Islamic Jerusalem: “We Will Drive the Jews into the Sea” – 2 of 3
The following is the second instalment of a three-part series of posts on the subject of “Islamic Jerusalem”, written by our latest associate author, Dr J.
The following is the second instalment of a three-part series of posts on the subject of “Islamic Jerusalem”, written by our latest associate author, Dr J. Hashmi.
Click here to read the first instalment (parts 1-3).
Article Index
- Part 1: Jewish Rule of Jerusalem [Prehistory to A.D. 70]*
- Part 2: Christian Rule of Jerusalem [A.D. 70 – 630]*
- Part 3: Muslim Rule of Jerusalem [A.D. 630 – 1095]*
- Part 4: The Crusades [A.D. 1095 – 1250]
- Part 5: The Turks [A.D. 1250 – 1914]
- Part 6: The British Mandate, Israel, and the Rise of Anti-Semitism [A.D. 1914 – Present]**
- Part 7: Clarifying our Thesis: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly**
- Part 8: Conclusion**
* Link to previous instalment.
** Link to next instalment.
Parts 4 and 5 are presented below.
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Part 4: The Crusades [A.D. 1095 – 1250]
Part 4a: Crusaders Capture Jerusalem
The powerful Eastern Roman Empire had initiated hostilities with the fledgling Islamic state in A.D. 630 at the Battle of Tabouk. It seems that the Byzantines foresaw the emergence of a great power that would become its main territorial rival, and tried to snuff it out early on. By A.D. 1095, however, the scales of power had shifted dramatically, and the Islamic empire had diminished the Eastern Roman Empire to a meager fraction of its original size. The once great Christian empire was on the verge of utter collapse, and so Pope Urban II issued a plea for help from the Western Roman Empire. Thus began the Crusades, a bloody series of wars between Muslims and Christians. Within four years, Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, and it was then that the age of coexistence between Jews, Christians, and Muslims of that region came to a crashing halt. The official website of the Jewish Agency for Israel narrates:
In 1099 the Crusaders besieged Jerusalem and, in one of history’s strange ironies, the “City of Peace” was once again involved in war and bloodshed. The Christian soldiers, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, scaled the city walls and massacred the inhabitants — Jews and Muslims alike. In order to repopulate the city, the Crusaders transferred Christian Arab tribes from Transjordan and settled them in the former Jewish quarter.
Jerusalem became the capital of the Crusader kingdom and thrived because of the concentration of all the government and church bodies there. Tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims visited the city every year, thus adding to its growth and prosperity. But the Jews were still for the most part banned, as during the previous Christian period.
Part 4b: Saladin Recaptures Jerusalem
The Muslim world was scandalized by the barbarity of the Crusaders; stories of cannibalism and blood orgies were reported by both Muslim and Christian chroniclers. The call to Jihad (holy war) was issued. But it took two hundred years for the city of Jerusalem to be re-conquered. It was the legendary Saladin (Salah al-Din) who fulfilled this task. Like his predecessor Caliph Umar, Saladin entered Jerusalem in a bloodless conquest; the city surrendered to him without a fight. The Christian inhabitants expected to be slaughtered by their Muslim conquerors, as vengeance for the bloody massacre of Jerusalem’s Muslims some eighty-eight years ago by the Crusader conquerors. But Saladin granted the Christians generous terms, and wronged not a soul:
Eighty-eight years later, Crusader Jerusalem was besieged by the Muslim army commanded by Sultan Salah al-Din (Saladin). The besieged Jerusalemites trembled for fear that the Muslims would make them pay for the slaughter of their people. But the sultan was made of different stuff. He was humane, generous, sensitive, merciful toward the weak, honest, skillful in statesmanship, and courageous in war. In short, the image of Saladin the infidel matched the ideal of the Christian knight. Saladin set generous terms of surrender, and no Christian was killed…The Church of the Holy Sepulchre…was reopened and Christian worship restored. The image of the generous enemy, the unbeliever who demonstrated the Christian spirit more than the Christians themselves, kindled the imagination of the Europeans.
Part 4c: Saladin’s Magnanimity
Saladin allowed the Eastern Christians to stay in Jerusalem, and he was merciful on the Western Crusaders as well, allowing them to leave for a pittance ransom, much of which he paid from his own coffers. These Crusaders were escorted to safety by Saladin’s own guards. Arguably in contravention to the treaty hammered out with Saladin, the Crusaders stripped the churches of gold and silver on their way out:
They [the Crusaders] stripped the ornaments from their churches, carrying with them vases of gold and silver and silk- and gold-embroidered curtains as well as church treasures. The Patriarch Heraclius collected and carried away gold plating, gold and silver jewelry, and other artifacts from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
(Source)
Note: This is the official website of Fordham University: the Jesuit University of New York.
Saladin’s own secretaries protested that he was being too generous to the Crusaders, but Saladin refused to take action against the Christians:
Imad al-Din was amazed at the amount of treasure that had been carried away by the departing Latins [Crusaders]. He reports having told Salah al-Din that these treasures could be valued at 200,000 dinars. He reminded him that his agreement with the Latins was for safe conduct (arnan) for themselves and their own property, but not for that of the churches, and he counseled that such treasures should not be left in Latin hands. But Salah al-Din rejected his proposal:
“If we interpret the treaty [now] against their interest, they will accuse us of treachery…Let us deal with them according to the wording of the treaty so they may not accuse the believers of breaking the covenant. Instead, they will talk of the favours that we have bestowed upon them.”
Certainly Salah al-Din’s magnanimity towards the Latins contrasts sharply with the attitude of the victorious Crusaders in 1099.
(Source)
These Christians were escorted to safety:
Salah al-Din assigned each group fifty of his officers to ensure their safe arrival in territories held by the Christians. One chronicler gives Salah al-Din’s officers credit for their humane treatment of the refugees, noting that these officers, “who could not endure the suffering of the refugees, ordered their squires to dismount and set aged Christians upon their steeds. Some of them even carried Christian children in their arms.”
(Source)
When the Crusaders had conquered Jerusalem, they had ransacked and destroyed the mosques; yet, Saladin preserved and refurnished the churches. Additionally, he even allowed the Byzantine patriarch to directly rule the churches of Jerusalem:
Salah al-Din allowed them to pray freely in their churches, and he handed over control of Christian affairs to the Byzantine patriarch…When the Byzantine emperor received the news of Salah al-Din’s victory in Jerusalem, he asked him to restore the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Greek Orthodox Christians, a request that Salah al-Din granted.
(Source)
Part 4d: Saladin Reverses the Ban on Jews
Just as Caliph Umar had reversed the Christian ban on Jewish settlement, so too did Saladin allow the Jews to return. During the next few years, Jerusalem shifted between Muslim and Christian control: each time the Christians conquered the city, the Jews were expelled, and restored when the Muslims re-conquered it:
When the Muslims, under Saladin, recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, the Jews enjoyed a short period of resettlement in Jerusalem. But with Saladin’s death, the city remained without any stable authority and was shuttled back and forth between Christians and Muslims.
(Source)
A useful aside:
It is interest to note here that, as far as Palestine is concerned, the right of Jews to “return” to live in this small area of land was accepted by all successive Muslim rulers from the Muslim conquest to the end of the nineteenth century, when Zionist settlement there became entangled in European weltpolitik*. Gibb and Bowen relate how, when the Jews of Europe “learned of the paradisiacal life awaiting them in Turkey” and many of them set out for Palestine, it was not the Muslims who objected but the [Christian] Franciscans of Jerusalem, “who talked the Pope into forbidding the Venetians to carry Jewish passengers to the Holy Land.” This was not the first time Jerusalem Christians tried to prevail on Muslim rulers to ban Jews from living in the city. A similar attempt was made first when the second Caliph, Omar, entered Jerusalem at the time of its conquest by the Muslim army in the seventh century, and again when Salah ad-Din [Saladin] drove out the Crusaders in the twelfth. On both of these occasions, the Christian patriarch of the city tried to persuade the Muslim conquerors to prevent Jews from living in or (as in the latter case) returning to Jerusalem after they had been expelled from it by the Christians. Both Omar and Salah ad-Din refused to heed their pleas.
(Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, p.40)
*weltpolitik: translates to “world policy”, and refers to an aggressive foreign policy by which a country wishes to establish itself as a colonial world power
Note: Nissim Rejwan, the author of the above book, is a Jewish Israeli historian. He is currently a Research Fellow at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Rejwan’s book won the 1998 National Jewish Book Award for Israel Studies.
Nissim Rejwan writes: “Whenever the Crescent had hegemony, the lot of the Jews began to improve.” (as quoted by Daniel Pipes in his review of the book).
Part 5: The Turks [A.D. 1250 – 1914]
Part 5a: The Mamluks
Saladin’s dynasty was succeeded by the Mamluks, who were Muslim Turks (emphasis is ours):
In 1250 a new Muslim force appeared on the scene, the Mamluks, who managed to establish themselves as rulers of Jerusalem for over 260 years. Jewish life in Jerusalem was somewhat freer under Mamluk rule than it had been with the Christians. The city remained poor but Jewish scholarship and learning thrived.
(Source)
Part 5b: The Ottoman Empire
The Ottomans, another group of Muslim Turks, succeeded the Mamluks:
Jerusalem came under the domination of the Ottoman Turks in 1517 when Sultan Selim I took it in a bloody battle with the Mamluks. His successor, Suleiman the Magnificent, left his mark on Jerusalem’s history by building the present-day wall around the Old City. The construction of the wall, which took five years, made a great impression on the Jews of the time and it remains as one of the dominant architectural features of the city to this day…
(Source)
We read:
For nearly five centuries the Ottoman dynasty founded by Osman I (r.1280-1324) governed a vast Islamic empire…and embraced a medley of ethnic and religious minorities, including Jews and a variety of Christian communities. Ottoman rule generally improved the situation of Jews living in those areas previously controlled by the Byzantine Empire, under which the Jews suffered humiliation and servitude for centuries. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Jews fleeing the Inquisition and persecutions in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe found refuge in the Ottoman realm…they (the Ottomans) granted their communities considerable autonomy in the conduct of their cultural and religious life.
(A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations, by Edward Kessler, p. 327)
Part 5c: Jews Find Refuge in the Ottoman Empire
Israeli historian Nissim Rejwan writes:
Under Ottoman Islam, which by the beginning of the sixteenth century dominated Syria [including Palestine] and Eygpt, the conditions under which the Jews were permitted to live contrasted so strikingly with those imposed on their coreligionists in various parts of Christendom that the fifteenth century witnessed a large influx of European Jews into the [Ottoman] Sultan’s dominions. During the first half of that century, persecutions had occurred in Bohemia, Austria, and Poland, and, at about this time, two German rabbis who sought and secured refuge in the Ottoman Empire wrote a letter to their community extolling the beauties and advantages of their new home.
But it was the measures taken against the Jews in Spain, culminating in their expulsion in 1492, that gave the greatest momentum to this migration. The Jews who chose to settle in various parts of the [Ottoman] empire found their surroundings rather congenial, and they, in turn contributed greatly to the flowering of Ottoman civilization…Marranos, who in Christian Spain had embraced Christianity to escape persecution and death, abandoned their disguise and returned to Judaism. Istanbul soon came to harbor the largest Jewish community in the whole of Europe, while Salonika became a predominantly Jewish city. The degree of the Jews’ integration into the life of Ottoman Islam was such, indeed, that two notable non-Jewish students of modern Islam found that there has been, in their words, “something sympathetic to the Jewish nature in the culture of Islam,” since “from the rise of the Caliphate till the abolition of the ghettos in Europe the most flourishing centers of Jewish life were to be found in Muslim countries: in Iraq during the Abbassid period, in Spain throughout the period of Moorish domination, and thereafter in the Ottoman Empire.”
…At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Jewish community in Jerusalem experienced a growth in numbers at an inordinate rate…According to a recent study by Tudor Parfitt, however, the startling increase in Jewish immigration to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century took place “not because the attraction of Jerusalem as the holy city grew, but because political and other factors made such immigration increasingly possible.”
…In nineteenth-century Palestine, he adds, such tolerance was “a consistent part of the relationship between the Ottoman authorities and the Jews.” He quotes European travelers as remarking on “the perfect religious freedom” that prevailed…One of these travelers, J. Wilson, is quoted as saying that “entire freedom of worship…is now accorded to [the Jews] and they are left to manage their own internal affairs without interference from any other quarter.”
(Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, p.40)
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›› Continue to final instalment (parts 6, 7 & 8 )
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