Why do Muslims persecute Jews?

Answer 1

Answer 1

The Muslims don't persecute Jews or people belonging to any other religion unless they conspire against the Muslims or persecute them. The Jews had been,unfortunately, conspiring against many nations who in response persecuted them. Hitler was not a Muslim. He was a Christian. Many Roman and Christian Kings persecuted the Jews for their real or supposed faults. At present it is the Jews of Israel who persecute the Muslims and kill them ruthlessly.

Answer 2

This is a complex question and it depends on who you ask. Contrary to Answer 1, we cannot accept the claim that the persecution that Jews brought the persecution upon themselves by persecuting others. From 135 B.C.E. until 1948 C.E., Jews did not have the political power or clout to persecute others with local exceptions of Yemen in the 6th century and Khazaria in the 10th century. The persecution of Jews in both Christian, Islamic, Zoroastrian, Ultra-Secularist, and Shenist Societies is entirely the burden of those societies to bear since those groups were in power. (Uniquely, Hindu-led societies have been the only ones to both have a Jewish minority and to have never engaged in any act of persecution prior to 1948.) The act of blaming the persecuted for their persecution is a deeply insensitive and racist-derived rationale.

It is also worth noting that before going into this that not all Muslims believe this way, especially today when Muslims are increasingly liberalizing their views of the Other.

However, concerning Islamic societies, there are several reasons why different Islamic regimes discriminated against Jews and persecuted them:

1) Qur'anic Inspired Inequalities: While Muslims may interpret the Qur'an differently in this day and age, the historic reading of the Qur'an was to relegate all Non-Muslims in Islamic Society (including Jews) as second-class citizens and compel them to pay special taxes for the right to continue in their unique religions. While this system was very progressive and tolerant for its time, if such a system were to be implemented today, it would be considered apartheid. Like all apartheid or segregationist systems, this system promoted a sense of Muslim superiority. This led to numerous laws further buttressing this inequality between Muslims and Non-Muslims such as: unequal values of testimony in courts, bans on military enlistment, bans on government participation (except in the financial ministries), unequal compensation in terms of blood money (which is how much a family would be compensated for the murder of one of their members), requirements on living areas, requirements to dress in certain ways, etc.

The above issues are discriminatory, but do not rise to the level of persecution. The persecution would come during times of strife, financial difficulty, or war with another Islamic State when the Muslims who had been trained by this system to believe themselves superior targeted their Jewish populations and committed pogroms against them to gain their assets and offset those that they had lost. Correspondingly, since the persecution was not state policy (as opposed to Christendom, where it often was), these pogroms were rare but notable.

2) Islamic Judenhass (Jew Hatred): In addition to how the Islamic tradition promoted legal and civil inequality, there was a strong Muslim current of Judenhass that was derived both from a simple reading of certain Anti-Jewish Qur'anic verses and from the tortured relationship between Mohammed and the Muslims on the one hand and the Medinan Jewish Tribes on the other. In most cases, while the Judenhass was common, it was not often acted upon. However, there were fundamentalist Islamic States, such as the Almohad Dynasty in Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Spain which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews and justified it by resorting to Judenhass rhetoric within Islam. More recently, Islamic Judenhass has been infused with historic European Judenhass. The first Arab-World-Blood-Libel occurred in 1840 in Damascus and is still discussed as a true event on Arabic language television. Egypt recently made a television series on the Russian forgery called the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as if this strongly Anti-Jewish document were true.

3) Anti-Zionism: The ancestral strains of Judenhass in the Islamic thought and practice were reignited by the Jewish attempt to create a country in what had previously been a Muslim-majority region. The creation of Israel and the inequality between Jews and Muslims in certain aspects of the Israeli State as well as the repression of the Palestinians in the Palestinian Territories creates additional Judenhass in Islamic countries. This corresponded with the Arab countries' forcibly expelling their own Jewish population out of fear that they would rise as a fifth column in Israel's defense. The resulting lack of Jews in the Islamic World (the biggest population now is 17,000 in Turkey compared with 280,000 in Morocco in 1940) has the effect of increasing Judenhass since Muslims cannot make grow up with Jews and humanize them.

4) Islamic Government Propoganda: For both Secularists and Islamists in Islamic Societies, it is much easier to blame and persecute Jews for their problems than to actually deal with the root causes of: bad education, bad civil society, lack of infrastructure, etc. Therefore, they openly assist in the propogation of Judenhass both through literature and television. Since the governments now have the power to persecute, they will occasionally exercise it.