Muhammad and The Jews — Page 125
THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF THE CONFLICT repression has survived. Unfortunately the Jews of the I;Iijiiz as if by instinct withdrew physically and mentally to their ufum. In less than twenty years after the death of the Apostlel they demolished the walls of their mental and spiritual ufum and walked out to accept the challenge of a Muslim society which opened for them the doors of its mosques, its schools, its bazars, markets and civil service, for education, social assimilation and their participation in the civic and political life. They took the fullest advantage of the somatic, intellectual, and spiritual comforts offered by the dominant elite with- out disappearing as a marginal minority. They joined the ummah as sustaining members. For seven hundred years their destiny was bound with that of the Muslims. Every phase of Islamic growth was accompanied by a positive and creative reaction among Jews. Every phase of Muslim breakdown was accompanied by a disinte- gration: a golden age when Spain's wealth grew; humiliation and exile when it dwindled. 2 Carmichael considers it "very strange that while Christianity was gradually to disappear in most parts of Muslim Empire, Jewish communities survived and flourished-in Bukhara, formerly a great Christian centre; in Yemen, once a Christian bishopric; and in North Africa, the home of Saint Augustine". 3 It would not look strange if the restricted nature and the limits of the Muslim-Jewish conflict were seen in their proper perspective. 1 c. umar appointed Bostenai as the Exilarch in 640. See Alexander David Goode, "The Jewish Exilarchate During the Arabic Period in Mesopotamia From 637 A. D. to 1258 A. D. " (John Hopkins University, Ph. D. thesis 1940), p. 33. 2 Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History, p. 138. 3 Joel Carmichael, The Shaping of the Arabs: A Stiidy in Ethnic Identity (New York, 1967), p. 54. 125