Muhammad and The Jews — Page 28
Here they were not shut out from the paths of honour, nor excluded from the privileges of the state, but, untrammelled, were allowed to develop their powers in the midst of a free, sim pie and ta Ien ted people, to show their manly courage, to compete for the gifts of fame, and with practised hand to measure swords with their antagonists. Instead of bearing the yoke, the Jews were not infrequently the leaders of the Arabian tribe s. 1 The Jews of the I:Iijaz, unlike other Jewish communities, did not seem to interest themselves in literary or scholarly pursuits. The authenticity of their poetical remains has been questioned by Margoliouth and others. 2 Al-Samaw?al is but a legend and KaGb b. al-Ashraf was the son of an Arab, though "he behaved as if he belonged to his mother's clan of al-Nac}ir". 3 Baron admits: Arabian Jewry's intellectual equipment seem to have been limited to some scrolls of law, Hebrew prayer books, and other paraphernalia of worship and study, while the availability at that time of more than fragmentary Arabic translations from Scripture is extremely dubious. 4 The knowledge of the Bible which the Arabian Jews possessed, according to Graetz,. . . was not considerable. They were acquainted with it only through the medium of the Agadic exegesis, which had become familiar to them in their travels or had been brought to them by immigrants. For them the glorious history of the past coalesced so completely with the Agadic additions that they were no longer able to separate the gold from the dross. 5 They maintained trade contacts with the Jews of Syria 6 and religious ties with Babylon 7 , "but they had few intellectual contacts with the centres of Jewish life" in these two places. 8 In the absence of any historical evidence it is difficult to agree with the romantic claim of Baron that during the few generations of Jewish control the focal northern areas were raised 1 Graetz, Vol. III, p. 53. 2 See D. S. Margoliouth, The Relations between Arabs and Israelites Prior to the Rise of ls/am (London, 1924) and Horovitz, Islamic Culture, III, pp. 188-90. 3 Watt, Muhammad at Medina, p. 210. 4 Baron, Vol. III, p. 261. Graetz, Vol. Ill, p. 59. Ibid. , pp. 58-59, and supra, p. 27. 7 Infra, p. 30. 8 Baron, Vol. III, p. 72.