Muhammad and The Jews — Page 8
Now that the Exilarch everywhere met with the respect due a prince, he was installed with a degree of ceremony and pomp. . . lo a large open place, which was lavishly adorned, seats were erected for him and the presidents of the two schools. The Gaon of Sora delivered an address to the future Exilarch, in which he was reminded of the duties of his office. . . Both officials put their hands upon the head of the nominee and declared amidst the clang of trumpets, "Long live our lord, the Prince of the Exile. " 1 Leon Nemoy has accused Graetz of pro-Muslim bias and said that "Graetz must bear a large share of the blame" for the current illusion that Jewish life under the rule of the Crescent was somehow far easier than it was under the sway of the Cross. 2 What Graetz wrote about the Exilarchate is factually correct and is supported by Margolis and Marx3, Hirschberg,4 and Bashan5. But Graetz wrote his history in 1894 under the shadow of the Dreyfus affair, and Leon Nemoy wrote his words of criticism in J 956, probably on the eve of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and Sinai. It is not the facts which have changed, it is the perspective. Graetz is pre-Herzl (the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel in 1897), Nemoy is post-Israeli. But even Goitein, whose book Nemoy was reviewing, after cautious qualifications admits that under the Abbasids the Resh Galutha occupied a very honoured position as the general representative of the Jewish community. According to a Christian source, he had precedence over the Christian dignitaries at the Caliph's court, but as a rule he had no administrative function within the Muslim state. He was addressed by the Muslims as 'Our Lord, the son of David', and as David is described in the Koran as one of the greatest prophets, naturally his office was surrounded by the halo of sanctity. . . Of far greater importance for the Jews in Islamic countries than the office of the Resh Galutha was another ecumenical dignity, that of the Gaon, which became indeed so prominent in Jewish life during the first five centuries of Islam that these are labelled in Jewish history as 'the Gaonic Period'. Gaon was the title borne by the heads of the two great Jewish academies of Babylonia-Iraq (originally only one 1 Graetz, Vol. III, pp. 93-94. 2 Review of S. D. Goitein's book Jews and Arabs, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, 1956, p. 386. 3 Max L. Margolis and Alexander Marx, A History of the Jewish People, (New York, 1965), pp. 254-57. 4 Haim Z'ew Hirschberg, "Abbasids", Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), Vol. II, Cols. 42-3. 5 Eliezer Bashan, "Exilarch", Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. VI, Cols. 1023-34. 8