Arab Muslims and the Protection of the Jews A Forgotten History of Coexistence
Today, people love to speak as if Jews and Muslims were born enemies . As if history started yesterday. As if Twitter, TikTok, and angry little men with flags invented memory.
But that is false. Deeply false.
The relationship between Jews and Muslims was never perfect, and I refuse to romanticize it. There was discrimination. There was humiliation. There were periods of violence, fear, and second-class status. A serious person has to say that clearly.
But there was also protection . There was refuge . There was neighborhood loyalty .
There were Muslim rulers, Muslim families, Muslim merchants, Muslim neighbors, and Muslim men who understood that a Jew living beside them was not an enemy. He was part of the city. Part of the market. Part of the street. Part of the memory.
Protection did not always mean equality. But it often meant survival.
Under classical Islamic law, Jews and Christians were often treated as dhimmis , protected non-Muslim communities. That protection came with limits, taxes, and social inequality. It was not modern equality. It was not a paradise. But in many places, it allowed Jewish life to continue when other parts of the world were crushing it.
The truth is stronger when it does not pretend.
In parts of the Muslim world, Jewish communities did not simply survive. They built. They traded. They prayed. They wrote. They translated. They healed people as doctors. They advised rulers. They created poetry, philosophy, law, music, business, and memory.
In medieval Spain, especially under parts of Muslim rule in al-Andalus, Jewish culture reached heights that Europe itself would later have to recognize. Jewish scholars, physicians, poets, diplomats, and merchants were not invisible. They were part of the civilization around them.
One famous example is Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut , a Jewish physician and statesman in 10th-century Córdoba. Men like him remind us that Jewish history in the Muslim world was not only a story of suffering. It was also a story of contribution.
Jews were not some foreign object placed inside the Middle East. They were inside the language. Inside the markets. Inside the books. Inside the food. Inside the cities. Inside the rhythm of the region.
After 1492: When Muslim Lands Became a Door
Then came 1492 .
Catholic Spain expelled its Jews, and one of the great Jewish civilizations of Europe was shattered. Families were uprooted. Books were carried into exile. Languages moved across the sea. A whole people had to search for a place to breathe again.
Many found that breath in Muslim lands .
Istanbul. Salonika. Izmir. Sarajevo. Jerusalem. Safed. North Africa. The Balkans. The eastern Mediterranean.
These were not just names on a map. They became places where Sephardic Jews rebuilt life after Christian Spain threw them out.
The Ottoman Empire was not perfect. No empire is. Jews still lived within a hierarchy. But Muslim-ruled cities gave many Sephardic Jews something Europe had denied them: space to continue.
When Spain expelled them, Muslim cities gave many Jews a place to breathe again.
In those cities, Jews printed books, built trade networks, preserved Ladino, opened schools, maintained synagogues, and passed memory from one generation to the next.
Muslim Protection During the Holocaust
This protection was not only medieval. It did not end in old books.
During the Holocaust, when Europe produced one of the darkest machines of death in human history, some Muslims chose courage. In Bosnia, Albania, North Africa, and elsewhere, Muslims risked their lives to protect Jews.
In Sarajevo, the Hardaga family protected Jewish neighbors during Nazi persecution. That kind of courage does not need a thousand slogans. It speaks for itself. A family opened its door when closing the door would have been safer.
Sarajevo also gave us one of the most symbolic stories of Muslim protection of Jewish heritage: the Sarajevo Haggadah .
A Jewish manuscript, carried by Jews fleeing Spain, was later protected by Muslim custodians and scholars during times of danger.
A Muslim hand preserving a Jewish book is not a contradiction. It is history.
Sidon, South Lebanon, and the Kind of Protection Nobody Posted About
And then there is Sidon .
My city. South Lebanon. The place people love to simplify from far away, usually while knowing nothing about its streets, its families, its pride, or the strange moral codes that can exist inside old cities.
Sidon had Jews. Not as a fantasy. Not as some foreign footnote. Jews were part of the city’s memory. They lived there. They traded there. They prayed there. They argued there. They belonged there.
And in a city like Sidon, especially back then, nobody moved through the streets like he owned the souls of the people living inside them. Not even some Vichy French soldier with a uniform, an accent, and an inflated colonial ego.
A Vichy French soldier thinking he could casually intimidate or harm a Jew in Sidon would have had to think twice. Actually, let us be honest. He would have needed to sit down first, eat five croissants, finish a baguette, drink something, reconsider his life choices, and then maybe decide whether he really wanted to test the streets of Sidon.
Because Sidon was not empty .
It was loaded with tough Sunnite men . Men of families. Men of shops. Men of alleys. Men who knew exactly who lived where, who belonged to whom, and what line should not be crossed.
These were men who might fight each other over politics, pride, business, inheritance, or some stupid local drama. But they still understood one thing very clearly: a neighbor under threat was not always left alone.
This is the part people do not understand anymore.
Protection was not always announced. It was not always written in official documents. It did not come with a press release. It did not need a camera angle. It did not need a hashtag. It did not need some activist screaming into a phone like he discovered morality five minutes ago.
Back then, stupid social media did not exist .
So maybe nobody filmed the warning. Maybe nobody recorded the look one man gave another. Maybe nobody archived the moment a Jewish family was quietly told: “Do not worry. You are not alone.”
Maybe nobody wrote down the names of the men who stood in the way without turning themselves into heroes. But silence in the archive does not mean silence in the street.
Some histories were not posted. They were protected in silence.
In Sidon, memory does not always live in museums. Sometimes it lives in family stories. In old neighborhoods. In names people stopped saying. In doors that closed. In shops that disappeared. In synagogues that became ghosts. And in the strange feeling that something Jewish was always there, even when nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.
That is why this story matters to me. Not because I want to turn the past into a fairy tale. I do not.
I know very well what the Arab world did to many of its Jews in the 20th century. I know the betrayal. I know the cowardice. I know the silence.
But I also refuse to let extremists steal the older memory completely. Before the slogans, before the imported hatred, before everyone became a professional online warrior, there were cities where Jews and Muslims knew each other as people.
The Painful Side of the Story
But honesty requires pain.
Jewish life under Arab and Muslim rule declined sharply in the modern period, especially in the 20th century. Nationalism, colonial pressure, antisemitic propaganda, political cowardice, and the Arab-Israeli conflict poisoned ancient communities.
Jews from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere were pressured, dispossessed, frightened, pushed out, or forced to leave. Some left with almost nothing. Some left behind homes. Businesses. Graves. Synagogues. Songs. Keys. Memories.
That cannot be erased.
A history of Muslim protection must never be used to cover the suffering of Jews from Arab lands. That would be dishonest, and I have no interest in cheap coexistence stories that smell like NGO perfume.
Arab Muslims protected Jews at many points in history, yes. Arab Muslims also failed Jews at many points in history. Both truths have to stand in the same room.
The past was not perfect. That is exactly why the humane parts must be rescued.
Why This History Matters Today
This history matters because it destroys the lazy lie that Jews and Muslims are eternal enemies. They are not.
For centuries, Jews and Muslims lived as neighbors. Sometimes unequally. Sometimes tensely. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes painfully. But they lived close enough to know each other’s foods, languages, fears, markets, prayers, songs, and weaknesses.
Arabic was a Jewish language.
Baghdad, Cairo, Fez, Córdoba, Damascus, Aleppo, Sidon, Beirut, and Jerusalem were all part of Jewish history. Jewish memory is not foreign to the Arab world. It belongs to it.
Jewish memory is not foreign to the Arab world. It belongs to it.
This is why remembering Arab and Muslim protection of Jews is not weakness. It is not surrender. It is not some fake kumbaya nonsense. It is resistance against people who want us to believe that hatred is ancient, natural, and impossible to break.
No. Hatred was taught. It was organized. It was fed. And because it was built, it can also be dismantled.
In a time when extremists try to turn history into a weapon, remembering this legacy is an act of resistance.
The better future is not built by pretending the past was perfect. It is built by recovering the parts of the past that were humane, brave, and worth reviving.
Arab Muslims who protected Jews are part of that story. Sidon is part of that story.
And I refuse to let that memory die just because the modern world became too stupid, too loud, and too addicted to hatred to remember it.