Defining Neighbors. Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter - Jonathan Marc Gribetz

230 • chapter 5

economics, anti- Jewish persecution,

and anti- Zionism

though the acquisition of wealth helped to preserve the Diasporic Jew-
ish communities, it also set the stage for the rise of antisemitism. the
Jews, Malul writes:

mostly worked in commerce and manufacture, but many paid at-

tention to agriculture as well, aside from those who went to the

sciences and the arts where they advanced ahead of their con-

temporaries. this caused envy among their contemporaries, who

exerted effort to attack them and to plant the seeds of slander and

groundless fabrications defaming them and their religion.^171

In these lines, Malul at once impugns antisemitism and anti- Judaism as
being driven by nothing more than base envy, while he also implicitly
defends the Jews against the accusation that they exclusively engage in
“unproductive” economic activities. the Jews are not involved merely
in commerce; they participate in manufacture, agriculture, sciences,
and arts as well. Indeed, as Malul sees it, it was particularly in the arts
and sciences that the Jews distinguished themselves (in other words,
not in commerce or banking).
In his text, Malul seeks to expose religious bigotry and persecution
of varied sorts and in numerous contexts. he focuses heavily on reli-
gious persecution committed by christians. in fact, he devotes fifteen
of the book’s sixty- four pages to enumerating the anti- Jewish policies
of the Spanish Inquisition, a period in which he was interested owing
in large measure, no doubt, to his own Sephardic heritage.^172 though
he concentrates most on the persecution suffered by Jews, Malul also
highlights periods in which Christians persecuted Muslims. In his dis-
cussion of the Crusades, for instance, he cites the alleged slaughter
of ten thousand Muslims perpetrated by Christians in Jerusalem.^173
however, he does not limit his discussion to discrimination carried
out by christians; he refers as well to the taxes levied on non- Muslims
in the Muslim umayyad state (the jizya and the kharāj). Moreover,
even in his passages about the violence perpetrated by Christians in
the course of the Crusades, Malul emphasizes that this “fanaticism”
was driven by the fact that the “Christians remembered the advance
of the Muslims and their oppression of them.”^174 In his conclusion,

(^171) Ibid., 26.
(^172) See ibid., 27– 41.
(^173) Ibid., 49.
(^174) Malul contends this twice. See ibid., 44, 46.