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Between Muslim and Jew

The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Who Were the Jews?

PROBLEMS IN PROFILING THE JEWISH COMMUNITY UNDER EARLY ISLAM

The end of late antiquity is a period of Jewish history best known for being unknown. Salo Baron emphasizes the darkness of this terra incognita: "In the first three and one half dark and inarticulate centuries after the conclusion of the Talmud (500–850), Jewish intellectual leadership laid the foundations upon which the vocal and creative generations of the following three and one half centuries (850–1200) erected the magnificent structure of medieval Jewish biblical learning." S. D. Goitein likewise states unequivocally that "the centuries both preceding and following the rise of Islam are the most obscure in Jewish history." Not long ago, a leading specialist in this period presumed this problem once again: "We all know that the two hundred years that preceded the Arab conquest and the two hundred years that followed are among the most obscure in the history of the Jewish community in Palestine; very few historical documents of that period have reached us." And Leon Nemoy, the leading student of Islamicate Karaism, recently reiterated a point he has emphasized throughout his career: "This whole period of Jewish history [remains] dark and puzzling."

This darkest of all periods of postbiblical Jewish history occurred, however, at a turning point in the history of the Middle East. Henri Pirenne says: "The Middle Ages were ... beginning. The transitional phase was protracted. One may say that it lasted a whole century—from 650 to 750. It was during this period ... that the tradition of antiquity disappeared, while the new elements came to the surface." And Peter Brown adds, "The late seventh and early eighth century ... are the true turning points in the history of Europe and the Middle East."

At this extraordinarily important moment, blackout overcomes the history of the Jews. This fact is all the more remarkable when one recalls Jane Gerber's estimate that "between 85 and 90% of world Jewry lived in the Muslim world in the period from the eighth through the tenth century." To the extent, then, that so few datable Jewish sources survive from this period, the status of the Jews at this point remains perhaps the best-kept secret of Jewish history. What can we really know concerning the Jewish community at the end of antiquity?

I shall start with Jewish professions in the first two centuries of Islamic rule, working toward a profile of the Jewish community at die end of antiquity by first surveying the kinds of work undertaken by Jews of that time. After this rough assessment of the class structure of eighth-century Judaism, I shall then describe what may be called the crisis of mobility on the part of the Jewish leadership. My conclusions will concern the ways in which the end of Jewish antiquity was brought about by a "third power," beyond the Jewish laity and Jewish leadership. This power from outside was a Muslim caliph, whose manipulation of power struggles among the Jews ironically turned out to be something of a boon to the Jews.

The Jewish Professions

"Upper" Professions

Perhaps the most salient of the "upper" Jewish professions was long-distance trade. In part because the Jews were neither Muslims, Christians, Indians, Chinese, nor Slavs, they were particularly well suited to moving goods among these various peoples. Accordingly, Jewish merchants by the eighth century specialized in plying the trade routes between China, India, Russia, Persia, Western Europe, and their home bases in the Muslim world. The goods they traded included slaves, spices, and other luxury items. The skilled, capital-intensive, and lucrative nature of this vastly dispersed entreprise placed long-distance traders among the highest levels of the Jewish economic elite. Indeed, the traveling merchant eventually helped pave the way for the subsequent creation of an international banking system, for such a trader was uniquely situated to convey letters of credit (suftaja) from country to country.

But long-distance trade was not the only route to Jewish wealth. The Jews of the Banu Nadhir tribe, for example, controlled a palm-growing oasis in central Arabia, which was conquered by the Prophet Muhammad in the year 625. When Muhammad drove them from their home oasis, the Banu Nadhir Jews proudly paraded "their women decked out in litters wearing silk, brocade, velvet, and fine red and green silk. People lined up to gape at them. They passed by in a train one after the other, borne by 600 camels.... They went off beating tambourines and playing on pipes." The Jews of the Arabian oases also earned their livelihoods by selling wine and importing silk. One pre-Islamic Arabic poet evoked his desert landscape as multicolored, "just as if the Jews had extended their cloth of silk, their shimmering sashes." These and other Jews of central Arabia were economically powerful enough that Muhammad's earliest political maneuvers were at least in part designed to come to terms with these entrenched Jewish merchants and agriculturalists.

Jews in the seventh and eighth centuries also were active in the precious and not-so-precious metal businesses. When one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Colossus of Rhodes, was scrapped in the eighth century, the remains were sold to a Jewish scrap-metal dealer. The Jews in the oases around Muhammad's Mecca not only raised date palms but were celebrated goldsmiths. And at the turn of the eighth century a Jew was named to be the head of an Ummayad general's mint. This Jew, one Sumayr, was successful enough in this position of head mintcr that his coins were named sumariyya after him.

In the earliest years of new Islam, upper Jewish professionals gravitated to the caliphal centers of power, which provided pivotal points from which to further pursue their scattered economic interests. Jewish physicians, astrologers, poets, and, eventually, viziers attended the affairs at court, if not to the caliph himself. Perspicacious caliphs naturally took advantage of these readily available Jewish skills. For example, when the 'Abbasid dynasty overtook the Umayyads in 750, the new 'Abbasid regime decided to establish its capital city at Baghdad. The man appointed to plot out the city plan for this ideal city was a Jew, the celebrated physician and astrologer Mashallah, This Jewish scientist calculated that the day of the historic groundbreaking should be July 30, 762. Thus, from its vary inception, the 'Abbasid dynasty, who ruled from this capital of Baghdad for the succeeding five centuries, utilized Jews in positions of technical and cultural authority.

For the ambitious young Jew already in the eighth century, then, a position of influence at the center of the Muslim world-empire was not entirely an unrealistic aspiration. And, indeed, Jewish skills continuously were co-opted in the interests of the Islamic state. By the tenth century the role of the Jews in international banking and commerce, often at the behest of the caliph, expanded considerably. The tenth century, in the phrase of Goitcin, constituted "the golden age of the high bourgeoisie" for Jews as well as for Muslims.

The Jewish community eventually prospered, along with its neighbors, in what Goitein termed the "bourgeois revolution," engendered by the economic boom following in the wake of the Arab conquests. Certainly by the tenth century Jewish middle classes of Egypt and Mesopotamia enjoyed the pivotal advantage of powerful friends at court. But beneath these well-documented and overemphasized few success stories were squeezed a silent and apparently degraded Jewish majority.

Reviled Occupations

By the tenth century, the Jewish community had become a "religious democracy," with wealthy classes caring for the poor through efficient social services, as Goitein has shown from Geniza documents. My concern at this point, however, lies with the earlier, less organized situation. I therefore now turn to the neglected "lower" levels of Jewish life, with special reference to what (little) we know of the eighth and ninth centuries. Jewish court poets, town planners, caliphal astrologers, ambassadors, and monied courtiers of that day, I suggest, did not represent their people. Indeed, for however much evidence there may be concerning court Jews and their apparent influence, there is that much more proof that the Jewish masses were in a generally miserable condition.

This grim situation can best be illustrated by a look at die most frequently mentioned of all Jewish professions in the first centuries of Islamic rule. I refer to cloth-making—mere manual labor, which almost universally was considered to comprise the lowest level of society. It was assumed that mercantile activity possessed social status, while manual labor did not. Moreover, the social status of those engaged in laboring on cloth and fur—tanners, fullers, carders, weavers—was that of a despised underclass. And of workers engaged in the manufacture of cloth, the weavers were derogated as the lowest of them all.

This was an ancient prejudice. As early as the first century, Flavius Josephus describes the general Roman loathing for weavers. Rabbinic Jewish views were much the same: a passage from Tosefta designates weaving as "the lowest trade in the world." No wonder weaving has been deemed by one scholar as "the most despised profession in the East." And the prejudice against weavers common in other traditional societies seems particularly acute in the medieval Muslim social world.

It is striking, then, that garment work, with its derogatory implications, was associated widely with Jews in the first centuries of Islam. An Arabic essayist tells us that the Jews of the ninth century were dyers, tanners, cuppers, butchers, and tinkers. About the same time, a geographer notes that many of the Jews of Egypt and Syria were dyers and tanners. The most striking castigation derives from a source dated between the eighth and tenth centuries: In this source, an Arabic-speaking Christian reviles a Jew in this way: "As for you, God has replaced the status of his Son and his delight with malediction, wrath and exile; instead of Royalty, the job of weaver; instead of Prophet, the profession of tanner; instead of Priest, that of barber, potter, glassblower and other vile professions." And we find this image corroborated by another Eastern Christian, who asserted that "no Jew has been raised to a position of exalted honour ... [and] the humbler among them are engaged as tanners or dyers or tailors."

This depressing background should be kept in mind in order to comprehend the full pathos of the Jewish rebellions of the eighth century, for rebellious Jews are repeatedly associated with various kinds of cloth work. It is interesting to note that garment workers in particular have been perennially associated with something more than their low class standing. They were also—not inaccurately—held responsible for social agitations. The conjunction of cloth workers and rebellion is known outside the Muslim world. Jewish women working in die imperial Roman weaving establishment converted Christian women to Judaism. The Jewish women weavers accomplished this in such numbers that the disturbance required a special proviso in the Theodosian Code (398 C.E.) in order to allow converted women back into Christianity. Even in the Europe of the High Middle Ages, several millenarian peasant uprisings were instigated by semiskilled weavers and fullers.

Furthermore, more than one of the widely vilified eighth-century proto-Shi'i prophets was said to be a weaver. The medieval Muslim historian who reports this fact dryly comments "that this claim [to prophecy] should have been raised by diem in favor of a weaver is strange indeed!" And, certainly, these eighth-century Shi'i rebels propagandized on the effectively populist appeal of their own lower-class origins.

We should therefore not be surprised to find that contemporaneous Jewish rebels, closely associated with these originators of Shi'i Islam, seem to have appealed similarly to their underclass status in their uprisings. One of these Jewish rebels arose in Mesopotamia around the year 720. Around him gathered Jews who were "weavers, carpetmakers and launderers." Though his rebellion was quickly put down, others were soon to follow.

The greatest of all these Jewish cloth-worker revolutionaries—indeed, the most significant Jewish Messianic figure from Bar Cochba in the second century to Shabbetai Zevi in the seventeenth century—was Abu 'Isa al-Isfahani. A reliable source says that Abu 'Isa was "an ignorant tailor who could neither read nor write"—another lowly, illiterate cloth worker. Despite—or because of—his humble origins, his movement apparently was a mass movement. Indeed, Goitein argued that Abu 'Isa's movement, the 'Isawiyya, was at least symbolically responsible for the decline of Jewish village life starting in the second century of Muslim rule.

The way Maimonides tells this tragic story is instructive. He refers to "an exodus of a multitude of Jews, from the East beyond Isphahan, led by an individual who pretended to be the Messiah. They were accoutered with military equipment and drawn swords, and slew all those that encountered them." The caliph stops them by proving their leader to be a phoney and then bribing his followers to return home. When pacified, the "Caliph ordered them to make a special mark on their garments, the writing of the word cursed' and to attach one iron bar in the back and one in the front. Ever since then the communities of Khorasan and Ispahan have experienced the tribulations of the Diaspora." Goitein may have been correct to extrapolate that it may well be that the disappearance of Jewish village population in the Arab East was partly caused by the negative outcome of such Messianic upheavals."

Goitein's suggestion may be corroborated by two further indications of the serious extent of these movements. First, classical Muslim traditions have it that the Dajj al, the monstrous Antimessiah who will oppose the Messiah, "will emerge from Isfahan followed by 70,000 Jews wearing Persian shawls." Note the motif of Jewish cloth—but more importantly, note that this mythical terrible uprising of Jewish peasants is permanantly embodied in Muslim tradition as a sign of the end of time.

Christian tradition provides a second indication of the impact of the weaver rebels. Their widespread appeal made their way into a later Eastern Christian report: "A weaver wanted to be a prophet. The people told him, Never has there been a prophet who was a weaver. He, however, replied to them: Shepherds with all their simplicity have been employed as prophets, why should not weavers be fit for it?"

It is no surprise, of course, to find that underclasses revolt—all the more so, to be sure, in a society in which reviled occupations were so isolated and stigmatized. Nevertheless, it still seems extraordinary to realize that, in the first centuries of Islam, Jews filled so many of the occupations conveniently named by a Muslim author listing "professions that damn": blacksmith, butcher, conjurer, policeman, highwayman, police informer, night watchman, tanner, maker of wooden and leather pails, maker of women's shoes, burier of excrement, well digger, stoker of baths, felt maker, masseur, horse trader, weaver, ironsmith, pigeon racer, and chess player.

Extraordinarily, there were Jewish occupations even more reviled and undesirable than any of these. It was common enough, in fact, from ancient times through the decline of Muslim power, to use Jews for dirty work—not only the smelly and offensive work of tanning or foiling, but even more repulsive occupations. One of the worst of these was the universally loathed jailer. We already hear of Jewish jailers in sixth- and seventh-century Persia. Moreover, in the Babylonian Talmud (Taanit 22a) the prophet Elijah appears in a contemporary marketplace and declares that a man there has a share in the world to come. That man was a Jewish jailer.

Jews were used not only as jailers, but even as executioners. Middle Eastern rulers, in other words, utilized Jews for the very worst jobs for well over a millennium. In illustration, I have translated a description of such activities deriving from events in fifteenth-century Lebanon. On Wednesday night, the twenty-ninth day of the month of Shawwal, in the year 1462,

a slave and a black bondswoman conspired against their mistress at Tripoli. Her husband was away at the time and they murdered her ... A Jew was put in charge of their execution, as was their custom in that land, for whenever such a thing occurred they would call upon a Jew at random, whoever it might be. The Jew was then ordered to execute by whatever manner of punishment the criminal deserved, out of the apprehension that one of [the Muslim community] should have to do [that undesirable deed].

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Excerpted from Between Muslim and Jew by Steven M. Wasserstrom. Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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