Mark R. Cohen, who teaches history at Princeton, disputes the “Golden Age” narrative, which suggests that the Jewish-Muslim relationship was an “interfaith utopia” under Muslim majority empires. But to say that Jews and Muslim have never been amicable is a distortion of history:

“The idea of a so-called Golden Age, a Jewish-Muslim interfaith utopia in Islamic Spain and elsewhere in the middle ages, has rightly been called a myth” writes Cohen. “But to say that Muslims have always persecuted the Jews…would be just as wrong indeed, a counter-myth.”

Cohen has described many instances during the middle ages and beyond where relations between the two religious groups had remained cooperative and peaceful. He further reveals that the roots of anti-Semitism are much more recent: “imported into the Middle East in the nineteenth century on the heels of European colonialism.”

Even Bernard Lewis, whose work on Islam has been met with severe criticisms (and rightly so), maintains his position that any inherent hatred within Islam for Judaism or Jews is simply a falsehood.

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