From the perspective of this millennium, it might be tempting to conclude that the two religions that share a Middle Eastern spiritual homeland with Christianity are incurable enemies. In the year 2000, Jewish and Muslim voices are all too frequently raised against each other--thank the Lord, less often in America than in other parts of the world.
Yet transported back 1,000 years on some magic carpet--a good Oriental mode of imaginative voyage--time travelers would witness quite the opposite relationship between adherents of the two faiths. At the turn of the first millennium, Jews were well integrated into Muslim societies, often rising to positions of considerable authority.
Moses Maimonides, the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers, served as court physician to the viceroy of Egypt. The head of the Jewish community in Baghdad, capital of the Islamic world, he was respectfully addressed by the city's Muslim authorities as: "Our Lord, the Son of David."
The animosities came much later and represent, in truth, no more than the blinking of a historical eye. With the re-establishment of the state of Israel in the middle of the 20th Century, Jews and Muslims have sometimes confused their political differences with religious antipathies. Their ancestors wouldn't have made that mistake.
In 1492, when the Christian rulers of Spain expelled their Jewish subjects, thousands were given refuge by the Muslim Sultan of Turkey. They brought to Constantinople a brilliant Sephardic Jewish culture that had flourished under Spain's previous Muslim rulers for almost eight centuries.
By contrast, Jews were just then being forcibly segregated in many Christian countries. Venice established the first Jewish ghetto in 1517.
Indeed, Jews and Muslims share a common distaste for measuring history by Christianity's millennial yardstick.
The first millennium was shortly marked by the First Crusade, which replanted a Christian presence in the Near East. But Jews remember that that military expedition was financed by slaughtering Jewish communities in Europe and confiscating the residents' property. Muslims recall that the Christian knights celebrated their capture of Jerusalem in 1099 by massacring the city's largely Islamic inhabitants.
The contrasting mutual accommodation between Jews and Muslims stems from the fact that Islam and Christianity took quite differing views of their religious parent. Judaism is acknowledged as a necessary predecessor by both Christianity and Islam. But while Christians recognized their Hebraic heritage by preserving the Old Testament in their Bible, they also have long regarded Jews as spiritual traitors whose forbears were responsible for Jesus' crucifixion.
Muslims, though, long accepted the validity of the Jewish faith, favorably noting that their Jewish neighbors honored a holy text, the Torah, just as they drew their religious inspiration from the Koran.
"Jews were protected as a people of the Book," notes Aminah McCloud, professor of Islamic studies at DePaul University.
Indeed, Judaism and Islam each in its own way recognized the principle of toleration centuries before the concept had even made an intellectual beachhead in Christian Europe.
Judaism defined itself with encyclopedic precision, holding its followers to 613 commandments. But it never assumed that such was the only way to spirituality: Non-Jews were recognized as decent, God-fearing people if they lived up to only a few, central moral requirements--roughly the Ten Commandments.
Islam gave that principle a political expression. By the year 1,000, Muslim armies had conquered the whole southern half of the Mediterranean basin. To the East, Islam had expanded out of its Arabian homeland to include the Fertile Crescent and Persia. Yet the inhabitants of that vast empire were under no compulsion to forsake their ancestral religions.
Even more remarkable is the fact that Islam began as a faith of the Arabs but came to accept peoples of all races under its religious tent. In the second millennium, it expanded into India and then into South East Asia and the islands off its coast. Other Muslim missionaries brought word of the faith to sub-Saharan Africa, making the Muslim community truly a human rainbow.
Writing in the context of American society, the distinguished African-American historian W.E.B. DuBois held that "the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line." But with that kind of prejudice having never gained a footing in Islam, it has largely been exempted from the painful re-examination of racial doctrines that 20th Century Christianity has had to undertake.
Indeed, Islam's color blindness made it increasingly attractive to black Americans in the countdown to the second millennium. Not only did Elijah Muhammad make his Nation of Islam (the so-called Black Muslims) a force in the black community, other African Americans began to study and worship at more traditional mosques.