The emergence of Islam as a major western religion during the seventh cen-
tury C.E. fundamentally altered the political and cultural landscape of the
Jewish world. For much of world Jewry, the Islamic conquest brought a
reprieve from the harshness of Byzantine rule. In addition, the uniting of the
heretofore separate Jewish populations of Byzantium and Sassanid Persia
under a single Islamic ruler would prove critical in the emergence of
Rabbinic Judaism for the first time as the normative Judaism for most of the
Jewish world.
Furthermore, by the end of the eight century the influence of Islamic cul-
ture on Jewish culture, reminiscent of the impact of Hellenism a millennium
earlier, would expand the cultural and intellectual boundaries of Judaism to
include the philosophical tradition of the ancient Greeks, refashioning the
archetypical Jewish scholar as a master of rabbinic text and Greek wisdom. As
with earlier encounters between Judaism and non-Jewish cultures, the
encounter with Islamic culture would engender the emergence of two rival
traditions claiming to be the one authentic and legitimate Judaism: Rabbinic
Judaism and Karaism. Karaism would pose the greatest challenge to
Rabbinic Judaism, and be the focal point of rabbinic efforts to establish
Rabbinic Judaism as normative Judaism.
Historians have disagreed in assessing the favorable and deleterious aspects
of Jewish life under Islam. In response to a long-time prevailing assumption
that the Jews of Islam fared better, on the whole, than Jews under
Christendom, several historians asserted that the Jewish experience under
Islam amounted to little else than 1,300 years of uninterrupted adversity and
persecution. This point of view, labeled by its detractors as a “neo-lachrymose”
view of Islamic Jewish history, in reference to an older “lachrymose view” of
endless Jewish suffering in the Christian world (to be discussed in the next
chapter), presumes above all that Qur’anic doctrine exerted a decisive and
overarching influence on Islamic policy and popular attitudes toward Jews,
and that the disparaging view of Jews expressed in the Qur’an translated
directly into the political and social status of Jews. This claim has recently
Chapter 4