Why Muslims should not be antisemitic.

For Salafist theologians the existence of the Jews is the only way to explain why the world doesn't work according to Allah's plan. It's exactly the same Nazi notion that the Jews are the disgrace of the Germans, thus the disgrace of the world ("Die Juden sind unser Unglück"). If the reality doesn't look like the Quran says it should, it's because of the Jews that distort everything.

Historical truth is totally irrelevant for Salafists, as it is for fanatics of any religion. However, normal, rational and instructed people should know that there never was a conflict between Muhammad and the Jews, Muhammad waged a war against what he thought were Jews but were in fact Arabian monotheist that adored a God they named Raham or Rahim (meaning “The compassionate”).

There had always been Jews in Arabia before that the Muslims under Omar's ruling exterminated them in the beginning of the VIIIth century. Only the Jews of Yemen and some in the coast of the Persian golf survived this most gruesome genocide.

The Hebrew ancestors of the Jews came from Arabia, not Mesopotamia as the Bible pretends. The commercial relations between the Hedjaz (Arabia's west coast) and Palestine were intense and seldom interrupted, so since Jews exists, there had been Jews in Arabia, like there had been Christians, Mandeist, Sabeans, Magii and Hannifs.

However, the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Qurayza, and Banu Nadir that  Ibn Hishām calls Jews weren't Jews. None of the prolific Jewish texts and traditions of that time or afterwards let suppose that there were Jewish tribes in Arabia.

These are the scholar's main arguments against the jewishnes of the Quran "Jews":

First: Jews didn't organize themselves in tribes, with the only absolute exception to Yemen and in much later times (XIIth century onwards).
Second: Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Qurayza, and Banu Nadir are certainly no Hebrew names. It could be objected that these tribes were descendants of Arabian converts to Judaism, but the first thing any convert to Judaism does is adopt some sort of Hebrew name. An so it has been since conversions to Judaism exist, with extremely few exceptions like Antigonos, Aquilas and Onkelos that surely also had Hebrew names but are not remembered by them.
Third: They called their God Rahim (the Compassionate in Arab) and were monotheists. The expressions "Ab ha Rahaman" (father of compassion) and "Rahamana" (the compassionate in judeo-aramean) exist in Jewish liturgy and texts, and compassion is one of the divine attributes (kabbalist "sephirot") but they are not and have never been the usual way in which Jews address God.
Fourth: The solidarity between Jews is a subject that has been much overstated, especially by antisemites, but it contains a grain of truth. No minority can survive anywhere without some measure of intra-ethnic solidarity. Though in the Quran there is no mention that these tribes did anything to ally themselves against such a ruthless common enemy. The tribes fell one after the other, no tribe intervened to help another, each tribe confronted alone it's ill fate.

Muslims, and for that matter everybody else, should know that the "Jews" that Muhammad fought were not Jews. That they were called "Jews" doesn't prove anything. In today's Argentine antisemites call the Jews "rusos" (Russians) and in all Latin America Arab immigrants and their descendants are called "turcos" (Turks) and many could add other examples of this kind.


Jews, Muslims and everybody else should also know that the "abrahamic" roots of Arabs are a myth. Before the advent of Islam names derived from Hebrew as Ismail, Ibrahim, Yakub, Mussa, Yussuf, etc. did not exist in Arabia.

Why does the Jewish tradition call the Arabs "Ismaelites"? It does so out of sheer dogmatism and ignorance. In the Jewish dogma the Bible enumerates all the peoples on Earth. The tradition assimilates any nation that appears and is no listed in the Bible to a nation that is listed. In this manner the Romans were regarded as descendants of Esau and so on. Much latter, but with the same dogmatic logic, catholic missionaries tried to assimilate the indigenous Americans  to Israel's lost tribes. No nation could exist if it was not already mentioned in the Bible.


To conclude: There should not be any conflict between Muslims and Jews. The Jews that fought Muhammad were not Jews, neither was there a conflict between Arabs and Jews before the advent of Islam. If Abraham and Ishmael ever existed, which I strongly doubt, they were not the ancestors of the Arabs.


See :
Margoulioth, D.S., Litt, A. The Relations between Arabs and Israelites Prior to the Rise of Islam, Oxford University Press, London, 1924