Since the founding of Islam fourteen centuries ago, Jewish people and Muslims have lived together and interacted in both harmonious and adverse ways. Most scholars of Jewish history, Islam, and the Middle East perceive a much harsher life for Jewish people under Christian Europe than among Muslim societies where they experienced relative freedoms mixed with subservience.[1] These same scholars have mostly determined that Islamic antisemitism developed during the nineteenth century onward due to a variety of factors, including the flow of antisemitic ideas from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, major political shifts like European colonialism and Arab nationalism, the emergence of Zionism, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts. This mix then sparked violent resistance from modern Islamist movements who brought out the possible latent anti-Judaism of some of Islam’s foundational texts.[2]

The Narrative of Early Islam

The narrative of early Islamin the seventh century Arabian Peninsula describes a hostile relationship between Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and Jewish people; these accounts have been used, at times, throughout the centuries to foment hatred between Muslims and Jewish people. The story relays that, after a decade in Mecca, Muhammad and his followers moved his religious outreach to Medina in a religiously significant journey for Islam called the Hejira. Once there, Muhammad encountered three Jewish tribes—the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Qurayza, who were allies with the local Arab tribes[3] and who were deeply ensconced in society through commerce, agriculture, and weapon-making.[4] Following complex political conflicts, accusations of breaking pacts, and mostly rejecting Mohammed’s conversion efforts, these Jewish tribes were either exiled, brought into slavery, or killed. Consequently, some scholars attest that Muhammad altered some Jewish elements of the new Islamic religion, like praying toward Mecca instead of Jerusalem and observing the fast of Ramadan rather than the Day of Atonement. Scholars see the resulting effect of these founding stories as producing pejorative perceptions of the Jewish people in the Islamic worldview and its origin texts that continue to the present day.[5]

Nevertheless, scholars recognize Jewish-friendly verses in Islam’s early writings and maintain that those sporadic anti-Jewish texts of the Koran and Hadith (sayings)—portraying Jewish people as corrupt enemies of Allah, the prophet, and the angels, as well as distorters of their own Scriptures—remained somewhat dormant for centuries.[6] Political scientist and historian of antisemitism Matthias Küntzel and other scholars acknowledge anti-Jewish sentiments in the religious texts of the Koran, but claim they were not fully merged with antisemitic conspiracies, like that of Jewish world control or blood libels, until twelve centuries later. For Küntzel, Islamic antisemitism’s “essence is the fusion of Islamic anti-Judaism from the old scriptures [Koran] with modern European antisemitism – hence the combination of the worst Islamic and the worst Christian images of the Jews.”[7] Other scholars consider anti-Jewish sentiment as prevalent in Islam’s founding texts, which allowed Muslims to swiftly embrace European antisemitism.[8]

As Islam spread through Muslim conquests of vast territories (from the seventh through fifteenth centuries)—including today’s Middle East, North Africa, Iran, Spain, central and south Asia, and the Balkans—Jewish people (and Christians) were allowed religious freedoms but were also subject to certain legal and social restrictions. Jewish people were relegated to a protected, or dhimmi, status dependent on loyalty to their Muslim rulers, taxation, and various forms of subjugation. Yet Jewish communities who shared similar ritual purity and dietary laws with Muslims thrived in places like Syria, Palestine,[9] Egypt, and under the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain (eighth century). Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (often known as Maimonides), the notable Jewish philosopher and physician, exemplified a Jewish person living in Egypt under Muslim rule in the twelfth century who gained favor and a high position in the Muslim world. Sometimes Jewish people even sought refuge from Christians in Muslim lands, such as those within the Ottoman Empire, after being expelled from countries like Catholic Spain in the fifteenth century.[10]

At times however, Muslims in the pre-modern era turned violent against their Jewish subjects, like when they decreed the burning of synagogues in Egypt and Syria (11th-14th centuries), Iraq (9th and 14th centuries), and Yemen (17th century); imposed forced conversions in Yemen (12th and 17th centuries), Morocco (13th, 15th, 18th centuries), and Baghdad (14th century); and even incited pogroms in Fez, Morrocco, in 1033 or in Granada, Spain in 1066 where a group of Arabs crucified the Jewish vizier and razed the Jewish quarter, killing 5,000.[11] Yet, scholars regard these types of persecutions as rarer than those experienced by Jewish communities in Christian Europe and less based on the kind of racial hatred seen in modern times that led to the slaughtering of six million during the Holocaust of World War II.

A Turning Point for Muslim Antisemitism

Scholars view the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century as a critical turning point that created a storm of anti-Jewish sentiment and persecution in the Muslim world due to European influence and political developments. British and French colonialist activity in the region not only elicited a response from local inhabitants but also enabled the flow of European antisemitic ideologies to the Middle East, including that of ritual murder.[12] These ideas initially worked their way to Arab Christians in Syria through merchants and missionaries, and then eventually to Muslims.[13] One particular incident in Syria, the Damascus Affair of 1840, helped disseminate the blood libel mythology after the Jewish people were accused of kidnapping and murdering a Capuchin friar for Passover rituals.[14]

The flow of European literature also deeply stirred up anti-Jewish beliefs in Muslim societies, especially the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text about Jewish world domination that was written in France for the Russians. Arab nationalists in Iraq and Palestine in the 1920s quoted from it, and by 1925 it had been disseminated in Cairo, Egypt.[15] Its message, translated into Arabic, of an international Zionist-Jewish conspiracy spread wildly throughout the Muslim world within Arab media and literature.[16] Hitler’s racist manifesto, Mein Kampf, had also been translated into Arabic in 1935. During the twentieth century, Sayid Qutb—a Muslim writer from Egypt and member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s—wrote Our Struggle with the Jews, which brought together Islamic theology and Qutb’s negative perspective on contemporary relations with Jewish people.[17] Some scholars significantly attribute Islamist antisemitism to his work because he portrays Jewish people as the enemy of Islam with desires to destroy Islam’s holy sites.[18] European antisemitic literature with tropes of poisoning wells, ritual murder, and other conspiracies took on a religious Islamic bent in the Middle East according to Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis who asserted, “But to an astonishing degree, the ideas, the literature, even the crudest inventions of the Nazis and their predecessors have been internalized and Islamized.”[19]

The advent of the Zionist movement of the nineteenth century heightened hostilities between Arab Muslims and Jewish people. Zionism was based on the Jewish desire to return to the ancient biblical homeland from which Jewish people had been exiled, and on the urgency to escape European antisemitic environments. Tension between residents in the land and Jewish people centered first on property-related issues, but eventually also reflected antisemitic conspiracies about Jewish greed and control.[20] During Ottoman times, Jewish people—mostly Sephardic Jews who had returned to the land from the fifteenth century onward—balanced a peaceful coexistence with times of tension with their Muslim neighbors. Yet, Muslims felt threatened about their loss of power due the decline of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the growth of Zionism.[21] Muslims perceived Zionism as part of European colonialist efforts and as threatening Islam’s claims to the land, especially of Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque (which had been built on the site of the former Jewish Temples).

According to some scholars, Islamism (a political Islam that called for the merger of religion with government) was born out of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 as a means to address these threatening political developments in the region.[22] Through widely disseminated booklets like Islam and Jewry (1937), Islamists posited that Jewish people and Muslims had been in conflict since Islam’s foundation during Muhammad’s early interactions with them. Islamists also combined Quranic verses with antisemitic, even Nazi, ideology.[23] The Muslim Brotherhood met with Nazi officials who aimed to use the land conflicts to target Jewish people.[24]

A key anti-Zionist figure and ally of the Brotherhood who disseminated antisemitic propaganda to the Middle East was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (a cousin of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat). He collaborated with the Nazis in Germany and forcefully conveyed antisemitic propaganda to the Middle East, playing on Muslim sympathies against Western colonial powers. His goal was to prevent partition of the land and push the Jewish people out.[25] From 1939–1945, Nazis aided by al-Husseini broadcast antisemitic propaganda through radio into the Middle East, broadly reaching Muslims in the Arab world.[26] Persecution soon forced Jewish people to depart Arab lands after a series of pogroms in places like Baghdad in 1941, where almost 200 Jewish people were murdered, and in Tripoli, Libya beginning in 1945.[27] Jewish people in various North African countries were forced into ghettos that had been established since the fifteenth century.[28] The Muslim Brotherhood grew to one million by 1948 and was responsible for the widespread popularity of antisemitism.[29]

Despite growing Islamism, leftist Arab nationalism which was more secular in nature and was led by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was the predominant worldview over the Islamist movements, especially throughout the 1960s and 70s.[30] This pan-Arab nationalism, partly prompted by the humiliating defeats of the Arab-Israeli conflicts and anti-British colonialism, also inflamed anti-Israel sentiment.

British support for a Jewish homeland that began through the Balfour Declaration (1917) and continued in the United Nations Partition Plan (1947), Israel’s re-establishment in 1948, an ensuing Palestinian refugee crisis, and the first Arab-Israeli war fully concretized animosity between Muslims and Jewish people in the region and abroad. Peace initiatives involving a two-state solution have been attempted since then by various political leaders of Egypt and the United States, but have been mostly rejected by Palestinian leadership. The unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict has continued to brew and flare up, escalating into intifadas (terrorist uprisings) as well as the horrific violence of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis and abduction of 251 hostages on October 7, 2023. The ensuing war between Israel and Hamas has continued to fuel and merge antisemitic propaganda with anti-Zionist rhetoric to levels unseen globally, despite prior peace efforts like the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Scholars like Küntzelsee Islamic antisemitism engrained in the ideology of groups like Hamas and employed as a tool to prevent peace in the region: “Islamic antisemitism did not develop spontaneously but was invented and used as a means to an end.”[31]

Antisemitism Today in the Muslim World

Antisemitism among Muslims today is rampant. The Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 Index (2014, 2019) of antisemitic sentiments worldwide records an average score of 74 percent of individuals in Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa who endorse antisemitic statements, including the notion that Jewish people are responsible for world wars.[32] There are about 2 billion Muslims in the world today—over 25 percent of the world population—who make up a majority of the population in 53 countries and territories.[33] In comparison, the Jewish global population is about 15 million, or 0.2 percent of the world population.[34] Classic antisemitic tropes like outsized Jewish influence in American politics, combined with localized racist ideologies, are prevalent in countries like Iran and its proxy groups of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, as well as in Türkiye (Turkey).[35] The Iranian Regime after 1979 pushed a religious perspective onto the Palestinian conflict, believing the only solution lay in Israel’s eradication.[36] Today, the narrative of the Jewish people throughout the Middle East presents a history of the region that is devoid of Jewish people and continues with a narrative rich in Holocaust denial.[37]

Although there are differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims, there tends to be a shared creed of fighting colonialism, resistance to a common enemy (Israel and the West), and the acceptance and propagation of conspiracy theories about Jewish people. Islamist groups like Hamas perpetuate antisemitism in the Middle East.[38] Though the Muslim Brotherhood is much weaker today, Hamas’ religious ideology was born from it, which is evident in its foundational 1988 charter.[39] In that charter, Hamas rejects any two-state solution and aims for at a Palestine free of Jewish presence or at best Jewish subjugation to their rule.[40] The charter sees the land of Israel as Muslim land that must be guarded by resistance or holy war: “Palestine is an Islamic land . . . in face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.”[41] Scholars like Küntzel underscore that Hamas’ founding documents prove Hamas’ unwillingness to cooperate with Israel, the group’s desire for a Muslim theocracy, and the fusion of Islamism with a classical antisemitism similar to Hitler’s antisemitism.[42] According to former US diplomat Aaron David Miller, Hamas made a few changes to their renewed 2017 charter, including a provisional acceptance of a Palestinian state separate from Israel and an attempt to distinguish between the Jewish people and Israel, which it still calls a “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project.[43] Miller also claims the updated charter takes out some of the antisemitic language as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.[44] Yet, particularly since the Hamas attacks of October 7, the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish language of both charters have seeped into societies across the globe through pro-Palestinian organizations and Western naivete. Multiculturalism in the West has been quick to accept the propaganda that places Jewish people and Israel into an aggressor-versus-victim framework that glorifies Palestinians, marginalizes Jewish people and Israelis, and plays into antisemitic stereotypes of colonialists and ruling elites.[45] Muslim antisemitism has thus fully merged with today’s extreme form of anti-Zionism.

Christian Obligations

As the world, including Christians, interprets the events in Gaza and the Middle East, it is critical to learn the nuanced history of the antisemitism (combined with the political factors) that made its way to the Middle East and now affect and complicate Israel’s relations with its Muslim neighbors, especially the Palestinians. Some believers in Messiah hope for practical, although challenging, ways toward peace that would subdue Hamas and call for a reverse indoctrination process across many generations of Palestinians, and Muslims more broadly, regarding the Jewish people and Israel. Other Christians acknowledge that only the transformative nature of the gospel of Jesus can bring peace, revolutionize the centuries of Muslim hatred and end violence toward the Jewish people and the land of Israel.[46] The obligation of all Christians who call on the Jewish Messiah, Jesus, as their redeemer is continual prayer for Israel and the Jewish people against this longstanding anti-Jewish hatred. It is also vital for Christians to take action to counter the antisemitism that is couched in anti-Zionist ideology by publicly acknowledging the State of Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people (Genesis 12:7) and the locale of the Messiah’s return (Zechariah 14:4).