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Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages

von Mark R. Cohen

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Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia"? Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged ideas as myths, Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--and the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.Under Crescent and Cross has been translated into Turkish, Hebrew, German, Arabic, French, and Spanish, and its historic message continues to be relevant across continents and time. This updated edition, which contains an important new introduction and afterword by the author, serves as a great companion to the original.… (mehr)
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Despite the title, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages is focused as much, if not more, on historiographical conceptions of, and debates about, medieval Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim interactions as it is about those interactions themselves. Cohen dubs the two main schools of thought on medieval Jewish history the lachrymose and the anti-lachrymose, and then marshals the evidence in favour of a third way—one which regards Jewish-gentile history as neither utopian nor dystopic.

At times, I found Cohen's writing a little dense, and wished that he didn't presume knowledge on his reader's part—he states in his introduction that he is aiming this both at the academic and at the interested lay reader, but as someone who knows less than she ought about Judaism and Islam, I found myself resorting to an encyclopaedia a lot to look up concepts which went unexplained. I didn't necessarily learn anything new about Jewish-Christian interactions in Western Europe, but I found the comparisons between Northern Europe and the Southern Mediterranean contexts to be fascinating, and appreciated Cohen's scholarly demonstration of how ahistorical it is to view Arab/Muslim culture as innately anti-Semitic. Recommended, though perhaps only for those who already have a grounding in the subject. ( )
  siriaeve | Jan 8, 2011 |
(Taken from a lit review that I did for a class)

Mark Cohen’s book, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews of the Middle Ages, originates in the field of Geniza studies. The Geniza documents consist of thousands of fragments of both literary and non-literary items (i.e., contracts, marriage documents, etc.) relating to the patterns of Jewish life in medieval Islamic lands. Combining analysis of Geniza documents and traditional literary-historical-legal sources with a comparison of similar types of documents and accounts concerning the Jews of Christendom, Cohen advances two propositions regarding the status of Jews in the Muslim world during the Middle Ages. First, Cohen asserts that while dhimmi status is certainly not progressive by modern standards, acceptance of the conditions of the dhimma and annual payment of the jizya provided a guarantee of security for Jews in the Islamic world that was relatively standardized and transparent as well as a basis for their integration into Islamic society, albeit in an inferior position. Second, through his analysis of economic and social history in the lands of Christendom and the lands of Islamdom, Cohen demonstrates that “factors outside of religion could both exacerbate and moderate the innate religious intolerance of the societies in which Jews lived.” These positions are almost exactly the opposite of scholars such as Bat Ye’Or, who sees the dhimma as an exclusionary tactic, designed to humiliate non-Muslims, and views the treatment of dhimmis as almost entirely conditioned by static religious doctrine.

Cohen’s analysis begins with the theological and legal positions of Jews under Christianity and Islam, as “legal status is the earliest aspect of the problem of gentile-Jewish relations we can know with clarity.” Cohen argues that while both Christians and Muslims wanted to avoid a situation in which the Jew, an infidel under Christendom and a dhimmi under Islamdom, obtained power over the members of the ruling faith, early Christianity and Judaism had a significantly more complicated relationship than early Islam and Judaism. These relationships are reflected in the status of Jews in Christian and Islamic legal thought. Whereas Christianity singled out the Jews as a unique group whose continuing existence required theological justification and special precautions to exclude them from the community, Islam treated the Jews as one of many subordinate non-Muslim groups that needed to be integrated into Muslim society through application of the dhimma. Protection was extended to European Jews by Christian kings on an individualized basis and could be revoked at any time for any reason. In the Islamic world, dhimmi Jews received protection as part of their acceptance of a set of conditions that were embedded within a larger social order and could not be revoked without contravention of that social order on the part of either the protected people or the ruler. While this in no way implies that dhimmis lived unmolested, it does support Cohen’s argument that the Jew as dhimmi occupied a “recognized, fixed, safeguarded niche within the hierarchy of Islamic social order.” This stands in sharp contrast to the Jew as infidel, who occupied a position that was marginalized, “de-normalized” and apart from Christian society.

In spite of his argument regarding the importance of the legal position of Jews, Cohen realizes that legal status is not the only, or even the most accurate way to gauge the condition of the Jews in either environment. Through an examination of historical documents, many drawn from the Cairo Geniza, Cohen demonstrates the importance of economic and social factors in determining the condition of Jews in medieval Christendom and Islamdom. Though similar patterns of Jewish life can be observed in both realms, these patterns are understood and interpreted differently by the dominant culture. Jews in medieval Christian Europe served disproportionately as merchants and moneylenders, both of which were viewed with considerable distaste. When Christians began expanding into commercial occupations in the later medieval period, Jewish merchants and bankers were marginalized as a threat to Christian businessmen. Islam, which arose in a commercial center, never developed a fear of the merchant as alien. Additionally, the Geniza documents reveal a much broader economic diversity amongst Jews in medieval Islamic lands, with Jews employed in dying, metalwork, wine-making, and tanning. Although Cohen argues that this diversity “militated against the abuse that Jews in Christian lands had to endure in part on account of their identification with a limited and problematic set of occupations,” it is unclear if these professions were actually unproblematic, or simply a set of shunned but necessary occupations that the ruling elite was happy to let the dhimmis perform. In either case, Cohen’s analysis of the economic factors impacting treatment of dhimmis is valuable because it shows that the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims was not conditioned entirely by religious factors.

Patterns of social organization also affected perceptions and treatment of the Jews. During the early Middle Ages, European Jews were concentrated in nascent urban centers, which were viewed as alien to a social order that privileged the agrarian peasant. Jews were also viewed as aliens within these urban centers because they were often under individual protection from feudal lords and exempt from municipal jurisdiction. By contrast, urban existence was a normal pattern in the Islamic world. “To be a Jewish townsman in the Muslim world meant to be part of an institution originally a component of the social order rather than part of an organism considered an innovation and encroachment on the power of traditional authority.” When the patterns of Jewish life conformed closely to the patterns of the dominant group, they seem to have experienced a lesser degree of persecution.

Cohen also uses the Geniza sources to demonstrate that, at least in medieval Egypt, there was considerable variation between the treatment of Jews as specified in the restrictions of the dhimma and actual relations between Jews and Muslims. These differences are most visible in the economic sphere, where it appears that Jews and Muslims often formed interdenominational business partnerships against the advice of Muslim jurists who worried that dhimmi control in these partnerships might result in the Muslim partner inadvertently trafficking in prohibited goods. Geniza documents also reveal that Jews and Muslims mixed in residential settings and shared in popular religious practices including pilgrimage to shared shrines. Laws were not always contravened in ways that benefited Jews, however. Documents contained in the Geniza show that collection of the jizya was often done in a humiliating way and without compassion for the indigent, despite stipulations in medieval legal works mandating leniency and forbidding humiliation of the dhimmi.
Cohen has been accused of picking his case study in such a way as to highlight the tolerance of Islam and maximize the intolerance of Christianity, thereby falling into the same “Golden Age” trap as previous scholars. Though he does believe that the position of Jews in Muslim lands was on the whole more secure than that of their counterparts in Christian lands during the Middle Ages, Cohen’s principle intent is not to defend one regime over another, but rather to demonstrate that legal status was but one component in structuring the lives of both groups and that this legal status frequently functioned in surprising ways. ( )
1 abstimmen fannyprice | Jan 11, 2008 |
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Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia"? Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged ideas as myths, Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--and the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.Under Crescent and Cross has been translated into Turkish, Hebrew, German, Arabic, French, and Spanish, and its historic message continues to be relevant across continents and time. This updated edition, which contains an important new introduction and afterword by the author, serves as a great companion to the original.

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