The historical mistreatment of Jews under Arab/Muslim rule

Jews living in Arab/Moslem lands were officially second class citizens, century after century, having to yield the sidewalk to Muslims, unable to testify in court (which makes it difficult to defend yourself from false accusations), often not allowed to build/repair synagogues (which in any case couldn't be as grand as the neighboring mosques) and subject to pogroms.

Albert Memmi, a Tunisian-born author and political theorist, writes: "Never, except for two or three eras with very clear boundaries in time, such as the Andalusian period ...have the Jews lived in the Arab countries otherwise than as a diminished people in an exposed position, periodically overcome and massacred."

For example, decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt & Syria (1014, 1293, 1301), Iraq (854, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Forced conversions (or death) in Morocco (1275, 1465, 1790) and Baghdad (1333, 1344). Even massacres (5000 Jews in Grenada in 1066, all but 11 Jews in Fez in 1465), Libya (1785), Algiers (1805, 1815, 1830) and Morocco (1864 and 1880).


http://www.nitle.org/arabworld/texts.php?module_id=6&reading_id=54

| As the nineteenth century began... Jews had to bear the burden of social isolation, inferiority, and general opprobrium. Over the preceding four centuries, they had become increasingly confined into overcrowded ghetto-like quarters, which were called by a variety of names throughout the Muslim world (for example, Mellah, Harat al-Yahud, and Mahallat al-Yahud ). European travelers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were unanimous in their reports of the overall debasement of the Jews living in the Islamic lands. The Italian Jewish poet and traveler Samuel Romanelli, who spent four years among his coreligionists in Morocco in the late eighteenth century, described them as "oppressed, miserable creatures, having neither the mouth to answer an Arab, nor the cheek to raise their head." 3 And the Englishman Edward William Lane, who lived in Cairo during the 1820s and 1830s and was a keen and sympathetic observer of native life, depicted the Jews of Egypt as being "held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by Muslims in general." 4 He also noted that the condition of the Jewish lower class was wretched and that many in this group depended on alms. 5

Even in the Holy Land, the Jewish homeland, the fate of the Jews under foreign Arab/Muslim rulers was no better:

The Jerusalem Jews were bitterly and mercilessly persecuted during the 17th century reign of an Arab ruler Ibn Barouk who bought the rule from Murad IV. In 1660 the entire Jewish community was massacred by Arabs with only one survivor.

Little is known by Arabs as to why Ahmad Basha El-Jazzar (The Butcher) held this name, his sadistic wanton exploits became legend during the 1800s, who was known to travel accompanied by an executioner. When The Butcher encountered a subject who was adjudged to be misbehaving, "The criminal bowed his neck, the executioner struck, and the head fell" (DeHass). Hayim Farhi, the only Jew who has risen to power in the area was imprisoned by The Butcher, cutting off his nose, ear, and gouging out his eye. The Jews were at the bottom of the heap of peoples in status who had to pay to pray on the Wailing Wall, protection money was always collected against destruction and vandalism of the Jewish burial grounds, and to prevent molestation of Jewish travelers.

In the 1830s havoc was created during the Egyptian reign of Palestine, and the Jews were persecuted brutally throughout the country. In 1834 the inhabitants of Eastern Palestine crossed the Jordan River to join natives of Nablus, Hebron, and Bethlehem, 40,000 of them rushed on Jerusalem and looted the city for 5 days where the Jews had their homes sacked and their women raped. (DeHass, History, vol V, p.393).

The Jewish story in Palestine was like the story of a rape victim, blamed for being there at the time. Between 1848 - 1878 scores of incidents involving anti-Jewish violence, persecution, and extortions filled page after page of documented reports from the British Consulate in Jerusalem.

Throughout the 19th century Jews were victims of mass hunger and of Arab attacks. The 1929 Arab riots resulted in the rape and massacre of most of Hebron's Jewish community.

All this long before 1948.