For instance, in 1066, the ibn Nagrela family, prominent courtiers at the Muslim court of Granada, were deposed and the ghetto destroyed by mobs incensed at the haughty behavior of the ‘infidels.’ This pogrom was preceded by a vitriolic attack launched by the theologian Ibn Hazm and the writer Abu Ishaq, both of whom castigated King Badis for his relative leniency in letting Jews rise to influential positions in contradistinction to their degraded station in Islamic jurisprudence.
The internecine warfare among the petty Moorish states which succeeded the Caliphate of Cordoba led to the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by the Almoravides and Almohades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, respectively. These Berber marabouts, warrior clerics similar in certain respects to the Teutonic Knights, streamed from their forts in the North African wastelands and with their intolerance put the nail in the coffin for Jewish life in Muslim Spain.
By offering the choice of conversion or death to all ‘non-believers,’ a stance contrary to general Islamic practice, they sounded the death knell for the relative tolerance of the ‘Iberian Renaissance.’
The Jewish condition tended to worsen with the decline of Islamic power (with Turkey being the main exception), reaching its nadir in Iran and Yemen from the seventeenth century onward. In those countries, Jews were subjected to particularly humiliating forms of discrimination. In Shiite Persia, for example, with its stringent ‘sanitary’ religious prohibitions, food or items handled by Jews were considered unclean and polluting to the faithful, a situation analogous in some respects to that of the Hindu caste of untouchables in India. Iran even created its own Marranos by forcibly converting the Jews of Meshed in 1839.
In Yemen a royal decree instituted in 1673 and continuing until that country was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1872 forced Jews to go bareheaded, something particularly galling to the pious. Yemen’s treatment of its Jews varied little with the passage of time, which can be seen in the following description offered by the German explorer Hans Helfritz in Land Without Shade, a book published in 1936:
“The Southern Arabians regard the Jews as people of a lower grade, and despise them utterly, although both belong to the same Semitic race. Accordingly the Jew has very limited privileges and is subject to strict regulations. Evidently there is a desire to prevent him from climbing upwards. An indication of the inferiority of his position is in the fact that he is not allowed to ride a camel or a mule, but has to rely on donkeys for his transport.
“Further, he is not permitted to carry arms or to serve in the army; on the other hand he is required to pay a high sum to the Imam, who then condescends to see to his protection. He is called upon to perform the most servile tasks, and though he is allowed to trade in the Arab city [the Arab section of San’a], he may never settle among Mohammedans.
“The houses in the ghetto, the Ka?a el Jahud (City of the Jews), may only have two floors, and the synagogues are allowed in no wise to differ from the ordinary living houses. Consequently the streets in the ghetto, in contrast to those in the Arab city, make a monotonous and unattractive impression.”
This predicament was repeated throughout the Mohammedan world. A late nineteenth century European traveler penned the following similar observations about North Africa:
“It has lasted long enough before the Jews enjoyed in those countries [i.e. Morocco and Tunisia] an existence worthy of human dignity….The oppression to which the latter [the Jews] are exposed, even to this day, are almost incredible…they had to live in a certain quarter, and were not allowed to appear in the streets after sunset….If it was a dark night, they were not allowed to carry a lantern like the Moors and Turks, but a candle, which the wind extinguished every minute.
