Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] IN THEIR OWN WORDS 295
S.D. Goitein’s six-volume A Mediterranean Society reports two special
words coined and much-used in the geniza era to describe Islamic hatred of
Jews: “sin’úth, ‘hatred,’ [and] a Jew-baiter being called sóné, ‘a hater.’” 5
All other texts cited also refer to “stubborn malevolence” as the defining
Jewish “worldly characteristic,” leading them to reject Muhammad and
refuse “to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy, and even selfish personal
interest.” These traits allegedly induce typical Jewish treachery: “sorcery,
poisoning, assassination,” archetypes sanctioning “Muslim hatred toward
the Jews, and the admonition to, at best, ‘subject [them] to Muslim domination,’
as [contemptible, humiliated] dhimmis.”
Having whetted reader interest, Bostom leaves nothing open to doubt.
In the next five sections—252 more two-column pages—he unveils the
antisemitic contents of the Qur’an and its interpretations (Part 2); Hadith
(sayings and deeds of Muhammad, Part 3); Sira (early Muslim biographies
of Muhammed, Part 4); and fatwas (religious rulings) and laws prescribed
by Islam’s most “luminary” judges, both classical and pre-modern (Part 5)
and modern (Part 6).
In Part 2, one twelve-page chapter contains fifty-five antisemitic
Quranic verses, each translated three times to avoid confusion or denial
regarding their toxicity. For the “Children of Israel” the Qur’an mandates
God’s anger, as expressed in their “abasement and poverty;” curses “by the
tongue of David, and of Jesus, son of Mary;” and their hastening “about the
earth to do corruption there.” The Jewish people, moreover, are accursed as
liars, confounding the truth, murderers of their prophets, perverse creatures,
and thieves. 6
Haggai Ben-Shammai’s 1988 essay on Quranic literature and interpretations
notes that they likewise cursed Jews through history, frequently citing
the very passages Bostom quotes in the previous chapter—for example,
that describing Jews as cursed disbelievers, “laden with God’s anger” and
having “abasement and poverty pitched upon them.” 7
Bostom, in Part 3, continues exposing traditional Islamic enmity for
Jews, with a brief collection of forty-five accounts from the voluminous
5. S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. II (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2000), 278, as cited in Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,
31.
6. Bostom, Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, ibid., 209-20.
7. Haggai Ben-Shammai, “Jew Hatred in the Islamic Tradition and the Koranic
Exegesis,” from Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog (Oxford: Pergamon,
1988), 161-69, as reproduced in Bostom, Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,
221-25.