IMAGInInG ThE “ISrAElITES” • 157like. the Jews did not bear this disgrace patiently but rather con-
spired against their enemies with various tricks for which there
is no space here.^80according to the al-Hilāl author, anti- Jewish persecution was (and re-
mained) a distinctly Christian and european phenomenon, one wholly
foreign to Islam. Overall the author is highly critical of Christian eu-
rope’s persecution of Jews, though his claim that it was “based on
charges that were mostly fabrications” suggests that, in his mind, per-
haps not all the accusations were unwarranted. While the author con-
tends that Jews were not altogether faultless in their relations with
european Christians, he interprets Jews’ “tricks” as a reaction to an-
tisemitism, not its cause— a stark contrast to rida’s perspective. For
this al-Hilāl author, the cure for antisemitism is not Islam— the journal
was, after all, edited by a Christian^81 — but “modern civilization” and
the “spirit of individual freedom.” Once these ideals reached parts of
europe in the modern period and Jews “were granted their civil and
personal rights and freedom of occupation,” they were able to achieve
success in many areas of public life, most prominently in finance. (With
this the author returns to the subject of his article, the rothschilds.^82 )
These two articles— the first in rida’s al-Manār and the second in
Zaydan’s al-Hilāl— are suggestive of a consensus spanning the spectrum
of Muslim and Christian fin de siècle Arabic writers on the fundamen-
tally superior treatment of Jews by Muslims than by Christians. (to
be sure, many Jewish writers of the period shared this view.^83 ) For an
article published in a journal edited by a Muslim, it is perhaps unsur-
prising that this view is expressed unabashedly. however, in a journal
edited by a Christian, this forthright statement of Islam as inherently
more tolerant than Christianity is remarkable.
Tolerance as a Quality of Islam or of Arabs?not every Christian- edited journal, however, was apparently satisfied
with the wholesale criticism of Christendom that was implied by this
comparison between the treatment of the Jews under Islam and those
under Christendom. Al-Muqtaṭafproposed a more nuanced stance on
the question. In “the Jews of France,” its 1913 article cited above, the
(^80) al-Hilāl (October 1906), 6.
(^81) though not only Christians wrote for or read al-Hilāl, this is not the forum in which
one would find explicitly proselytizing arguments on behalf of Islam.
(^82) al-Hilāl (October 1906), 6.
(^83) See chapter 3 and Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross.