I saw an article on the Gatestone Institute site, a book review, that is definitely going to push me into making a request for it at my local public library (it’s a bit too expensive for me to buy) not just so I can read it, but also to make it available to others as well. The book in question, ‘Exile In The Maghreb’ (ISBN-13: 978-1611477870) appears to be a thorough busting of the leftist lie that Jews lived in peace and safety in the Islamic world prior to the recreation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Here’s a little of what Gatestone said about this book.
Exile in the Maghreb, co-authored by the great historian David G. Littman and Paul B. Fenton, is an ambitious tome contradicting the myth of how breezy it was for Jews to live in their homelands in the Middle East and North Africa when they came under Muslim rule.
“Ever since the Middle Ages,” the book jarringly illustrates, “anti-Jewish persecution has been endemic to Muslim North Africa.”
Littman, before his untimely death from leukemia in 2012, had intended this book on the Maghreb to be the first in a series that would cover the social condition of the Jews of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and Turkey — an ambitious project that he was unable to tackle in its entirety.
The impetus for the book, which was first published in French in 2010 and in English in 2016, was to expose the misrepresentation by certain historians of the relations between the Jews of Morocco and Algeria and their Arab rulers. One such historian cited in the book was the French Orientalist, Claude Cahen, who dreamily wrote in his chapter on “Dhimma” in the Encylopaedia of Islam:
“There is nothing in medieval Islam which could specifically be called anti-Semitism… Islam has, in spite of many upsets, shown more toleration than Europe toward Jews who remained in Muslim lands.”
The original idea for the book — a massive collection of personal testimonies, photos and documents spanning ten centuries (from 997-1912) — came to Littman when he was on a humanitarian trip to Morocco in 1961. Littman noted:
“Following the independence of their country in 1956, the Jews of Morocco had begun to redefine their hopes regarding the future. Whereas new opportunities for them began to loom on the horizon, I was astonished to observe that the Moroccan Jews were making every possible effort to leave their native land to immigrate to the struggling young State of Israel or even to Europe, whose communities were still painfully recovering from the tragedies of World War II.”
In an article for the Jerusalem Post — entitled, “Exploding the myth of Moroccan tolerance” — Lyn Julius described an anti-Israel documentary by Al Jazeera that blamed the Mossad for “play[ing] a key role in convincing thousands of Moroccan Jews that they were in danger and covertly facilitated their departure” to the newly established state of Israel. Prior to that, according to the broadcast, “Jews first began to settle in Morocco over 2,000 years ago and for centuries they and Muslims have happily co-existed there.”
This book looks like it could be a timely, fact-filled antidote to a lot of the unadulterated bullshit that we in the West are fed on the subject of Islam’s relationship with other faiths. It may well blow apart the myth, and yes it is a myth, that there was a golden age when the descendants of Isaac and the descendants of Ishmael watered their sheep together. By hook or by crook I’m going to try to get this book as it may well provide me with intellectual ammunition to use not just against the naive secular Left, but also to those Leftists embedded within my own Jewish community who tell us that the path to peace and security requires that we should willingly lie down with that hungry crocodile named Islam. The reality of the world is sadly that there can be no peace with Islam and no watchfullness regarding it until Islam lays down its swords and its 1400 year old hatred for Jews and Judaism.
