446 A History of Judaism
other Europeans, has been much complicated by perceptions of the role
of Israel in the Middle East conflict, where the Israeli state has often
been regarded unfavourably as a colonialist proxy of the United States.
Local hostility to the few Jews remaining in Arab countries after 1948,
when most fled to Israel to escape growing persecution, has also tended
to increase as the cause of the Palestinians has been widely adopted in
the Islamic world as a paradigm case of the violation of the Dar al- Islam
(the region of the world which should be governed by Islamic law).
From the Muslim perspective, the licit settlement of Jews as dhimmi, a
protected minority, within Islamic societies has been subverted by the
assertion of Jewish political power in a part of the world that by rights
should be ruled by Muslims. The rhetoric of such groups as the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt has resurrected anti- Jewish material from the
Koran and the earliest period of Islam, to create a novel, distinctive and
powerful form of Islamic antisemitism which paints a picture of the
Jews of Israel and the United States as a worldwide conspiracy, even
citing for this purpose the venerable literary forgery of The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, which had circulated (and been widely believed)
from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s in the European circles
which wished to blame Communism on the Jews.^9
The secular lives of the Jewish communities in which Judaism has
evolved over the past two centuries have thus themselves evolved out of
all recognition at the same time. Already in the early nineteenth century
it was possible for a Jew to attempt to abandon his or her Jewish iden-
tity in many European countries and to merge into the wider population.
This was indeed common in the deeply acculturated community in Ger-
many, in which many Jews identified with German culture and saw
conversion to Christianity as an attractive means to social advancement
(which in turn fuelled some of the shock at Nazi legislation which tar-
geted such converts as much as those who had remained within
Judaism). Other German Jews, starting with the philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn (see Chapter 17), rejected assimilation and instead
adapted the values of the Enlightenment to Jewish culture itself, insist-
ing on the importance of a secular education alongside the study of the
Talmud. The secular Jewish culture promoted by these maskilim,
‘enlightened ones’, over the nineteenth century in central and eastern
Europe took radically different forms, from romantic Hebrew poetry to
encouragement of manual labour in arts and craft work and a return to
nature, but they all had in common an insistence that the values of the
wider secular world were to be embraced rather than rejected.^10