
Originally Posted by
ENT
The accounts don't speak of an egalitarian co-existence between Jews and Muslims, far from it.
The academic treatise (written by a Jewish academic, incidentally) clearly states that the degree of freedom from violence and persecution, legal rights, the right to trade and make ones own living ones own way, and the general degree of co-existence and harmony enjoyed by Jews in the Muslim world, far far exceeded that of the Ashkenazi Jews in the Christian world- specifically Europe. There can be no denying this fact- and it is a Fact. So much for the bigoted 'Revisionists'.
The Princeton academic treatise, written by a Jewish Professor, concludes :-
The Arabic language gave Jews entrance to the corridors of Muslim power and made possible the remarkable careers of such luminaries as Samuel ha-Nagid ibn Naghrela in the eleventh century, head of the Jewish community, poet, Talmudist, and vizier of Granada (the father of the Jewish vizier assassinated in 1066), as well as scores of other Jewish denizens of Islamic courts, many of whom occupy pages in Islamic chronicles. Other dignitaries, as well as merchants, less well known because they did not leave books behind, but whose quotidian lives are described in minute detail in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, are no less important as Jewish exemplars of the Jewish-Muslim coexistence that reigned for several centuries during the Islamic high Middle Ages. For such illustrious figures in the Jewish elite, those centuries were indeed a Golden Age.
Of course, there are those who would prefer to take the word of an aged, uneducated bigot over this entirely credible academic source, but they are hardly worthy of serious discourse- except within their own right wing bigotry and the blogs that nourish their ignorance and malcontent.