Muhammad and The Jews — Page 10
restored not by a miracle but by force. He called the Jews to his standard and some ten thousand Jews collected under his leadership hailing him as the Messiah. 1 His uprising was well-timed, since the Abbasid Caliphate was still not consolidated. "The affairs of the Khalifate were at that period in a chaotic condition, and a military movement, such as Isaac's soon became, had good chances of success". 2 Ibn "'isa had planned to join forces with a Persian rebel chief against the Caliph, but al-Man~i. ir defeated him at Rayy, where he fell in battle. 3 "These messianic uprisings", Grayzel observes, "were based on a strange mixture of ideas. The desire of a fairly large number of Jews to throw off the yoke of their new Mohammedan masters was bound up, somehow, with rebelliousness against Jewish authority. " 4 It is difficult to say how the author of the Sirah reacted to these events. ·As a confident member of the dominant elite he could ignore the revolts, smugly look at Jewish prosperity and freedom under Islam and deal with the history of the Jews in the ljijaz during the life of the Apostle with detachment. Or did the impact of the messianic movements juxtaposed with the pomp and show of the Exilarch give him an impression of Jewish infidelity and ungratefulness? Were his reporters (who were the sons of converted Jews)5 aware of these events, nervous and outdoing the Arab Muslims in their loyalty by embellishing their reports about the Jews of Medina? One is tempted to speculate-and not without reason-that the B. Qaynuqa", the B. al-Na<;lir and above all the B. Quranah were not so much part of the maghazi of the Apostle as much as a warning to the Jews of the Abbasid empire: 'one more lbn "isa and you will be exterminated like the B. Quray:fah'. It is idle to ask whether Ibn lsl). aq was not hearing the echoes of the trumpets at the installation of the Exilarch retro- 1 Maimonides lggeret Teman, vide Israel Friedlander, "Jewish Arabic Studies'', The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. I (1910-11), p. 206. Shahrastani; Al-Mila[ wa al-Nii1al (Cairo, 1968), Vol. I, p. 180, says a large crowd of Jews followed him. 2 Albert M. Hyamson, "Messiahs (Pseudo-)", Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York, 1916), Vol. III, p. 582. 3 In addition to Shahrastani and Maimonides see Graetz, Vol. III, p. 124-5, and Margolis and Marx, p. 259. 4 Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews (New York, 1968), p. 245. 5 Ibn l;lajar Al-"Asqalani, Tahdhib al-Tahdhib, IX, p. 45.