Antisemitism in Islam

Antisemitism in Islam is hostility toward Jews rooted in Islamic scripture, jurisprudence and history: Qur’anic verses that curse Jews and describe their transformation into apes and pigs, canonical hadiths including the end-times command to kill Jews, thirteen centuries of legally mandated subordination under the dhimmi system, and the modern fusion of all of it with imported European conspiracy antisemitism, which is the form that kills today. It is not the whole of Islam, and it is not identical to the annihilationist Jew-hatred of Christian Europe; honest history records long stretches of relative (never equal) coexistence. But the texts are real, the massacres are dated, and the modern Islamist movements that quote scripture while murdering Jews are quoting accurately.

The texts

The foundational material is not obscure. The Qur’an calls the Jews of certain stories a people cursed for disobedience (5:13, 5:60), describes Sabbath-breakers transformed into “apes, despised” (2:65, 7:166), and in 5:82 names the Jews, alongside the polytheists, as the people “strongest in enmity” toward the believers. The hadith corpus adds the text with the longest modern shadow: the gharqad hadith (Sahih Muslim 2922), in which the Last Hour does not come “until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,” the very stones and trees crying out that a Jew hides behind them. Hamas quoted that hadith verbatim as Article 7 of its 1988 Covenant, which is why no honest treatment can file it under antiquarian curiosity.

The biographical tradition supplies the episodes Islamists invoke as precedent: the 627 CE execution of the men of Banu Qurayza, the last Jewish tribe of Medina, after the Battle of the Trench, and the 628 conquest of the Jewish oasis of Khaybar, which survives today in the chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud” aimed at Jews at demonstrations from Beirut to London. Muslim scholars have read these texts narrowly (as bound to specific seventh-century tribes and treacheries) and broadly (as standing verdicts on Jews as such); both readings have deep roots, and the broad reading is the one that built law.

The dhimmi centuries

Classical Islamic law did not order the extermination of Jews; it ordered their submission. Under the dhimmi system, elaborated in the Pact of Umar, Jews and Christians lived as protected but formally inferior subjects: they paid the jizya poll tax “in willing submission” (Qur’an 9:29), could not testify against Muslims, build new houses of worship freely, ride horses, or bear arms, and were periodically required to wear distinguishing dress. The yellow badge later infamous in medieval Europe appears first in the Islamic world: the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil ordered Jews into yellow garments in 850, more than three centuries before the Fourth Lateran Council imposed the same idea on Christendom in 1215.

When the arrangement broke, it broke bloodily and on dates: the 1033 massacre of Jews at Fez; the 1066 Granada pogrom, in which a mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and killed much of the city’s Jewish community, with estimates running into the thousands; the Almohad persecutions of the twelfth century, which forced Maimonides’ family to flee Córdoba and led him to write, in his Epistle to Yemen, that no nation had ever oppressed Israel more than “the nation of Ishmael”; the 1834 Safed pogrom; the 1840 Damascus affair, a Christian-imported blood libel prosecuted under Ottoman rule with torture. The point is not that the Islamic world was a uniform hell for Jews, it was not, but that “tolerance” meant tolerated inferiority, enforced by law and punctuated by violence.

The modern fusion

What made twentieth-century Islamic antisemitism lethal at scale was its merger with European material. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion reached Arabic translation in the 1920s and has circulated in the region ever since; Hamas’s 1988 Covenant cites it approvingly in Article 32. Nazi Germany broadcast Arabic-language antisemitic radio from Zeesen from 1939 to 1945, and its most prominent regional collaborator, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, met Hitler on 28 November 1941 and spent the war recruiting for the SS and broadcasting calls to kill Jews. That propaganda climate fed the Farhud, the 1 to 2 June 1941 pogrom in Baghdad in which rioters murdered between 128 (the official commission’s count) and roughly 180 Jews, injured 600, and looted some 1,500 homes and businesses (USHMM).

Within a generation, the 2,600-year-old Jewish communities of the Muslim world were gone: roughly 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries after 1948, a dispossession larger than the Palestinian exodus it mirrored (Jewish Virtual Library; see the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world). Today the scriptural and conspiratorial strands run together in the charters and sermons of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s clerical regime and their imitators, where the Jew of the gharqad hadith and the Jew of the Protocols are the same enemy. The claim that Arabs cannot be antisemitic because they are “Semites too” is a word game answered here.

The coexistence was real, and the verdict still stands

Islam has no deicide charge, the theological engine of Christian antisemitism, and for long stretches Jews were measurably safer under Islam than under Christendom: Jews fleeing the 1492 Spanish expulsion were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire by Sultan Bayezid II, and centers like tenth-century Baghdad and Umayyad Córdoba produced a genuine Jewish golden age within dhimmi limits. The Constitution of Medina initially included Jewish tribes as parties, the idea that Jews and Arabs have always hated each other is a myth this wiki debunks itself, and the tradition is not monolithic now either: reformist Muslim scholars read the hostile verses as historically bounded, and Muslim-majority states from Morocco to the UAE have signed accords with Israel and restored synagogues.

None of that erases the record, and none of it softens the verdict. Islamic scripture contains genuinely hostile material about Jews, classical law institutionalized their inferiority for thirteen centuries, and the modern Islamist synthesis of that scripture with the imported Protocols is among the most murderous antisemitisms alive today, even as hundreds of millions of Muslims subscribe to none of it. An encyclopedia that states all four facts as flatly as it states the last one is doing its job.

The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world · The gharqad hadith · Jews and Arabs have always hated each other? · Can Arabs be antisemitic if they are Semites too? · The Oldest Hatred · The Qur’an, examined