History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

He altered the nature of the Sabbath and changed it to Friday. He changed the orientation of prayers from Jerusalem to Mecca. He redated the principal feast. Most important of all, he declared that most of the Jewish dietary laws were simply a punishment for their past misdeeds, and so abolished them, though he retained the prohibitions on pork, blood and carcasses, and some of the slaughtering rules. All these changes made it quite impossible to bring about a merging of Jewish and Islamic communities, however much they might agree on ethical or dogmatic fundamentals; but, in addition, Islam soon developed a dogmatic dynamism of its own, and theological debate – leading to violent sectarianism – soon began to play a central role in Islam, as in Christianity. Above all, Islam quickly created a theory and practice of forcible conversion, as the Jews had done in the time of Joshua, David and the Hasmoneans, but which rabbinic Judaism had implicitly and conclusively renounced.