A wandering star

As you can tell I've had Mark Cohen, Under Crescent & Cross on The LOCKDOWN List this week.

This is another one in the Power Hungry file. For each text I bought the book years ago and, at the time, didn't feel I had the background for it. For Bryce, I needed to catch Chernobyl and Michael Moore. For Cohen, I needed more Spain - I needed Fernández-Morera. Possibly/technically português.

At stake for Jews is whether they (we) should trust one side or th'other. It sure looks like life is better for MoT's in Long Island these days than in, say, al-Raqqa; but can they count on that? Al-Raqqa was a different place under Caliph Harun. At stake for the rest is the moral-dimension. Should Christians feel like we (they) are better people than Muslims, or vice versa? Both Islam and Christianity own text at a scriptural level - Divine writ - which cannot do otherwise than distance these religions from Jewish scripture (including Mishna). Both also own a Tradition. Can either be better? ... should either be better?

Cohen argues the longstanding majoritarian (but not unanimous!) claim in Jewry that the Muslims were kinder to them than the Christians were. As Fernández has pointed out, this is a case that needs be argued, not assumed. If you caught a Jew on a bad day, he might well go into raptures about the Muslims... elsewhere and elsewhen... having just fled a pogrom in Moldova. A different Jew on a different day might have a different story to tell. The Mizrahis from Baghdad post 1941 done tol' them stories, at length. So did Maimonides about the Almohads. Cohen is aware of all of this so proposes a sifting-of-evidence. Overall, quibbles aside, Cohen Gets It.

Also here must go definitions of "Judaism". I think this is what Cohen misses.

As noted this is Mishnaic Judaism mediated by the (Sasanian-Iraqi) Talmud. (As with the Shi'a, we may excommunicate the Karaism, at least from our calculus.) I am sorry to report that as a Late Antique Oriental document, the Talmud is hardly superior to the Qurân, in terms of how it positions Jewry against its neighbours, and in terms of its recourse to magical demons. The Talmud's neighbours include Christians and cannot include Muslims, who did not yet exist. Those Christians as Church-Of-The-East were, moreover, very very like Augustinian Catholics. (And not like Monotheletes.) Not all Jews accepted all the Talmud. More to the point, not all the Jews played the same economic role.

Islam inherited the thirsty Late-Antique slave trade. Jews, owning text banning them from keeping slaves for very long, got into selling them, to others. North of the Alps and Massif, keeping slaves over winter was uneconomic. Here the trade was predatory - few were there to buy slaves, and only foreigners would sell them. And... to whom? Cornishmen and especially Vikings did have their thralls, but. With the reduction of the Cornovii and especially the taming of the Norsemen, slavery dried out. That left the local northern Jews to compete with gentiles for farmland and trade, and/or to get into moneylending. Usury, we Latins call it.

Leaving aside the Christianitas, northern Christians had a real case against Jewish practice, which Muslims along Algeria did not. As the north fine-tuned a Christian philosophy, they discovered how slave-traders and usurers justified their predations.

Cohen, then, provides a service in detailing how Christians were less tolerant of Talmudic Judaism at base, than the Muslims. I would make a case that Christianity itself is necessarily hostile to the Talmud; where Islam is not, beyond swiping at stray innovations to the deen Ibraheem which Islam cannot accept. I venture, though, that the problem may lie less with Christianity than with the Talmud. (Some Jews have felt similarly, which is how we have ended up with Talmud editions and extracts which no longer contain passages obnoxious to modern WEIRD sensibilities.)