re: #58 po8crg

Not completely convinced there, Muhammad was pretty anti-semitic at times, especially in Medina.

OTOH, the Ummayad era was a pretty good one to be a Jew - there’s a reason that Ummayad Al-Andalus was Sepharad.

Anti-semitism has ebbed and flowed between the two sides of the Mediterranean over the years and the Jews have migrated back and forth as Christian and Muslim have taken turns to be tolerant and oppressor.

Different cultural patterns. Also, of course, different cultures within each larger religious set. It’s enormously complicated by political, religious and other internal factors. Unfortunately, everyone, not just Pam, tends to try to ‘pick sides’ depending on current political factors.

For years you’d hear about how the Muslim world was great to Jews. Then, mysteriously, it switched to, “No, they were even worse than the Christians.” History didn’t change, we didn’t learn anything new—the world we live in now changed.

I would say that ‘worse than the Christians’ is ridiculous. In general, the good times for Jews in the Muslim world tended, especially post-Crusades, to be better than the good times in the Christian world. The bad times in both tended to involve violent mobs and lack of civil liberties, but the obsessive psychotic behavior at government levels that cropped up periodically in the Christian world were not a feature in the Muslim world. (The Inquisition in Spain and New Spain, for example.)