On Revisionism of Muslim/Arab Anti-Semitism

By Published On: October 20, 2008

In his review of the book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, Benny Morris discusses (among other things) the revisionist history that claims Jews in the Arab world were well-treated:

The story peddled by latter-day Arab propagandists (and reinforced by some Jewish scholars, who tended in decades past, sometimes for apologetic reasons of their own, to highlight the medieval “Golden Age” of Islamic Spanish Jewry)-that the Jewish minorities in the Muslim Arab countries before the advent of Zionism enjoyed a pleasant fraternal existence among the majority populations-has often been trotted out for the benefit of ignorant Westerners, to illustrate Muslim Arab tolerance of minorities and, politically, to promote plans for a multi-ethnic, one-state solution for Israel/Palestine.

It also has taken hold among Western intellectuals. …

But this construct, in Bostom’s view (and in my own), is wholly false.

The entire review can be read in The New Republic, here.

To read about AP’s revisionism on the treatment of Moroccan Jews, see here (and here). For BBC’s whitewash on Iraqi Jewish history (which was eventually improved after a formal complaint was filed by CAMERA) see here.

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