Rabbi's Musings

As we enter a new year we continue our stroll though Jewish history in honor of CBSW’s fortieth anniversary. (We will also be studying American Jewish history in person at our biweekly lunch and learns this winter and spring.) Today we have reached the dawn of the Muslim era in the world at its impact on Judaism and the Jewish people.

Islam arose in the Arabian desert in the early seventh century. Muhammad, its prophet, taught that Islam actually came before Christianity and Judaism. His new religion tolerated Judaism and Christianity, as long as their adherents kept in line.

This meant that Jews did reasonably well under Islamic rule, as long as they remembered their place. There was a golden age in Muslim Spain when the Jewish communities there prospered and Judaism itself borrowed much from the intellectual abundance of Islamic philosophy. The golden age began to lose its luster as Spanish Islam itself splintered into various factions. A victim of this crisis is the venerable Moses Maimonides, whom we will learn about next week!