One Thousand Years of Cultural Harmony between Judaism and Islam r 267Jewish identity was expressed as one which has a strong sense of belong-
ing to the Jewish people; an allegiance that is bound to their shared his-
tory. As one of them, Morris Hadad, said, “My father was a Jew, his father
was a Jew, my grandfather’s father was a Jew, so I am Jewish, too, and my
children and their children forevermore will be Jewish as well. We can’t do
anything about it. This is our destiny.”^25 The religious component of their
Jewish identity was described in a manner typical of the masortiym (tra-
ditionalists), Jews who keep the spirit and word of the commandments.
Hadad explained their approach: “Religion is meant to lishmor (to keep
and preserve) our Jewish identity. Tradition is the important thing and
not fanaticism.” Perhaps this strong sense of belonging, coupled with a
lack of fear of being converted, may explain the reason for the tremendous
influence that Arabo-Islamic culture had on these Jews in the past, as
well as in modern times. They acquired many of their customs and ideas
from this culture, in the most natural way, but at the same time they did
not have any sense of betraying their own identity and heritage as Jews.
For them, as they expressed it, blending with the Arabo-Islamic cultural
environment meant enhancing and intensifying their joy of life.
This coexistence, it appears, has its long and deep roots in ̔Abbasid
Baghdad of the mid-eighth century. The profound assimilation of the
“Islamicated Jews” of that time, as Stillman (1997, 86) calls them, who
adapted Islamic “mentalité et sensibilities,” never meant total assimilation.
“This simply could not occur in a traditional hierarchical society in which
religion was the hallmark of individual identity, the ultimate goal of in-
dividual concern, and the determinant of individual social and political
status.” It seems that Stillman’s observation of the past is equally relevant
more than a thousand years later. The main characteristics of the tradi-
tional and hierarchal society of the Babylonian Jews remained, in essence,
almost intact until the eve of their departure from Baghdad, and, to some
extent many of these characteristics still exist today.
Both the set of values and tastes that constitute the identity of the car-
riers of the PLS, as Jews by religion and Arabs by other aspects of their
culture, comprises, again, a combination of elements that might be under-
stood as contradictory. In this respect, all three components of the para-
liturgical realm are similar: the PLS, its poets across the centuries, and its
carriers all reflect, in their very nature, an innate coexistence between the
diverse elements existing in their cultural surroundings.
It is true, though, that this phenomenon can be found in other artistic