had finished he bowed to the host, who drew forth from the folds of his coat a purse full of gold pieces and handed them to Ibn Khalfon. All his friends voiced cries of enthusiasm over the beauty of the poem and the generosity of the noble lord. A few arose from their places to stroll in the corners of the courtyard, where tall trees stood; others remained seated and engaged in spiritual but friendly conversation. It was a warm and pleasant night, the skies were strewn with innumerable stars, and the moon shone with a brilliant light. From a distance could be heard a monotonous voice, yet pleasant to the ear: "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah. Life to those who pray to Him, life to those who serve Him." Again and again the voice repeated its cry saturated with yearnings. This was the muezzin calling the Moslem to prayer, for this was the month of Ramadan, when the call to prayer is sounded before dawn. East and West had met under Andalusian skies. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
