2. What Mahomed learned from the Jews.—From very early times there had been a settlement of Jews in Arabia. Tradition says that the Queen of Sheba travelled thence to pay her famous visit to King Solomon. But, however that may be, there are tolerably trustworthy records which tell of Jewish dwellers in Arabian valleys before the Christian era. At one time there undoubtedly existed an Arab-Jewish state. Its limits and dates are not very exactly defined, but over this Himyerite kingdom, as it was called, there was certainly a Jewish king ruling at the time of its downfall in the year 530. It was brought to an end by a Christian king of Abyssinia, who in his turn was defeated by Chosroes II. ofPersia. There is also a story, seemingly legend, and yet historical, of a people called the Khozars, whose king, Bulan, became a convert to Judaism, and who founded a Jewish dynasty and ruled long and happily by the shores of the Caspian Sea. But however much or however little of truth there may be in these traditions which treat of kings and dynasties, certain it is that, divided by the desert from the pursuit of persecutors all round, Arabian Jews did live, century after century, in their fertile valleys, secure in the possession of perfect freedom of faith. In the northern parts of Arabia these Jews were wandering herdsmen like their Ishmaelitish brethren, but in the south and east they carried on a considerable trade with India and Persia and the Byzantine Empire. They were much more civilised than the native Arabs among whom they dwelt. The Jews were people with a past, which is in itself impressive. They could tell tales without end, of heroic ancestry, or could speak of the higher life with the authority befitting descendants of seers and prophets. They were the direct heirs of Abraham; these other Arabians, fulfilling the destiny of Ishmael, whose ‘hand was to be against every man, and every man’s hand against his,’ had the blood of Hagar the bondwoman in their veins. The Arabian Jews came naturally to have that influence over the native tribes which the higher always exercises on the lower. And thus it came to pass that the new faith, which Mahomed came from Arabia to preach, showed many signs of the Jewish surroundings in which its founder had been born and brought up.

3. Islam.—The very name which was given to Mahomedanism has a certain Jewish suggestiveness about it. Arabic and Hebrew belong to the same group of languages, the Semitic. The Arabic ‘Islam’ and the Hebrew [a]‏שָׁלוֹם‎] are derived from a like radical term, which denotes soundness, or a perfect and unimpaired condition. Peace is another rendering of the word, and expresses a very similar meaning, since ‘peace’ would naturally ensue from a sound and healthy state of things.

4. Likenesses between Islam and Judaism.—There was a kinship of religious thought, as well as of language and of race, between the Arab and the Jew. The Unity of God is the first principle of Islam as it is of Judaism. Abraham and Moses are the heroes of the Koran as of the Pentateuch, and the covenant of Abraham and the dietary laws of Moses are enjoined by Mahomed on his followers.

5. Differences between Islam and Judaism.—But there were differences too, and these of a very vital sort. ‘Allah was God.’ That doctrine of the new faith, the Jews, worshippers of One, might agree with. That ‘Mahomed was His prophet’ was debatable. Moses, even, was not always unquestioningly obeyed. There was small hope for Mahomed. And much of the teaching of the new prophet soon showed that the deserts of Arabia, and not the heights of Sinai, inspired it. Judaism, for all its minute bodily observance, is essentially a spiritual religion. Future rewards are not mapped out after any human pattern, and such Hereafter as is hinted at is of a purely spiritual kind. ‘In My presence there isfulness of joy,’ is the nearest glimpse God vouchsafes of His heaven. ‘Allah’s’ promised paradise was of a quite different sort. Creature comforts, and very earthly delights, were to be the portion of believers in him, and in Mahomed his prophet. It was a programme likely to appeal to a lower class of mind, and the Jews remained unaffected by it. Mahomed was never able to count the Jews among his converts. From among the Jews of Arabia he met, indeed, at first with contempt and opposition. They would not grasp the hand that held the Koran, and so the other, the sword-arm, was lifted against them. There was some fighting, and much bad feeling, at first between the Jews and the followers of Mahomed. During the lifetime of the Prophet some Jews were oppressed and some were exiled, and some were forced to serve under the banner of Islam. But after his death, and as the tide of Mahomedan conquest swept on, the Jews found cause to rejoice in the more tolerant treatment which they experienced from the rulers who adopted the faith of Islam.

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CONQUESTS OF THE KALIPHS: EFFECT, RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL, ON THE JEWS.
(600–800.)

1. Progress of Mahomedanism.—There were great changes brought about in the position of the Jews from the spread of the new faith. The followers ofMahomed conquered east and west. First Syria was overrun, and the Christian subjects of the Byzantine Empire driven out of Jerusalem, and a mosque, sacred to Allah, was erected on the ruins of the Jewish Temple and of the Christian church.The power of Persia was broken and finally subdued by the Mahomedans,[8] and their victories over the Persians were rendered the easier by the help and sympathy which they found among the oppressed Persian Jews. Then from Asia the followers of the Prophet turned to Africa, and, establishing themselves in Egypt, looked threateningly across the straits at Spain. Within fifty years of the death of Mahomed the enormous empire of the kaliphs, as his successors were called, extended from the Caspian Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar, and was soon to bridge these, and to come to its greatest triumph in the Peninsula. It was just in these countries that Jews most congregated, and therefore the history of Islam has a special importance for the students of Jewish history.

2. Gaonim.—The first effect of the Mahomedan supremacy was felt in the neighbourhood where it arose, and chiefly amongst those scholars of Babylon who, within the memories of elderly men, had seentheir schools closed and their [a]‏רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא‎] hanged. It was no part of the Mahomedan policy to make war on schools. Conquest once assured, the conquered might occupy themselves as they pleased. So long even as contrary beliefs did not take the active form of opposition to Islam, the holders of such beliefs were contemptuously and good-naturedly ignored. It was a pleasant experience for the Jews. Under the tolerant sway of the first kaliph, Omar, who had reason, in his quarrels with the Persians, to make friends with the Jews, the schools were reopened, an heir of the murdered [a]‏רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא‎] was reinstated,and the heads of the colleges took on themselves all their old duties and dignities with the new name of Gaonim.[9] Talmudic studies were again revived, and the kallahs (high colleges) of Sora and Pumbaditha grew to be quite celebrated centres of learning. They were diligent students, these Gaonim, and a Gaon called Jehuda, who was blind, and who lived about the year 750, was one of the most active of them all in compiling the laws and decisions contained in the Talmud, and arranging them in systematic order. The Gaonim gradually became the great authorities on all religious and legal questions; and only political matters, and subjects which lay a little outside of the keenest interest, were left to the management of the [a]‏רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא‎]. His authority waned again. Some of those who wielded it were not very wise, and managed to come into collision with the Mahomedan rulers. Then from an hereditary dignity it became an elective one, andthe succession provoked quarrels. At a certain stage in their history the Jews would seem to have prized scholars more than ‘princes.’ At any rate, the Gaonim came to the front, and the office of Head of the Captivity grew to be of less and less importance. Finally, under the combined influences of neglect from the Jews and of some jealousy from the Mahomedans, the office, after having existed for 700 years, expired altogether, as we shall see, in the tenth century.

3. Spain in the hands of the Mahomedans.—Eighty years after the death of the Prophet, the Koran and the sword, having made their triumphant way in Asia and in Africa, the Mahomedans proclaimed the one and sheathed the other in Europe. In 710 the flag with the crescent floated from the cathedrals and citadels of Spain, and Mahomedan kaliphs ruled in the place of Catholic kings. It made an enormous change in the condition of the Jews. Christian legislation had been hard on them for centuries. In public life it kept them from ‘use and name and fame,’ and in private life it prevented any sort of dignity or pleasantness. A Jew might neither be born nor be married, neither love nor work nor play, without penalties and restrictions. He might have the children he had begotten, or the servants he had bought, taken from him at any moment without excuse or possibility of redress. He could be forced into a church and made to listen unwillingly to bad sermons, and if he resisted he might be scourged. Would he be converted, or would he have his property taken from him? wasa common form of question to the Jews. And when, about the date of Mahomed’s death, a Catholic king named Sisebut was reigning in Spain, even so much of choice, as was implied in this, was withdrawn. Not conversion or confiscation, but baptism or exile, was the alternative presented to his Jewish subjects by this royal fanatic Sisebut. It was a terrible state of things, for the difficulty to the Jews was to find any place where they should be better off. Dagobert was the contemporary king of France, and the laws he administered, and those that his predecessor Clotaire had had to administer, were precisely of the same sort. Heraclius, the ruler of the Byzantine Empire, had only lately renewed those edicts of Hadrian and Constantine which forbade Jews to approach Jerusalem; and with his recent experience of the part which Jews had taken in his struggle with Chosroes, Heraclius could not have been in a very friendly mood towards Jews generally. They could anticipate no welcome in any corner of Heraclius’s dominions. They might perhaps have tried Italy, where the Popes were powerful; for the Popes, as a rule, were not unjust to the Jews. And some did, and found in the comparative kindness of the heads of the Church good cause for believing that religion was not always a motive for persecution, though it too often served as an excuse for cruelty and plunder. And many had migrated to the East; and many, who were obliged to remain in Europe, had taken upon them, in hate and fear and trembling, the forced disguise of converts. Then came the conquests of the kaliphs, which brought about an altogether newstate of things for the Jews. In Spain, we shall see that it made a brilliant silver lining to the clouds, a rift in that thick darkness which had descended upon the nation when Jerusalem fell.

4. The Karaite Movement.—Mahomed did not succeed in converting the Jews, but nevertheless the indirect influences of the faith he preached, helped perhaps a little by communal disputes, did produce a distinct sect among the Jews about the middle of the eighth century. There is so little that is really new, that many historians call Karaism only an old school of thought revived under new conditions and with a fresh name, and consider Judaism to be quite as accountable for it as Islam. We know that there were anciently three Jewish sects: the Essenes, who never struck root in Judaism at all; the Pharisees, the best of whom developed into the great earnest body of Rabbis; and the Sadducees, of whom Josephus said ‘they were able to persuade none but the rich,’ and who did, in truth, all but die out with the prosperous days into which they had fitted so easily. With Islam triumphant the prosperous days seemed dawning again, and once more the yoke of the Law began to be grumbled at. The oral law was now a written and settled code, and the obligations of codified tradition were more numerous than the injunctions of the Law. The murmurers said that they would observe the text, but not the commentary; they would read the Law, but they would skip the traditional interpretations. These grumblers grew numerous enough to be recognised: they were called Textualists, or Scripturalists;and yet more distinctively Karaites, from the Hebrew root [a]‏קָרָא‎], to read.[10]