The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

But in 1834 frock-coat Jewry was not paying much attention to tarboosh Jewry whose condition, apart from the occasional murder, was in any case shocking. The vast majority lived in poverty, ignorance and especially fearfulness. There exists today a romance of Jewish life in the Islamic world, imagined as one of neighbourly harmony, irremediably altered by the rise of Zionism and the creation of Israel. It is true that in cities like Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad and Aleppo, at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, a Jewish middle class, much of it identified with the forces of modernisation, lived a culturally vibrant life alongside Muslim and Christian co-citizens. But this was the creation of colonial modernising, and the Jews paid a heavy price for their identification with empire. For centuries before that, the mass of Jewish poor in Syria, Egypt, Palestine and the Maghreb states lived a back-alley life, hammering metalwork or selling brightly woven textiles and leather goods. In so far as their children were educated at all, it was in religious schools, the cheders, where they were taught to recite the Torah by rote much as their Arab peers chanted passages from the Quran. Those same children had to get used to being spat on in casual encounters with Muslims in the street, and showered with stones whenever it amused anyone to do so. The Jews of the Muslim world were still more or less legally powerless, prohibited from testifying on their own behalf i...