Sunlight & Shadow

by Lucien Gubbay

Book Overview

Despite the Jews? subordinate status in Muslim society, it was under Muslim rule that early Judaism developed into the religion that we know today. In recounting the history of Jews living in the world of Islam from the age of Muhammad to the present day, Lucien Gubbay, acclaimed author of Origins and Quest for the Messiah, fosters a better understanding of a long-standing, enriching, yet problematic relationship. "Gubbay writes clearly and fairly...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1892746697
• ISBN13: 9781892746696
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Other Press (NY)
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An apt title

Into a short book of 160 pages Lucien Gubbay packs what is for the most part a workmanlike account of the relationship between the Jews and Islam. The title is very apt. Gubbay does not underplay the shadow side of the relationship: for most of the history of Islamic rule over Jews, the latter were second-class citizens, though protected (that is what the word `dhimmi' means) from active persecution as long as they paid a special tax and were loyal subjects of their rulers - which they were, from the early days of Islam to the end of the Ottoman Empire. Bat Ye'or in her book `Dhimmitude' (see my review) has listed a great many discriminations, hassles and humiliations to which Jews were exposed; and on a few occasions the shadows were very black, with instances when Jews were forced conversion and exile or worse, and in that long history there were a few instances of massacres. But mostly the protection was real, and the position of the Jews under Muslim rule was vastly superior to what it was in Christian Europe. And there are certainly periods of sunlight, when Jews and their institutions were respected and honoured by their Islamic rulers, when they lived peaceably and cooperatively with their neighbours, when they flourished economically and professionally, and quite often even politically, having influential positions at the courts of their rulers and in administration: in early medieval Iraq; during the so-called Golden Age in medieval Spain, and then in the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed Jews who were expelled from Europe, especially from 15th and 16th century Spain and Portugal - aspects to which, I think, Bat Ye'or had given insufficient attention. There are, however, significant omissions in the last part of Gubbay's book. He mentions that Britain and France forced the Sultan to end dhimmitude in 1856, for which of course the Jews were grateful to them. In just two paragraphs he shows that from that time onwards many Muslims, already humiliated by Western imperialism, saw the Jews as allies of the colonialists. But astonishingly there is no mention of the Balfour Declaration, which so powerfully reinforced that idea. Though there is one reference to Zionism in the index, there is not a single mention of it in the text; and there is nothing on the creation of the State of Israel and of what it has meant to the Muslims. The account of the visceral hatred of Islamic fundamentalism for the Jews, with which the book ends, therefore omits one of its most important ingredients. These last few pages lack the judicious balance which has characterized most of the book and to which he appeals in his closing two paragraphs.

Lucien Gubbay masterfully presents the larger historical context

Lucien Gubbay, Sunlight and Shadow: The Jewish Experience of Islam (Other Books, 2001) The largest dilemma currently facing Sephardim is the problem of self-knowledge. Our children who attend American Jewish day schools are faced exclusively with Ashkenazi oriented curricula and administrators and teachers who, even if they are Sephardi in ethnic origin, have been trained in the methods of the ubiquitous Board of Jewish Education and the general detritus of the larger Orthodox Torah Umesorah system which has controlled the Jewish day school system since the 1950's. This control has created a pedagogical status quo that produces a student with very definable characteristics not traditionally Sephardi in orientation. In the course of the past 50 years, Sephardim have seen their cultural and religious traditions fade into oblivion. Self-representation in the public arena is now nearly non-existent. With the recent political struggles in Israel over Palestinian rights, the Israeli government, with the help of academics and the benighted Sephardim themselves, has been able to manipulate the complex history of the Jews of the Middle East (even the nomenclature is not without its own internal lack of polemic: Are we Sephardim? Mizrahim? Arab Jews? Jews of Arab Lands? Eastern Jews?) in order to create a quid pro quo between the Jewish refugees of Arab countries and the Palestinians. The issue of the quid pro quo unfortunately further exacerbates the tensions between Sephardim and their Muslim compatriots. Having lived since 1948 as second class citizens in the Jewish state, Sephardim have continually sought to displace their rage at the Arabs and are presented, or rather have been manipulated into "Arab haters." As Lucien Gubbay masterfully presents the larger historical context in his Sunlight and Shadow: The Jewish Experience of Islam, the truth is far more complicated than merely seeing Muslims as the eternal enemy of the Jews. The story told by Gubbay is refreshingly balanced in perspective. We learn about the great historical evolution of Middle Eastern civilization after the Islamic revolts. Rather than merely presenting the Islamic conquest of the Middle East as retrogressive, as is so often done in books of this type, Gubbay continually places the role of Islam within the larger context of Roman and Byzantine civilization. Against the dominant Christian model, as Gubbay states, "It should not be forgotten that the Arabs exploded into a world exhausted by twenty-six years of constant warfare, a world whose inhabitants longed for peace and stability and had come to believe that great changes were inevitable. Christian heretics and Jews in the Byzantine Empire, to whom almost any change must have seemed for the better, welcomed the Arabs with open arms." It is balance that enriches Gubbay's argument. Rather than enlist the lachrymose approach to Jewish history that has generally governed the limited works on the subject of Jews