Remembrance and Oblivion of Religious Persecutions: On Sanctifying the Name of God (Qiddush ha-Shem) in Christian and Islamic Countries during the Middle Ages* Menahem Ben-Sasson Qiddush ha-shem—self-sacrifice for the holiness of the God of Israel and his law—is a commandment whose purpose is to glorify the name of God publicly, to the point of willingness, under certain circumstances, to sacrifice one’s life. In Jewish law and morality, qiddush ha-shem should be performed with maximum devotion in the presence of witnesses. The more public the act, the more valuable it becomes: declaring the unity of God and devotion to him is not worthy of being called qiddush ha-shem unless the declaration is made in the presence of others, be they Jews or adherents of other faiths; following Jewish law out of mere habit does not meet the special level of intent required for qiddush ha-shem. Proper qiddush ha-shem entails acting beyond the letter of the law. In daily life, it requires patterns of behavior that arouse public attention, even if the believer performs those acts in secret; in death, when the believer is offered the choice between accepting a different faith and dying, it is likewise an act that is both public and all-encompassing.1 This chapter explains the behavior of converts under duress and perceptions of this behavior in collective memory. The chapter focuses on the Jews of Islamic countries, with a brief look at the experiences of forced converts in * An earlier version of this article appeared as Menahem Ben-Sasson, “Memory and Forgetfulness of Religious Persecutions: A Comparative View” [Hebrew], in From Sages to Savants: Studies Presented to Avraham Grossman, ed. Joseph R. Hacker, Yosef Kaplan, and B. Z. Kedar (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2010), 47–72. 1 On the place of prayer among those coerced by the Almohads, see Ben-Sasson, “The Prayer of the Anusim” [Hebrew], in Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel, ed. Isaiah Gafni and Aviezer Ravitzky (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1992), 153n1. For further discussion of the rabbinic infrastructure, see E. E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew], 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 1:351–60, and for a different characterization, see David Hartman, Crisis and Leadership: Epistles of Maimonides (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 41–50. 170 ben-sasson other regions.2 For this purpose, we shall outline the main approaches used to understand self-sacrifice and qiddush ha-shem as well as more general ways to understand relations between minority Jewish communities and majority society and the behavior of Jewish communities in times of crisis. Major Approaches The scholarly consensus distinguishes between Jews in Islamic countries who, forced to choose between conversion and death, are generally said to have chosen to convert, and Jews in Christian countries, who are believed to have chosen martyrdom.3 The assumption has been that the commitment to a single body of Jewish law and a single literary tradition created the expectation that 2 See Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts: A Study of Forced Conversion in the Almohad Period” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 42 (1989): 16–37; Haym Soloveitchik, “Iggeret Ha-Shemad: Law and Rhetoric,” in Rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein Memorial Volume, ed. L. Landman (New York: Ktav, 1980), 281–319; Aryeh Strikovsky, “Iggeret ha-shemad le-Rambam: Halakha o retoriqa?” in Sefer ha-yovel minḥa le-ʾish: qoveṣ ma⁠ʾamarim mugash le-ha-Rav Avraham Yeshaʿyahu Dolgin, ed. Itamar Warhaftig (Jerusalem: Bet Kenesset Bet Yaʿaqov Ramot Eshkol, 1990), 242–75. 3 See Avraham Grossman, “Martyrdom in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Between Ashkenaz and the Muslim World” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 75 (1997): 27–46; idem, “The Social and Cultural Background of Jewish Martyrdom in 1096” [Hebrew], in Facing the Cross: The Persecutions of 1096 in History and Historiography, ed. Yom Tov Assis, et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 55–73; idem, “The Sources of Kiddush Hashem in Early Ashkenaz” [Hebrew], in Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom, ed. Gafni and Ravitzky, 99–130; Israel M. Ta-Shma, “Suicide and Murder for the Sake of Qiddush ha-Shem: On the Place of Aggadah in the Ashkenazi Legal Tradition” [Hebrew], in Facing the Cross, ed. Assis, 150–56; Soloveitchik, “Religious Law and Change: The Medieval Ashkenazic Example,” AJS Review 12 (1987): 205–21; idem, “Halakha, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 (2004): 77–108, 278–99. On the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, by themselves and in comparison with persecution during the First Crusade, see Abraham Gross, “On the Ashkenazi Syndrome of Martyrdom in Portugal in 1497” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 64 (1994): 83–114; Ram Ben-Shalom, “Kidush ha-Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391: Between Spain and Ashkenaz” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 70 (2001): 227–82; Gross, “Conversions and Martyrdom in Spain in 1391: A Reassessment of Ram Ben-Shalom” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 71 (2002): 269–79; Ben-Shalom, “Jewish Martyrdom and Conversion in Sepharad and Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages: An Assessment of the Reassessment” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 71 (2001): 279–300; Kenneth Stow, “Apostasy and Apprehensiveness: Emicho of Flonheim and the Fear of the Jews in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 76 (2001): 911–33; Jeremy Cohen, “A 1096 Complex? Constructing the First Crusade in Jewish Historical Memory, Medieval and Modern,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 171 there was one legitimate response to forced conversion—qiddush ha-shem in death—but that the external circumstances in which Jews found themselves caused the Jews in Muslim-ruled lands to make a choice that differed from these idealized expectations. Scholarship has taken four major approaches to explaining those differences: an empirical approach, a tradition-based approach, a legal-religious approach, and a social-historical approach. The Empirical Approach “Empirical” distinctions are the first refuge of historians faced with variety and difference where they expect to find unity. These historians claim that Jews in Islamic countries did not face the firm and absolute forced conversion that the Jews of the Rhineland faced during the Crusades, since duress in Islamic countries was partial, exerted upon only certain members of the community, and only for a short period of time. Therefore, the conversion of many seems understandable, since they saw reasonable alternatives to Jewish life before them. There were indeed some differences among cases of coercion, and these differences are not sufficiently emphasized in work comparing persecutions. There are differences between coercion during violent attacks on Jewish communities (as occurred in the Crusades) and coercion stemming from royal decrees and preceded by negotiation, as was the case in some cities in Morocco in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But these differences do not explain everything, since some of the religious persecutions that took place in Islamic countries seem to have taken place during violent persecutions, and their descriptions resemble those of the Crusade attacks in Ashkenaz. Those who claim that the extent of the persecutions in Islamic countries was not as great as that in Christian countries have not considered the effects of Muslim messianic phenomena of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as the Almohad persecutions in some cities at the beginning of their conquests, the persecutions of the caliph al-Ḥākim in Egypt, and the first conversion order in Yemen (around 1172).4 Press, 2001): 9–26; idem, “Between Martyrdom and Apostasy: Doubt and Self-Definition in Twelfth Century Ashkenaz,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999): 431–71. 4 On the events under al-Ḥākim, see Ben-Sasson, “Geniza Evidence on the Events of 1019–1020 in Damascus and Cairo” [Hebrew], in Masʾat Moshe: Studies in Jewish and Islamic Culture Presented to Moshe Gil, ed. Ezra Fleischer, Mordechai A. Friedman, and Joel Kraemer (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1998), 103–23. 172 ben-sasson The Tradition-Based Approach In recent years, most research has taken a tradition-based approach, explaining differences in attitudes toward qiddush ha-shem through behavior patterns prior to the religious persecutions, differences that ultimately stemmed from the spiritual legacy of the Jews of Islam in the Babylonian Jewish tradition and those of Ashkenaz in the Palestinian Jewish tradition, whether those were differences in literary tradition, in messianic conceptions, or in halakhic prescription.5 Given the absence of clear halakhic sources in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds regarding the requirements to kill oneself or one’s relatives in times of religious persecution, we are left, according to this approach, with midrashic and narrative sources for the actions of Jews under Christian rule, while in Islamic countries, gaonic interpretation blocked this path, as it refuted the validity of aggadic sources in this context, especially those that clearly marked the path toward active qiddush ha-shem. According to this approach, the Book of Josippon, which came down to us in a version composed in Italy, brought the Palestinian Jewish ideals of martyrdom to Ashkenazi Jews, who then adopted them in practice. The martyrs of Yodfat, Jerusalem, and Masada were seen as precursors to the Jews of Ashkenaz. As evidence, this approach cites the concept of the Great Heavenly Light (ha-or ha-gadol) in the speeches preceding acts of suicide in the Book of Josippon, which is also found in the story of the First Crusade persecutions of 1096. Since the Book of Josippon was considered the literary heritage of both Ashkenazi and Italian Jews, its contents were assumed to have inspired both communities.6 But this work was no less widely transmitted among Jews in Islamic lands, a fact evidenced by the 5 Gerson D. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” in idem, Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 271–97; Elisheva Carlebach, Between History and Hope: Jewish Messianism in Ashkenaz and Sepharad, Third Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History (New York: Touro College, 1998). On the need to moderate the polarizing division between the Palestinian and Babylonian heritages, see Grossman, “Ties Between Ashkenazi Jewry and the Jewry in Eretz Israel in the Eleventh Century” [Hebrew], Shalem 3 (1981): 57–92; idem, “On the Relationship of the Early Jewish Community of Ashkenaz to Eretz Israel” [Hebrew], Zion 47 (1982), 192–97. 6 On the links between Josippon and the story of the First Crusade persecutions of 1096, see Yitzhak Baer, Studies in the History of the Jewish People, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Israeli Historical Society, 1985), 2:101–27 (114–21 in particular), 147–61; David Flusser, “The Author of the Book of Josiphon: His Personality and His Age” [Hebrew], Zion 18 (1953): 109–26; Grossman, “Martyrdom in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” 42–44; idem, “The Social and Cultural Background of Jewish Martyrdom in 1096,” 67–70. Recently, a closer reading of Josippon has been suggested, disconnecting the acts of members of Ashkenazi communities during remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 173 survival of many manuscripts inside and outside the Geniza, in both Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic, some very early and close to the date of composition, as well as its presence in book lists and its occasional use as a framework for the retelling of certain chapters of Jewish history. The Scroll of Antiochus also had special status among the Jews of Islamic countries.7 Those who take the tradition-based approach further stress aggadic traditions of martyrdom that originated in the land of Israel and seeped into Ashkenazi traditions. But the older tales of martyrs in Ashkenazi traditions are similar to those in the traditions of Jews in Islamic countries, where they were copied, adapted to eastern Jewish vernaculars, and studied; they also served as the inspiration for liturgical poems. The Geniza has also preserved texts that are two loci classici of martyrdom in the face of persecution: the stories of Daniel in the lion’s den and of Hannah and her seven sons.8 The educational infrastructure of Jews in Islamic countries was pervaded by stories from the traditions of the land of Israel; these stories were not to be found solely in Ashkenazi communities. A further tradition-based distinction has been suggested: expectations for the final redemption. According to this approach, Jews in Islamic countries wait for “proselytizing redemption,” while those in Christian countries seek “vindictive redemption.” But the literary heritage of each community is similar in this case as well: one who wishes to elaborate on the apocalyptic the Crusades from traditions concerning the persecutions of 1096: Soloveitchik, “Halakha, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz,” 279–86. 7 See Shulamit Sela, The Arabic Josippon [Hebrew], 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2009). A research group on the survival of literary sources in the Cairo Geniza at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered to our surprise that the Book of Josippon was the most widely transmitted historical composition in the medieval Jewish library, both in Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic. See Sela, The Arabic Josippon, and Nehemiah Alony, The Jewish Library in the Middle Ages: Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah [Hebrew], ed. Miriam Frenkel and Haggai Ben-Shammai, with the participation of Moshe Sokolow (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2006). On the Scroll of Antiochus in Christian Iberia, see Ben-Shalom, “Kidush ha-Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391,” 257n134. 8 For Hannah and her seven sons, see bGit 77b; Rav Nissim Ga⁠ʾon, Libelli Quinque: Opera Reliquias Recensuit Praefatonibus Notis et Indicibus Instruxit [Hebrew], ed. Shraga Abramson (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1965), 366–70; Rabbenu Nissim ben Yaʿaqov me-Qayrawān, Ḥibbur yafe me-ha-yeshuʿa, ed. Ḥayyim Ṣevi Hirschberg (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1954), 14–17. 174 ben-sasson traditions of Jews in Islamic countries can find there, too, depictions of vengeance on the Jews’ persecutors at the end of days.9 There are, then, more similarities than differences between eastern and western Jewish literary traditions; they are based upon a single literary heritage, in which Babylonian traditions became dominant in everything concerning the acts of martyrs and qiddush ha-shem. Any difference that can be detected between the two groups’ behavior does not, then, lie in their respective literary heritages. The Legal-Religious Approach The legal-religious approach is the most dominant one in discussions of the behavior of Jewish communities. Scholars who take this approach emphasize institutionalized legal differences between Christianity and Islam, or else view the acts of Jewish minorities as reflecting the larger society’s values and patterns of behavior. For example, the centrality of martyrologies in Christianity helps explain Jewish martyrdom in Christian countries, while the legal concept of taqiyya (caution and religious dissimulation in times of persecution) in Islam, and in Shīʿī Islam in particular, helps explain the behavior of Jewish communities in Islamic lands.10 This approach must take into account the central role that passive martyrdom plays in Islam. There exists no status higher in the world to come than that of shahīd, and the lack of opportunities to die a martyr’s death in times of peace troubled many Muslim theologians and jurists.11 But had these ideas passed from the majority society to the Jews, one would expect the latter to have seized every “opportunity” before them to achieve the status of shahīd 9 10 11 Israel Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations” [Hebrew], Zion 58 (1993): 33–90; Ben-Shalom, “Kidush ha-Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391,” 236–37, 246–48, 264–67; idem, “Jewish Martyrdom and Conversion in Sepharad and Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages,” 284–86, 260–62; for similar aspects of apocalyptic literature from Islamic countries, see Dan Shapira, “Qiṣṣa-ye Dāniyāl or ‘The Story of Daniel’ in Judaeo-Persian: The Text and Its Translation” [Hebrew], Sefunot 7 (1999): 337–66 (paragraphs 23–53 in particular). Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 82–84; Soloveitchik, “Between Islam and Christendom” [Hebrew], in Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom, ed. Gafni and Ravitzky, 149–52; Grossman, “Martyrdom in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” 29–30; Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 175–77; Ben-Shalom, “Kidush ha-Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391,” 251–53, 275–77. Etan Kohlberg, “Martyrdom and Self-Sacrifice in Classical Islam” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 75 (1998): 5–26. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 175 and to prove thereby that Israel can withstand the test of faith, as Yehuda haLevi enjoined in the Kitāb al-khazarī (The Kuzari).12 There were also important differences in the formal legal status of Jews in Christian and Islamic countries. Jews were defined as a tolerated minority in Christian countries, while in Islamic countries they were granted legal protection. It is true that acts of forced conversion came in times when the political authorities offering protection were themselves subject to instability; but the basic assumption of security was greater in Islamic than in Christian lands: under Christianity, Jews expected there to be times of patronage followed by times of harassment and humiliation, while in Islamic countries they expected security and full protection, and the continued renewal of this status. For that reason alone, waiting until the persecution had passed could have proven worthwhile and brought rewards in this world, rather than the next.13 The legal approach to converts who reverted to Judaism in both regions also differed. In principle, neither Christianity nor Islam recognizes as legitimate conversions under duress; yet, in the Christian world (both the Visigothic and the European spheres, as opposed to Byzantium), returning to Judaism in cases of mass conversion was strictly forbidden. One exception was the permission granted to the Jews by Henry IV allowing them to return to Judaism after the First Crusade. In the Islamic world, however, jurists set a precedent, following Qurʾān 2:256, that there was no compulsion in religion and that in the case of forced conversion, Jews could return to Judaism. According to this scholarly approach, these precedents were known to people in the Middle Ages and may have provided hope in the dark days of persecution: awareness of the simple procedure for returning to one’s religion could have served as a catalyst to conversion in times of duress.14 But had this expectation really shaped the acts 12 13 14 Yehuda ha-Levi, Kitāb al-radd wa-l-dalīl fī l-dīn al-dhalīl, ed. David Z. Baneth and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1977), 4:22; see additional discussion in BenShalom, “Kidush ha-Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391,” 255–56; David Berger, “Jacob Katz on Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages,” in The Pride of Jacob: Essays on Jacob Katz and His Work, ed. Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 50–52, 59–61. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 52–136; S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jews of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–93), 2:299–304, 5:59–61; Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts.” Regarding permission to return to Judaism, see ibid., 21n9. On the prohibition of forced conversion, see Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8–10. On the prohibition of returning to Judaism in Christian countries and on the exception under Henry IV, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, “Germany, 843–1096,” in The Dark Ages: Jews in 176 ben-sasson of those performing qiddush ha-shem, the permission granted by Henry IV should have brought about an increased willingness to convert in Ashkenaz after the first wave of the Crusades, but in fact the opposite occurred: precisely in these regions, one finds documented cases of active qiddush ha-shem.15 Another legal difference relates to how Jewish law regards the respective acts of conversion to Christianity and Islam. Conversion to Christianity involved baptism and participation in the sacraments, while conversion to Islam involved only a verbal utterance, the shahāda (declaration of faith).16 But all this assumes that people performed qiddush ha-shem according to the injunctions set out by Jewish law. In fact, behavior patterns were problematic in halakhic terms, especially in Ashkenaz. Cases of active deeds of qiddush hashem—the voluntary acts of Ashkenzai Jews who sacrificed themselves and their children—posed a severe dilemma for Jewish legists, as they have for modern researchers.17 In Islamic countries, on the other hand, the halakhic definition of qiddush ha-shem dictates that in times of religious persecution (such as those the Jews experienced in Egypt, Yemen and the Maghrib), one should take one’s own life for even less than an order to convert to Islam.18 Scholars who take this approach also point out the difference in the general halakhic attitudes toward Christianity and Islam. Christianity was considered idolatrous and discussed in halakhic works under the rubric of idolatry. 15 16 17 18 Christian Europe, 711–1096, ed. Cecil Roth (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 99–101; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 87–90. On the permission to return to Judaism in Islamic lands, see Yaacov Lev, “Conversion and Converts in Medieval Egypt” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 42 (1990): 76–82; idem, “Persecutions and Conversion to Islam in Eleventh Century Egypt,” Asian and African Studies 22 (1998): 73–91; Michael Grevers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi, eds., Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990); Mercedes García-Arenal, “Jewish Converts to Islam in the Muslim West,” Israel Oriental Studies 17 (1997): 227–48. Cf. Sarah Stroumsa, “On Jewish Intellectual Converts to Islam in the Early Middle Ages” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 42 (1990): 61–75. Shmuel Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 215–30; idem, “To Die for God; Martyrs’ Heaven in Hebrew and Latin Crusade Narratives,” Speculum 77 (2002): 311–14; idem, “Death Twice Over: Dualism of Metaphor and Realia in 12th-Century Hebrew Crusading Accounts,” Jewish Quarterly Review 93 (2002): 217–56. Grossman, “Martyrdom in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” 36–38. Maimonides had already defined this in his epistle on martyrdom; see Isaac Shailat, Letters and Essays of Moses Maimonides, Hebrew, 2 vols. (Maʿale Adumim: Maʿaliyot, 1988), 43–44. This matter was discussed at length by Grossman, Soloveitchik, and Ta-Shma (see note 3 above), and they are unanimous that the act is problematic in halakhic terms. Soloveitchik, “Between Islam and Christendom” and the additional references in note 3. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 177 Islam, by contrast, was defined as a monotheistic religion, and its believers were never considered idol worshipers.19 This distinction held in times of peace and for the day-to-day issues that accompanied them; in times of duress and religious persecution, different precepts held, and those demanded, at the very least, passive death in the service of qiddush ha-shem.20 Therefore, even if there are fewer narratives about Jews in Islamic countries dying in the service of qiddush ha-shem, the talmudic passages and their discussions in gaonic halakhic literature compel dying for qiddush ha-shem, and those would have remained binding. The burden of proof, then, is on those who take the legal-religious approach and expect Jews’ commitment to the formal, written requirements of the halakha to explain not why Jews in Islamic countries did not sacrifice themselves and their relatives, but rather why they did not agree to be killed by their oppressors in the name of qiddush ha-shem, as the halakha dictated. The Social-Historical Approach The social-historical approach is similar to the legal-religious approach in that it examines patterns of behavior unique to each of the communities in the context of its particular worldviews and its non-Jewish context. The explanations for the differences are usually limited to claims “in the alternative.” However, these kinds of contingency-based arguments create confusion regarding the factors relevant to the subject at hand, and cast doubt on whether there really are distinctions between the worlds of Islam and Christianity in the first place. The similarity of the traumas that accompanied forced conversions in each community brings us back to our starting point: Jewish responses to mass religious conversions during the Middle Ages. Cases of Religious Coercion An examination of the literary sources discussing acts of conversion in Jewish communities from the seventh to the thirteenth century reveals that, in most cases, when Jews were offered a choice between conversion and death, they chose feigned conversion, hoping that dissimulation would be required only briefly and that they could return to practicing Judaism openly. 19 20 See Berger, “Jacob Katz on Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages”; Grossman, “Martyrdom in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” 30–34. Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts,” 23–25; Soloveitchik, “Iggeret Ha-Shemad.” 178 ben-sasson The supposedly stark differences between Christian and Islamic countries have been qualified by scholars of the 1096 and 1391 persecutions, and this approach requires comprehensive modification regarding the expected patterns of behavior in times of forced conversion. Not only did Jewish communities in Islamic countries choose to convert rather than die; the majority of Jewish communities in Christian countries did as well, certainly those in places outside Ashkenaz during the Crusade. Prominent examples include Jews on the Iberian Peninsula under Visigothic rule in the seventh century;21 Jews in France at the end of the tenth century and in the first decade of the eleventh;22 and Jews in Byzantium during the reigns of Leo III (717–26), Basil I (867–86), and Romanos Lekapenos (932–44).23 The Jewish communities in Germany during the Crusades were indeed unique in their willingness to die in the service of qiddush ha-shem, and their behavior surprised even many contemporaries. However, one must remember that in many of these communities— Trier, Metz, Cologne, and Regensburg—most of those who were not killed 21 22 23 Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 484–537; A. M. Rabello, “The Legal Status of Spanish Jews during the Visigothic Catholic Era: From Reccared (586) to Reccesswinth (672),” Israel Law Review 33 (1999): 756–86; Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds, 133–36. Blumenkranz, “Germany, 843–1096,” 86–88; Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed., 17 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 4:5–27; Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds, 141–60; Blumenkranz, Les auteurs chrétiens latins du Moyen Âge sur les juifs et le judaïsme (Paris: Mouton, 1963), 250–57; Richard A. Landes, “The Massacre of 1010: On the Origins of Popular Anti-Jewish Violence in Europe,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 79–112; Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 12–20; idem, “1007–1012: Initial Crisis for Northern European Jewry,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 38–39 (1970–1971): 101–17. Joshua Starr, The Jews in the Byzantine Empire (Athens, 1939), 1–10, 18–26; Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 3:173–90; Andrew Sharf, “The Jews in Byzantium,” in The Dark Ages, ed. Roth, 30–39. Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds, 107–40, indicates that Byzantium provided the foundation for the pattern of qiddush ha-shem, especially the “tale of the ten martyrs” (ʿaseret ḥarugey malkhut). But the mass conversion in Byzantium requires further explanation; he may have chosen the events in southern Italy to demonstrate the pattern he suggests. See also Shepkaru, “From After Death to Afterlife: Martyrdom and Its Recompense,” AJS Review 24 (1999): 28–31. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 179 converted during the 1096 persecutions.24 While in these communities, the few who did sacrifice their lives received little recognition, in communities where the majority was killed in the service of qiddush ha-shem, those reporting the events tried to sympathize with the few who converted.25 The picture in Islamic countries is also complex. In four geographical centers, Jews had to choose whether to convert or die. In one case they preferred to die, and in the three other cases most of the community’s population, and most importantly their leaders, chose to convert. In the Arabian Peninsula, in the fifth year of the hijra, after the Battle of Buʿāth, the Banū Qurayẓa surrendered to Muḥammad unconditionally and were granted an offer to convert to Islam to save their lives. With the exception of three people, the community refused the offer. The same Islamic sources mention that approximately seven hundred fifty people—all the men and one woman from the tribe—were killed; the remaining women and children were taken hostage and sold as slaves. While the Islamic literary sources describe this event at length, medieval Jewish literary sources mention it only once, incidentally.26 In Egypt, the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh issued edicts of persecution against Christians and Jews in the years 1005–12; non-Muslims were forced to convert to Islam in the midst of violent pressure and the brutal abuse of minorities. But in 1020, the caliph allowed those who were forced to convert to return to their previous religion, based on the principle that there is no compulsion in religion (Q 2:256). Al-Ḥākim’s successor, al-Ẓāhir, took an extreme step and issued a decree permitting forced converts to return to their original faith provided that they pay the jizya they would have owed had they not converted.27 24 25 26 27 Chazan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), 76–85; Ben-Shalom, “Jewish Martyrdom and Conversion in Sepharad and Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages,” 283–86. Ben-Shalom, “Kidush ha-Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391,” 227– 33, 249–50, and the references in ibid., 249; idem, “Jewish Martyrdom and Conversion in Sepharad and Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages,” 283–86; Grossman, “The Sources of Kiddush Hashem in Early Ashkenaz,” 125–127. M. J. Kister, Studies on the Emergence of Islam [Hebrew], ed. Michael Lecker (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999), 77–98; Michael Lecker, “Did Muhammad Conclude Treaties with the Jewish Tribes Naḍīr, Qurayẓa and Qaynuqāʾ?” Israel Oriental Studies 17 (1997): 29–36; idem, “On Arabs of the Banū Kilāb Executed Together with the Jewish Banū Qurayẓa,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 19 (1995): 66–72. Lev, “Conversion and Converts”; Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 370–81. 180 ben-sasson Likewise, in the Maghrib and al-Andalus, under the Almohad dynasty, from the second quarter of the twelfth century until the beginning of the second quarter of the thirteenth, non-Muslim minorities were forced to convert to Islam. This religious coercion was part of the official policy of the Almohad dynasty, who imposed an uncompromising interpretation of Islam upon the people of the lands they conquered (including Muslims) and abrogated the dhimma. The brunt of the pressure made itself felt during the first generation of the Almohad conquests in the 1140s and 1150s, as well as under the third ruler of the dynasty, Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr (r. 1184–99). One could escape the religious persecution only by fleeing Almohad territory, by committing an act of qiddush ha-shem, or by converting to Islam. Both Jewish and Islamic sources testify that most of the Jewish population converted to Islam, at least superficially. Those who converted to Islam under the Almohads attempted to practice Judaism secretly, laying the groundwork for patterns of collective identity later adopted by the conversos of Christian Spain. After approximately four generations of religious persecution, the Almohads fell and the offspring of these converts to Islam began practicing Judaism openly again.28 Refugees who arrived in Egypt from Sijilmāsa, in the Maghrib on the edge of the Sahara, gave the following account, in which they attested to the pattern of mass conversion that the Almohad persecutions provoked: After he [ʿAbd al-Muʾmin] entered the city, he gathered the Jews and urged them to convert following seven months of negotiation during which they had fasted and prayed. After that, a new amīr came and demanded that they convert, but they refused. Then one hundred fifty of them were killed, sanctifying the divine name: “The Rock, His every action is perfect, for all His ways are just (Deut. 32:4)”; “Blessed is the judge of truth, who rules in justice and truth (Seder Rav ʿAmram Ga⁠ʾon)”; “For the king’s command is authority (Eccles. 8:4).” The rest then converted, led by Yosef b. ʿImran, the judge of Sijilmāsa, “and for this I will wail and howl (Mic. 1:8).” Before ʿAbd al-Muʾmin entered the city, while the people of the city were rebelling against the Almoravids, some of the Jews—approximately two hundred—escaped to the citadel, among them Mar Jacob, ʿAbud, my father’s brother, and Mar Yehuda bar Mar Parḥon and his brother. They are now in Darʿa, having taken everything they had with them, but we do not know what their fate was after 28 Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts”; Mordechai A. Friedman, Maimonides, the Yemenite Messiah and Apostasy [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2002), 23–30. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 181 that. And other than Darʿa and Meknes, none of the Almoravid lands was spared from the Khārijīs [Almoravids]. All the communities of the Maghrib have now sinned in accordance with the decree: and from Bijāya to Shaʿar, no one is left who remains a Jew. Some were killed, while others converted.29 In two episodes that occurred in close proximity during the twelfth century, the Jews of Yemen were faced with the choice between conversion and death. At the end of the 1160s, ʿAbd al-Nabī b. Mahdī tried to impose his beliefs on both the Muslim and Jewish residents of Yemen. This led to a revival of Jewish messianism in Yemen, but it also brought about mass conversion. The defeat of Ibn Mahdī in 1173 reversed the situation, and the Jews were allowed to return to their faith. In 1198, Yemen was under the rule of the Ayyubid sulṭān Muʿizz al-Dīn Ismāʿīl. He imposed Islam on the Jewish residents of Yemen, but not upon foreign merchants, who were compelled only to pay a triple poll tax.30 One such merchant described the conversion of communal leaders, including the nagid of the Yemeni community. The following description was not written as the events were unfolding, and it reveals the writer’s sympathies as he finds a way to justify those who converted to Islam and to ignore those who died for the sake of qiddush ha-shem: And he [the ruler] said to him [the Nagid, Maḍmūn b. David]: Convert to Islam or most of them [the Jews] shall be killed. He [Maḍmūn] wept bitterly but could find no way [to escape] conversion to Islam. Even before he arrived in Aden, everyone who was with him in the mountains had already “committed the crime” [converted]—“the honest one,” the doctor and everyone who was on the mountains. Only the Jews of Aden were left. Maḍmūn’s conversion to Islam occurred on Wednesday, 1 Dhū l-Qaʿda; on Friday, two days later, the bell rang to announce this: “A [To] all the Jewish communities: starting from tomorrow afternoon, those of you who refuse to come to the palace shall be killed.” There was not a single Jew left who did not go to the palace. Then the order was given that those who refused to convert to Islam would be killed, and they all 29 30 H. Z. Hirschberg, “The Almohade Persecutions and the India Trade (a Letter from the Year 1148)” [Hebrew], in Yitzhak F. Baer Jubilee Volume: On the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. Salo W. Baron et al. (Jerusalem: Israeli Historical Society, 1960), 147–48; Goitein, Mediterranean Society, 5:59–62. Friedman, Maimonides, 37–48, 108–12. 182 ben-sasson “committed the crime.” Those who feared heaven refused and they were beheaded.31 Linking the episodes in the Maghrib, Egypt, and Yemen is the act of conversion and the way it is described. In all three instances, community leaders led the way for a mass conversion of the Jewish community. In descriptions of these events by observers who were involved but succeeded in escaping, the forced converts are not depicted dishonorably; nor are the few who died for the sake of qiddush ha-shem praised excessively. Preserving Memory: Differences in Dialogue with the Host Society While the Jews of Islamic and Christian lands may have differed only minimally in their practical responses to pressure to convert and in their theoretical considerations of qiddush ha-shem, they preserved the memory of these occasions in dramatically different ways. The Jews of Christian lands recorded episodes of qiddush ha-shem in great detail and in a variety of forms: in prose narratives, in liturgical poetry (piyyuṭim) and in memorial lists. These events left their mark, as well, in their conceptions of both time (the calendar) and memorial sites (places of death and burial). These commemorative acts infused the Ashkenazi community with a unique collective consciousness, while the actions of those who were killed functioned as halakhic norms in the consciousness of the community. Conversely, it seems that the Jews of Islamic countries did not try to perpetuate the memory of such events, and instead reacted to what transpired with equanimity.32 We cannot attribute this to a lack of historical writing, as an acute historical consciousness existed among Jews in Islamic lands, a consciousness that expressed itself in all forms of spiritual creativity, including the documentation of historical events. And piyyuṭim written by Jews in Islamic 31 32 Ibid., 163–65, and see the discussion of the event on 160–78. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 27–52; Ivan G. Marcus, “History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 365–88; idem, “Medieval Jewish Studies: Toward an Anthropological History of the Jews,” in The State of Jewish Studies, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 113–27; Chazan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews, 107–26; Soloveitchik, “Religious Law and Change”; on the absence among Jews of Islamic countries see Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 242–86. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 183 lands that made their way into the liturgy have indeed perpetuated the memory of historical events and given them a timeless status.33 The episode of the Banū Qurayẓa can help to clarify my point. While this episode was kept out of the spotlight in Jewish historiographical works, it did not vanish altogether. Those who criticized the converts to Islam in the Almohad west denounced them for joining the religion of the man who murdered thousands of Jews, a reference to what happened to the Banū Qurayẓa. In his Epistle on Martyrdom, Maimonides repeated the arguments advanced by an earlier respondent to the queries of Maghribī Jews, arguments that he believed were pernicious. He left out, however, the claim concerning Muḥammad’s extermination of the Banū Qurayẓa, a claim that would have adversely affected the status of Islam in the eyes of the converts. Nevertheless, it was impossible for Maimonides to avoid mentioning the episode altogether, and so he refers to it, but in an offhand manner: “and he [the earlier respondent] added that the insane man [Muḥammad] killed 24,000 Jews, as if he were being asked if he [Muḥammad] would have a share in the world-to-come.”34 It is reasonable to assume that Jews in Islamic lands knew of this event, as many of them were familiar with the Islamic scholarly tradition; they knew of the affair yet evidently kept it from their consciousness and suppressed it in their writings. Focusing on mechanisms of memory preservation, it becomes difficult to blur the lines that clearly differentiate the two Jewish communities, and one cannot replace the prevailing view simply by harmonizing their distinct approaches. The sources we have quoted above speak for themselves in their almost laconic description of events, and the silence of Jewish literary sources on the affair of the Banū Qurayẓa cannot be easily dismissed. This divergence with respect to the preservation of memory in the two centers of Jewish life can be explained by means of a social-historical approach that recognizes a distinction between two issues: Jews’ affinity with the local culture and their sociopolitical expectations. The crux of the tension between Jews and non-Jews, according to such an approach, was not simply a matter of formal religious affiliation, but more fundamentally of the Jews’ place in the society in which they were living. In Islamic lands, Jews participated 33 34 Ben-Sasson, “The Structure, Goal and Content of the Story of Nathan Ha-Babli” [Hebrew], in Culture and Society in Medieval Jewry: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Haim Hillel BenSasson, ed. Menahem Ben-Sasson et al. (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1989), 137–96; Ezra Fleisher has published many piyyuṭim together with a discussion of methodological principles; see, e.g., Ezra Fleischer, “A Historical Poem Describing Some Military Events in Syria and Erez Israel in the Early 11th Century” [Hebrew], Zion 52 (1987): 417–26. Shailat, ed., Letters and Essays, 1:42. 184 ben-sasson extensively in society, the economy, and even the government, while in Christian lands they were excluded from each of these realms. The social interaction that characterized Islamic society finds expression in the associations that brought members of diverse religious traditions together and in the shared residential areas in which they lived as neighbors. There is evidence of close economic relations among merchants across the Islamic realm, and of Jewish contributions to the prosperity of the ninth to eleventh centuries. Jews also held important administrative positions in government—from the office of vizier or its equivalent at the very highest level (Ḥasday b. Shaprūṭ, Moshe b. Elʿazar, Shemuʾel b. Naghrela, the Tustarī family) to senior clerkships charged with oversight of taxation, logistics, and medicine. This situation is also reflected in the positive manner in which Jews living in Islamic lands articulated their identity during the high Middle Ages. Jews embraced an identity rooted in the urban environment alongside their identification with family and a distinctive religious tradition. This urban identity was shared by the inhabitants of a city, even when that city contained more than one Jewish community. This form of identification is evident in the nicknames borne by immigrants as they left their hometowns: al-Qurṭubī, al-Fāsī, al-Sijilmāsī, al-ʿAdanī, al-Iskandarānī, al-Madīnī, etc. Not simply a means of distinguishing one group from another, these names characterized immigrants in their new residences and are the key to understanding the actions of the social groups that operated in the main trade cities of the time. Such forms of identity allowed Muslims and Jews from the same city to cooperate in the pursuit of shared interests against the Muslims and Jews of other cities. An instance of such cooperation occurred in the context of the struggle between the residents of Alexandria and some merchants from Palermo, when the authorities were persuaded to impose double taxation on the foreign group in each of these main port towns. In a similar manner, property confiscated from Jews exiled from Fez was smuggled out of the city with the help of their Muslim neighbors, an act that crossed boundaries of political and religious loyalty and was a by-product of the social contacts developed in the context of a shared urban setting.35 35 Ben-Sasson, The Jews of Sicily, 825–1068: Documents and Sources [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1991), 9; idem, “Mouvement de population et perceptions d’identité: Fès sous les Idrisides et les Zirides,” in Relations judéo-musulmanes au Maroc: Perceptions et réalités, ed. M. Abitbol (Paris: Stavit, 1997), 47–56; idem, “The Self-Government of the Jews in Muslim Countries in the 7th–12th Centuries” [Hebrew], in Kehal Yisrael: Jewish SelfRule Through the Ages, vol. 2: The Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, ed. Y. Kaplan and A. Grossman (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2003), 42–47. It is true that those who remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 185 Incidental comments in the halakhic literature of the Jews point in a similar direction, as, for instance, the observation that “Muslims are the most concerned for our well-being and the most protective of us,”36 the expression of respect for the Islamic legal system,37 and the stringent rulings of Sherira Ga⁠ʾon in matters of dress and hygiene, which were based upon Islamic precedents.38 Abraham Maimonides’ understanding of the concept of ḥuqqot ha-goyim (gentile practices) likewise reveals that Muslim society posed a challenge to Jews.39 This view is reflected in every realm of life: from letters of the Cairo Geniza whose authors, even in times of tension and persecution, refrained from cursing or maligning their Muslim neighbors (with the exception of the common expression “In general, gentiles are coercive,” setam goy anes hu)40 to the highly diversified field of spiritual creativity, which knowingly employed the models, language, and terminology used by Muslims.41 In certain instances, Jews regarded Muslims through a consideration of halakhic formulations, namely the expansion of the concepts of qiddush hashem and ḥillul ha-shem beyond their meanings in the Talmud. The effort to evaluate Jewish religious behavior according to the standards of Islamic society, in matters of inappropriate prayer, customs relating to ritual purity and impurity, rules of hygiene and even stringencies in the laws of animal slaughter, was made with reference to the concepts of ḥillul ha-shem and qiddush ha-shem. Even if it was only a rhetorical maneuver intended to restore nor- 36 37 38 39 40 41 were appointed as communal leaders carried the names of their hometowns in Ashkenaz as well, e.g., R. Baruch of Magenza, R. Amnon of Magenza, R. Moshe of Coucy, and others. Shraga Abramson, “Five Sections of Rabbi Hai Gaon’s Sefer Hamekach” [Hebrew], in Jubilee Volume in Honor of Moreinu Hagaon Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ed. S. Israeli, N. Lamm and Y. Rafael, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1984), 2:1350. A. E. Harkavy, Responsen der Geonim (zumeist aus dem X.–XI. Jahrhundert) [Hebrew] (Berlin, 1887), 278; S. Assaf, Responsa Geonica [Hebrew], 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1942), 75; Gideon Libson, Jewish and Islamic Law: A Comparative Study of Custom during the Geonic Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 113–92. B. M. Lewin, Otzar ha-Geonim, vol. 11: Tractates Nedarim, Nazir and Sota [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: n.p., 1942), 101. Abraham Maimonides, Responsa [Hebrew], ed. A. H. Freimann and S. D. Goitein (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1937), 82; idem, Sefer ha-maspiq le-ʿovdey hashem (Kitāb kifāyat al-ʿābidīn), ed. Nissim Dana (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1989), 40–47. See, for example, Yosef ben Yehuda b. Jacob b. ʿAqnin, Divulgatio mysterium luminumque apparentia, Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum [Hebrew], ed. A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1964), 494–95, and the quotation at note 51. Ben-Sasson, “Al-Andalus: The So-called ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish Jewry—A Critical View,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 123–37. 186 ben-sasson mative behaviors, this effort stemmed from the Jews’ sense of affinity with a social reality in which they and their Muslim neighbors were participants. The claim that Muslims were watching them even as they were in their synagogues would have seemed reasonable to them given their familiarity with daily life in Islamic cities. Their Muslim neighbors’ impressions of them were important to them, and accordingly there was only one way to conceptualize the expectations demanded of them as they faced their Muslim neighbors, whether they were leaders or observers: either qiddush ha-shem or ḥillul ha-shem. Perceiving the Muslim as a superior observer of Jewish society’s behavior is in line with something I suggested in an earlier discussion of the identity of converts during the Almohad persecutions. There I proposed a preliminary step in understanding how the otherness of Muslims was minimalized: by the time of the mass conversion, Jewish society had been Arabized for three hundred years. The Jews of Islamic lands viewed themselves as part of the social and cultural fabric of their environment. Many of them were closely familiar with elements of the Islamic religious tradition and did not hesitate to assimilate them into their everyday lives or even their religious writings. On the whole, Muslim society and culture served as a challenge—hence the full and open participation of the Jews in that society, as is reflected in their names, forms of employment, places of residence, choice of language, and frames of reference.42 The mutual openness of the two societies requires further clarification, and there is an additional level to this because of the extension of the terms ḥillul ha-shem and qiddush ha-shem to everyday life. For Jews in Islamic countries, the status of Islamic society as a “reference group” served as a productive challenge—a group on the forefront in which many Jews wished to participate. A notable example of this is the sessions (majālis) in which fundamental theological questions were discussed, a practice motivated by a mutual commitment to freedom of expression and the study of non-authoritative texts.43 That 42 43 Ben-Sasson, “On the Jewish Identity of Forced Converts.” David E. Sklare, Samuel ben Hofni Gaon and His Cultural World (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 99–141; idem, “Responses to Islamic Polemics by Jewish Mutakallimūn in the Tenth Century,” in The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, ed. Hava LazarusYafeh et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 137–61; Mark R. Cohen and Sasson Somekh, “Interreligious Majalis in Early Fatimid Egypt,” in The Majlis, ed. Lazarus-Yafeh, 128–36; eidem, “In the Court of Yaqub Ibn Killis: A Fragment from the Cairo Genizah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 80 (1990): 283–314; Somekh, “Fragments of a Polemic Treatise from the Cairo Genizah” [Hebrew], in Shivtiel Book: Studies in the Hebrew Language and in the Linguistic Traditions of the Jewish Communities, ed. Isaac Gluska and Tsemaḥ Kessar (Tel Aviv: ha-Aguda le-ṭippuaḥ ḥevra ve-tarbut, ʿamutat afiqim li-tḥiya ruḥanit ve-ḥevratit, 1992), 141–59. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 187 Islamic culture served as a challenge and Muslims as a reference group was evident even during the difficult days of the Almohad persecutions, and the idea was expressed by those who converted to Islam but continued to practice Judaism secretly, for example the philosopher and poet Yosef b. Yehuda b. ʿAqnīn (ca. 1150–1220): And there might be someone who will argue against me, someone who is foolish, undiscerning, and hasty who might defame me for quoting words of philosophy, the Arabic language, and stanzas of poetry in this important book, and who will be disappointed by this and will keep his distance from the book, and who only out of respect for me will refrain from denouncing my work as treacherous. May the ignorant, the hypocritical and the careless know, therefore, that the rabbinic sages before me have already preceded me in doing so.44 Judaeo-Arabic literature was born out of Jews’ sense of inferiority in comparison with the achievements of Islamic culture, and it touched on every field of Islamic literature. This evidence fits well with what I have argued above, both about Islamic culture serving as a challenge to Jewish ways of life and about the definition of the religious terms ḥillul ha-shem and qiddush ha-shem in the eyes of the Muslim “other.” A Jew in an Islamic country might have found life in Islamic society palatable not only because of his close familiarity with its customs and those who participated in them, but also because he perceived it as an elite culture and believed in its achievements as proof of its favor in divine eyes. This alternative explanation is no less reasonable than that of the belief in the advent of the Messiah (a convenient belief for preachers, for medieval Jewish communal leaders, for those who spoke in the idioms of their times, and even for us scholars). This alternative explanation lurks nearby, since religious thinkers sought to deal with the complaints of their contemporaries, including their dismay at the duration of the exile and the worldly success of Islam, which in their eyes was linked to the degree of righteousness it had attained. Indeed, exhaustion and a weakened sense of religious obligation led some Jews to apostasy for reasons other than coercion, as Maimonides clearly states: Someone who renounces the entire Torah can be compared with those who turn to the ways of the idolatrous in times of persecution and cling to them, saying, “What gain could there possibly be in clinging to the Jewish people given that they are lowly and persecuted? It is better for 44 See above, note 40. 188 ben-sasson me to cling to those whose hand is strong.” Such a person is an apostate against the entire Torah.45 The instances of conversion among Jews in normal times are not numerous, but the few exceptions who joined the dominant culture with full participation in its destiny abandoned their religion for the reasons described in this passage.46 Such involvement broke the formal rules that required social exclusion on the basis of religion, at times surprising both Muslims and Jews. Such relations naturally diminished one’s sense of separation from the majority society and set it up as a challenge to the minorities. This tradition of coexistence, born of partnership between Jews and Muslims, contrasts with the way in which Jews in Christian countries recoiled from Christianity and its symbols. Such a tradition of coexistence, built upon normal quotidian relations, led to a willingness to feign conversion for two opposite reasons; both depend on an acceptance of Islam as an alternative way of living. First, neither Jewish culture nor the surrounding society pressured or coerced Jews to convert; rather, pressure and coercion resulted from temporary policies of rulers and fleeting persecutions; feigned conversion to Islam meant joining a society and a religion that allowed one to cross over easily in times of pressure. Second, in times of crisis and desperation, when Jews began to feel that there was no hope because their God had abandoned them, the passage to Islam, which anyway was familiar from everyday life, was unproblematic. In this spirit, it is possible to attempt to analyze the process of conversion in the Maghrib during the Almohad period and to understand why the accounts of this process are so restrained. Both those who hoped to return to Judaism and those who had lost hope experienced a passage to something that was familiar, not alien. This approach differs from that of Jacob Katz and Israel Jacob Yuval, who explain the acts of the Jews of Ashkenaz who died for the sake of qiddush hashem in 1096 by using a symbolic-religious approach according to which the power of symbols transcends the laws of halakha, an approach that shaped patterns of behavior and culture for generations. Katz explains the acts of qiddush ha-shem via the repugnance provoked by everyday symbols that manifested itself in the violent eruptions during the Crusades. Yuval explains them 45 46 Maimonides, Hilkhot Teshuva, 3:9. This differs from the simple meaning of the prior sources; see the comment of Abraham b. David of Posquières: “He who returns to the religion of idolatry acknowledges their gods and is a heretic.” See detailed discussion in Friedman, Maimonides, 1–6. See Stroumsa, “On Jewish Intellectual Converts to Islam in the Early Middle Ages.” remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 189 via the deeds of the Crusaders and the symbols they used.47 The exclusion a Jew might have felt in Christian lands is clear in the accounts we have of these acts, however accurate they may be, and it contributed to the shaping of a Jewish society opposed to the Christian one. An oppositional stance that manifests itself in collective memories of acts of qiddush ha-shem is not enough to negate social and economic cooperation or even common intellectual and cultural tendencies (e.g., the tendency to emphasize the deeds of martyrs). This is a basic starting point whose development and canonization occurred in the shadow of exclusion.48 Differences in the way events were recorded in Christian and Islamic countries may also be related to the size of the Jewish communities and the continuity of their existence in these places. Jewish communities in Europe were small, and many existed continuously for another five hundred years. In Islamic countries, on the other hand, Jewish communities were large and did not exist in unbroken continuity. Unlike their counterparts in Islamic countries, in Ashkenazi communities, families knew each other well and most of the population was closely related to those harmed during the events; the social structure of the community did not change after the events in question. In 47 48 This approach was first developed in Jacob Katz, “Though He Sinned, He Remains an Israelite” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 27 (1958): 204–17; idem, “Bein tatnu le-taḥ-taṭ,” in Yitzhak F. Baer Jubilee Volume, ed. Baron, 318–37; idem, Bein yehudim le-goyim (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1960). Soloveitchik has gone in this direction, distinguishing between halakha and cultural climate (Soloveitchik, “Religious Law and Change”). This approach was also taken by Grossman in a different discussion: Grossman, “Martyrdom in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” 34–36. For recent critical discussions on Katz’s methodology and these positions see Berger, “Jacob Katz on Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages,” 44–58; Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation,” 35–45. Yuval has discussed the issue of motif migration at length in his book Two Nations in your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 92–295. Although the vindictive element may exist in the writings of Jews of Islamic lands, the hatred and reticence toward Christian society expressed in the writings of Ashkenazi Jews (and the role the blood of the dead plays before the heavenly throne) indicate the distance between Jews and gentiles in the minds of the chroniclers and authors of piyyuṭim. See Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation.” On the Jews of Byzantium, see Robert Bonfil, “The Vision of Daniel as a Historical and Literary Document” [Hebrew], Zion 44 (1979): 111– 47; idem, “On the Vision of Daniel as a Historical and Literary Document” [Hebrew], Zion 56 (1991): 87–90; idem, “Between Eretz Israel and Babylonia” [Hebrew], Shalem 5 (1987): 1–30; idem, “Myth, Rhetoric, History? A Study in the Chronicle of Ahima’az” [Hebrew], in Culture and Society in Medieval Jewry, ed. Ben-Sasson, 99–135; Ben-Sasson, “Communal Leaders in North Africa, Figure and Image: Literary Composition as a Historical Source” [Hebrew], Peʿamim 26 (1986): 132–62. 190 ben-sasson Islamic countries, rejection of the majority religion was neutralized to such an extent that even religious symbols that might have become objects of hatred and signs of paganism—the Kaʿaba and the custom of stoning the devil during the ḥajj—were neutralized in a blunt and resolute manner by Maimonides: True, Mercury is worshiped by throwing stones, and Chemosh is worshiped by untying the hair and refraining from wearing sewn clothes, and these matters were clearly known to us long before the emergence of Islam. But the Ishmaelites of today say that they untie their hair and refrain from wearing sewn clothes [during the ḥajj] to submit themselves to God, may he be blessed, and to remind themselves how near man is to the grave; and that they throw stones at the devil to confuse him. And some of their sages give the following reason: there were idols there, and we throw stones where there were idols—that is, since we do not believe in the idols that used to be there, we throw stones on them to despise them; others say it is a custom. The general rule is that, although it is in principle idolatry, people throw stones and worship there and do all these things not for the sake of idolatry, neither in word nor in thought, but because their hearts are devoted to heaven.49 Commemorating examples such as the Banū Qurayẓa or the rare cases of qiddush ha-shem in situations of forced conversion detracts from the overall picture of safety, security, identification, and social and economic involvement in peaceful times. The historical writing of the time instead fostered collective memory via official writing. Collective memory draws upon what is still vivid from the past or what is likely to live on in the consciousness of the group. It aspires not to be inclusive, but rather precisely the opposite—to be selective: it preserves from the past what still holds significance for group’s present life. The selection was therefore made according to the group’s present self-perception, among those who attempted to justify a sense that “The gentiles honor and praise this, and are envious of us for that,” and that “The Muslims are the ones who are most concerned about us and most protective of us.”50 What held significance for the community’s life in the present, which was therefore the determining factor in 49 50 Maimonides, letter to Obadiah the Proselyte, in Shailat, ed., Letters and Essays, 239; and see Shailat’s comments at ibid., 216, collecting Maimonides’ discussions of this issue. R. Moses b. Maimon, Responsa [Hebrew], 4 vols., ed. Joshua Blau (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1957–61), 2:320–322; Abramson, “Five Sections of Rabbi Hai Gaon’s Sefer Hamekach,” 1350. remembrance and oblivion of religious persecutions 191 the formation of collective memory, was the deeds of the courtiers and close associates of the ruling regime: Naṭira, ʿUqba, Ḥasday b. Shaprūṭ, Shemuʾel b. Naghrela and the like. The stories of salvation after difficulties (al-faraj baʿd alshidda) had greater meaning for the community than the acts of three people who sacrificed themselves for the sake of qiddush ha-shem in Yemen, the hundred fifty God-fearing people in Sijilmāsa and the seven hundred fifty casualties (or 24,000, according to the Jewish version) of Banū Qurayẓa. In the collective consciousness, participation in Islamic society was perceived as routine.51 Select Bibliography Abramson, Shraga. “Five Sections of Rabbi Hai Gaon’s Sefer Hamekach.” [Hebrew.] In Jubilee Volume in Honor of Moreinu Hagaon Rabbi Joseph B. 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