RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Under Andalusian skies

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

LP writes: > Well, the only way to find that out is to study the history  of
Arab-Jewish relations as I've done for the past several days. It will
demonstrate that anti-Jewish persecution simply did not occur as it did in
Europe. BTW, although I could not deal with this in the post, which was
focused on the middle ages, the absense of persecution is really related to
the failure of  capitalism to penetrate the Islamic world. Jews were
persecuted in Spain in the 15th and 16th century, and in Poland and Russia
during the 19th century, and Germany in the 20th century because of
capitalist contradictions. They found a happy niche in the Islamic world
because they were needed as financiers. When Christian Europe moved toward
capitalist property relations, the Jewish banker became dispensible at best,
an enemy to be vanquished at worst.<

I believe that it's quite likely that anti-Jewish pogroms and the like
became more common with the rise of capitalism (which corresponded to the
creation of the Absolutist monarchies and of ethnic nationalism), but are
you sure that there were no persecutions of Jews under Western European
feudalism? This is sort of on the edge of my knowledge, but I know that
religious "heretics" and witches were persecuted during the Middle Ages. So
it makes sense that Jews were too, doesn't it?

>There are ideological reasons for this as well. Islam never really regarded
Judaism as a   threat. In many ways, Islam can be seen as an outgrowth of
Judaism. Unlike Christianity,  however, it saw no need to kill its father.<

wasn't Islam also a critique of Christianity, which at the time was
semi-pagan, with thousands of saints, the semi-deification of the Virgin
Mary, etc., with an established and sometimes-corrupt hierarchy? I can see
how the one prophet/one god/one book message of Mohammed would fight this.

Why did Christianity see it necessary to kill its father? I can see how it
might be driven to do so by the societal changes referred to above.

One time I saw a execrable and excremental Israeli propaganda flick about
Moslem persecution of Jews during the 1940s, justifying the Zionist project
(while ignoring Christian persecution). Is there any truth at all to this
movie, which portrayed large numbers of Jews moving to Israel to flee
persecution by Moslems?

JD