Today is the day we mourn for the victims of the holocaust, the “Shoah.” As Jews we are taught to mourn as if this happened not to our predecessors, or even to us, but to all people.
As a Jew with deep roots in el Andalus, the golden era of Jewish and Christian culture under Muslim rule in Spain, I am very proud of the heritage we Sephardim share with our Muslim brothers and sisters.
However, in the cause of the Palestinians, the Islamic world has painted a very wrong picture of the Holocaust, claiming that blame belonged only to the Christian world. That is not true. The Muslim world was pro Nazi and had a long tradition of abuse of their supposedly Abrahamic brother sand sisters.
Antisemitism runs deep in Islam, back to its essential roo0ts in the Quran.
Muhammad, traveled to Yathrib, a largely Jewish town after he was forced to flee Mecca in X 622 A.D. He chose Yathrib because the Jews there were tolerant, so tolerant that they made Muhammad the chief magistrate over Jews and non Jews alike. Yathrib is the city called Medina in the Quran amd Muslims today celebrate this period as a model for how all societies should be governed. Unfortunately, the Meccans attacked Medina and, when the Jews of Medina refused to side with Muhammad , two of the major Jewish tribes were expelled. In 627, Muhammad’s followers killed between 600 and 900 of the men, and divided the surviving Jewish women and children amongst themselves.23
The Muslim attitude toward Jews is reflected in various verses throughout the Koran, the holy book of the Islamic faith. “They [the Children of Israel] were consigned to humiliation and wretchedness. They brought the wrath of God upon themselves, and this because they used to deny God’s signs and kill His Prophets unjustly and because they disobeyed and were transgressors” (Sura 2:61). According to the Koran, the Jews try to introduce corruption (5:64), have always been disobedient (5:78), and are enemies of Allah, the Prophet and the angels (2:97-98).
Jews were generally viewed with contempt by their Muslim neighbors; peaceful coexistence between the two groups involved the subordination and degradation of the Jews. In the ninth century, Baghdad’s Caliph al-Mutawakkil designated a yellow badge for Jews, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany.24