Season 1: Episode 15 - The Rising Cresent

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A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots. That's what Marcus Garvey said. And I say that I'm trying to root us in our past history in order to give us a sense of origin and culture that will allow us to stand up tall in the present so that we can begin to see the horizon of the future of which we dream. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 15, The Rising Crescent So from here on out, our story is going to go split stream. On one side is going to be the Christian Byzantine Empire, and the other, the Rising Crescent of Islam. And the truth is, it's way more than split. Because as we go forward, the story is going to begin to fragment into ever more numerous subplots.

and that fragmentation is actually going to characterize not just the context of exile but our very being as we spread around the globe a story to illustrate you know one Friday my eldest daughter came home from Gaon and told me that she had a Davar Torah a little bit of Torah wisdom that she wanted to say that night at the Shabbat table now you can imagine I was ecstatic this is exactly why I moved to the land of Israel so there we are already Friday night, and she asks me for a glass of water, some oil, and a fork. She's six. I say, okay, no, it's fine. Okay, she said the words to Bartor. This is what I'm after. And so she pours the oil into the water, and she takes the fork, and she starts to mix it around.

And you can just hear the gun in it. Just like oil doesn't mix with water, so too the Jews don't mix with the nations of the world. My wife and I are looking at each other horrified. That's 40 years of liberal education out the door by kindergarten. But nevertheless, as she began to mix it around, I became fascinated by what was happening there in the cup. Because it's true that oil doesn't mix with water, but the truth is, it doesn't exactly go back to being one unified layer. On the contrary, it becomes what we know as an emulsion. There are chunks, clumps of oil, which are separate from the water, but separate from each other as well. Because there's two forces going on in that cup. One is hydrophobia, and the other one is internal cohesion.

And those two forces are actually going to characterize the Jewish story from here on out. Now what does hydrophobia mean? It's rejecting that which lies outside of you. And we spent a good part of the last episode actually speaking about the power of defining ourselves as not other. the other power the power of internal cohesion means that there's some positive core of identity which is maintained and for Am Yisrael that's going to rest on two things the first is the communal structure of the Kihila of Jewish community now in this there is a certain halachic service element meaning in order to live as a Jew you need a ritual slaughterer a mohel, a teacher for children a ritual bath, etc. But there's also the corporate identity side.

Because the Middle Ages, into which we are slowly but surely marching, mark a retreat from the Greco-Roman concept of citizenship and a move toward self-regulating communities, which will have their own internal structures and relate to the larger malchut, the larger kingdom, as communities and not as individuals. the ability of the individual to actually relate to society on their own is going to lie well ahead in our story but it's going to play a critical role keep your eye out so in many ways actually the experience of the Jews in the Christian and Muslim empires will become a model for how these universalist worldviews meaning all-encompassing communities of faith are going to deal with the other in their midst and that's a piece that we're going to pick up at the end of our story But the really powerful side of positive identity, which serves to maintain the internal cohesion of the Jews, is the conversation of the Gemara.

Because as we become scattered around the globe, that conversation will not cease. We have to recall that the Gemara will be transformed by the Go'onim, the people who inherit the Gemara from its authors, from a live conversation into a canonical document, but nevertheless the conversation will not cease. What happens is actually, whereas up to now the Gemara was a conversation, and therefore like every conversation, it's the product of the interaction of the actual participants and the context within which they find themselves, now in the hands of the Gaonim, the Gemara will actually shape those who can enter the conversation at all, and through the halachic discourse, through the legal structures which it employs, it will also, to a large degree, craft the environment in which they find themselves.

That's going to be our major topic in the coming episode when we speak about the Geonim in their own right. But I want you to just keep in mind that what the Geonim do is they transform the Gemara into a cultural matrix. Now, seeing as we've already mapped out the fact that this conversation was going on in parallel tracks well before this episode, one in the land of Israel and one in Bavel, in Babylon, we have to ask the question, how does Bavel come to reign supreme in this conversation? And why did they get to be the ones who produced the ism of Judaism out of so many disparate Jewish narratives? Well, if you look within the Babli, in the Babylonian Gemara itself, you'll see that it lays claim to both spiritual and genealogical superiority even over the land of Israel.

First of all, the Exilarch, who we've mentioned a few times. this is the last vestige of Jewish self-rule. We spoke about the year 425, when the Roman Emperor Theodosius II declined to renew the position of Nasi, of the patriarch of the Sanhedrin, of the Jewish body of self-government, which existed in the land of Israel. But the Axelarch, who is the parallel position within Bavel, has quite deep roots. Traditionally, the Jews actually saw the Exilarch as part of an unbroken chain of self-rule way back in the words of Jacob as he blessed his sons on his deathbed you can look it up in the 49th chapter of the book of Genesis it says that the scepter shall not depart from Judah and the sages in Sanhedrin that's the Gemara, 5a if you want to look it up they say from David onwards the scepter does not part from Judah this refers to the exilarchs in Babylon who ruled over the people with a scepter and who were appointed by royal mandate the exilarchs themselves actually laid claim to roots in King Yoyachin he was the first king of Judah who was exiled by Nebuchadnezzar in the time of the first temple recall 11 years before the first temple was destroyed by the Babylonians they took away the king and his ministers and all the craftsmen of Yushalayim Now, there's no solid documentary evidence for the existence of the office of the exorc before the early 3rd century of the Common Era, but nevertheless, there's good reasons, given the feudal structure of the Parthian Persian Empire and the internal communal structure of the Jews, to believe that indeed the office is quite ancient.

But either way, it will be the last standing central authority and the last vestige of self-rule, which the Jews will know until the modern Zionist era. Now, the sense of Babylonian superiority actually has unlimited literary expressions in the Gemara, but I'll just give you one to think about. Gemara in Kedushin in 69b says the following, Rabbi Eliezer said, Ezra didn't go up from Babylon until he made it like pure sifted flour. Meaning what? We followed the story of Ezra as he came up in the time of Persia, and we traced the trials and tribulations of the returnees all the way through the Greek period and the Roman and through the destruction of the Second Temple, and for so long our camera was on there, as if that's the story that mattered.

What Rabbi Eliezer is telling you, the Babylonian attitude is, Ezra left and he took the riffraff with him. So the Babylonian Gemara actually creates an almost seamless continuity between their past in Eretz Yisrael and even further back, the time of Abraham in Babylon itself, and the present occupation in Babel, thus shoring up legitimacy to Babylonian identity and allowing it to uncouple from and eventually actually overtake the identity of the land of Israel. That's what happens in the Gemara. But the Go'onim, who inherit the Gemara, will take the next step in making this Babylonian identity the actual source of future Jewish identity altogether. Now there's one more question we have to ask, which is, despite how it presents itself, was this Babylonian Jewish society really Jewish?

I don't mean really Jewish at all, but how pure was it? How much could it claim an unbroken core of identity? And in particular, how much Zoroastrian influence is there in the Babylonian Gemara? This is a huge area of academic research, and so it's worth it for us just to touch on it. Now, it's important to note that in general, no matter how much autonomy communities had in this corporate identity world of the Middle Ages, and no matter how much it was actually mutually agreeable to everyone to shore up their particular identity by drawing strong cultural and linguistic barriers between them and their neighbors, people are people, and it quite clear that the boundaries between them are porous An example would be to look into the language of the Gemara itself There are a considerable number of Persian loner words indicating that they were indeed interacting with Persian society in a way which necessitated the adoption of language, not just in order to communicate, but to actually facilitate intercommunal activities.

By the way, it's nothing compared to the thousands of words of Greek and Latin that you find in the rabbinic literature based in the land of Israel. Now, there's another place of significant crossover, and that's in a magical worldview. It is quite striking that there is a shared demonology and angelology between the Zoroastrian documents we have of the time, and the rabbinic ones as well. These are kind of a little bit fluff. The deeper challenge is the question in my mind, of what degree the dualism, which is so fundamental to Zoroastrian culture, became a means of answering the fundamental challenge to Judaism's vision of one God, the odyssey, the existence of evil, and why evil happens to those who we would assume deserve good.

Because the question of how one can maintain the assertion of one good God in the face of a broken world and an increasingly difficult exile is actually going to follow us for the rest of the Jewish story. Look out the window. It's going on to this very day. And the Zoroastrian answer, and one which is really adopted by Christianity, albeit in a less absolute sense, is to say that the world is really actually the battleground between two opposing forces. And though the sages remained firm in asserting that God is the only power, anyone who's ever worn a gartel, that ritual belt which was used really first by the Hasidim in a popular sense to separate between the lower organs, the sexual organs and the digestive organs, and the upper organs, but which has its roots actually in the Gemara, and can be followed through the Halacha, as I said, to our very day.

It can also be traced to a specifically Zoroastrian worldview about how the various organs of the body belong to opposing forces. So anyone who's ever done that will know, or at least should know, that there's much in Jewish practice which embodies the deep-seated sense that there is indeed a battle going on within me and within the world, between the forces of dark and light, physicality and spirituality, upper and lower worlds. And perhaps this is the place to remind ourselves of a paradigm that we actually put out at the moment of the destruction of the Second Temple, in the context of the sages of Yavne, those wise men whom Rabbi Yochan ben Zakai saved from the destruction and together with whom he created the culture of rabbinic Jewry.

And this was the question of whether our view of the past, and therefore our view of the future, are neoclassical or cultural evolutionary. Remember, neoclassical is the idea that the perfection lies in the past. That once upon a time, things were good, and we've mucked it up. Therefore, if we want to get to the future of which we dream, what we actually have to do is go backwards. And in European history, people are familiar with it, this is best represented by the Renaissance. the key to the other view the evolutionary paradigm is how much can we understand our progress forward through history not as an accretion of accidents which muddy the waters of pure culture but rather as continuous opportunities with which we are presented in order to bring out from within ourselves new facets of the truth that we carry which would have never emerged if it weren't for the historical circumstance in which we find ourselves now the vision of redemption which is able to stitch together such a track is actually the power of unbroken conversation because only conversation can maintain a continuity of identity in the face of life's disruptions in the face of the encounters with others and even in the face of conscious decisions to adopt ideas and practices which we might have identified as from outside as long as we stay engaged in that conversation we can stitch these things together into one wholeness now, no matter what stance you take on the question of cultural purity it's without doubt that the conversation preserved in the Bavli and the culture which grew out of it in Bavel has significantly less of the hydrophobic element in their development there was a much lower level of tension between the Bavli and its neighbors That's really because, first of all, there was an incredible geographic concentration, massive numbers of Jews, who actually had developed over a significant amount of time with a relatively high degree of autonomy.

Remember, with the exception of the troubles of the late 5th and early 6th century that we mentioned last week, their life was good. Furthermore, and perhaps more profoundly, in Babel, there was no need to live in the tension of the constant hermeneutic battle of that theological confrontation with the Church which had claimed the Hebrew Scriptures as their own. Lastly, perhaps the most practical reason that Bavel rose over the land of Israel is that Eretz Israel at this point has ceased to be the homeland and has become the Holy Land. And that's really happened for two reasons. One's the demographic shift that we mentioned in the last episode that was really finalized by the crushing of the Samaritan revolts in the early 6th century.

and made Christianity the dominant population in the land until the Muslim conquest. But even before that, the transformation had begun, and really began with the mother of Emperor Constantine, Empress Helena. Now, she was also a pagan-turned-Christian, and she attended the Council of Nicaea with her son Constantine. And there at the council, she met one of the delegates, Bishop Macarius of Aelia Capitolina. remember that's the name that Jerusalem was called by Hadrian after he crushed the Barcochal revolt now the Empress met Bishop Macarius and spoke at length with him about the sad state of the sites hallowed by the steps of Jesus of Nazareth and she became so absorbed in his sorrowful tale that when the council was over she decided she would go immediately to Jerusalem and soon enough she left with the blessings, authority and cash from her son the Emperor Now this became a voyage of discovery.

She and the bishop identified the locations of the crucifixion, of the burial of Jesus of Nazareth, and of many other events associated with his last days. According to Christian tradition, they also discovered relics associated with the crucifixion itself. And she was the one who founded the traditions of the locations of the main Christian sites, which are still followed to this day. A good example is the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. in Bethlehem. So, Eretz Israel has become the Holy Land in place of the Homeland. The Jews will maintain a foothold in Tiveria and for a few brief years even return to Jerusalem, and we'll come back to that later, but for now they no longer drive the culture in the Land of Israel.

This Christianization is going to go on in the Holy Land. It will be interrupted through this by the Persian invasion in 614, and will ultimately come to an end with the Muslim conquest in 638. Because the rise of the Islamic empire is the last piece in the puzzle of how Babylon actually reigns supreme, because this will be the first time that Babylonian Jewry and that of Eretz Israel are actually united under one political entity since the Seleucid Greeks that the Maccabees fought. But because of the shifting cultural weight. This will actually allow Babylon to take out the Minhad, the customs of Eretz Israel, and establish theirs as the sole source of Jewish identity. And that will really be the focus of the coming episode.

So for now, let Babylon reign supreme, and let's talk about the rise of the Crescent. Now if you're going to talk about Islam, you have to talk about the Arabian Peninsula. And if we're going to talk about the Arabian Peninsula, we need to note that Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula actually well predates Islam. There's an Arab legend, in fact, that Moshe, when the Jews came out from Egypt, and they had their first and cataclysmic battle with Amalek, which is continuing down to our day, that Moshe sent a contingent of soldiers down into Arabia to fight some remnant of Amalek, and that they settled in the Hijaz, that western coastal region, which became the site of spiritual pilgrimage to Islam to this very day.

It's odd to me that there is an Arab version of that old joke which says that if Moshe had taken a right instead of a left when he came out of Egypt, then the Jews would have all the oil. But either way, there are also many traditions which teach that the Jews came in the wake of the Roman persecutions of the first and second centuries. And the Yemenite Jews, whose roots of course are in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, say that they themselves are the descendants of the Queen of Sheba, who the Bible says actually visited King Solomon and that she had a son by him and she brought back Jews with her to Sheba in order to educate her child. Any way you look at it, it's critical to note that the Jews of Arabia are actually quite far away from either the land of Israel or Babel, so the two main cultural centers of rabbinic Judaism are not exactly right next door.

And this is critical because we know that the Arabian Pinsenah, for at least the Christians, was always a refuge for groups of peoples who are seeking freedom from outside influence in order to pursue their spiritual path on their own. And there are indications that there was a proto-Rabbinic or a subset of Rabbinic thought which actually took hold amongst the tribes in the Arabian Peninsula Now many of these tribes were actually quite powerful and held local hegemony An example, in the town of Taima, halfway between Medina and Petra, the capital of the Nabataean Empire, the Jews were actually strong enough to insist that anyone who settled in their town must convert to Judaism. There is much documentary evidence that Jews and Christians had a significant cultural impact on pre-Islamic Arabia, partially simply in their capacity as monotheists, for which they were deeply respected, but they also introduced many biblical stories and Midrashic traditions into pre-Islamic Arab culture, some of which actually emerged later in Islamicized form.

an example the collection of Midrashim which is known as Pirkei de Rebbe Eliezer collected likely in the 7th perhaps 8th century, the Byzantine era tells a story about Avraham's visit to Yishmael remember the Bible says that Avraham at the behest of Sarah drives Yishmael, his firstborn son out of his home to make way for Yitzchak his chosen seed and the Islamic culture and Arab culture as well will associate their roots with Ishmael. So the Midrash says that Avraham felt bad about this, and he was concerned for the well-being of his son Ishmael, and so he decided to go visit. And he promised his wife Sarah that he wouldn't even get off his camel, but he wanted to make sure that his boy was okay.

And so he went out into the desert, and he found Ishmael's camp, but he found that Ishmael was not at home. He was out with the flock, and his wife was there. But his wife failed to offer Avraham water to drink or food to eat, And so Avraham, without dismounting, said to her, give a message to your husband when he comes home. Tell him that the lintel of the door is no good. So when Ishmael comes home, and she says that there was a venerable old man who came, and that he told me to tell you that the lintel of the door is no good, he immediately got the message and divorced her. The Midrash goes through a second iteration, where Avraham actually comes back, and then he's treated quite well by Ishmael's second wife, and then he sends a message that the lintel of the door is good.

Now what's fascinating is that the names of the wives are actually Hebraicized versions of Aisha and Fatima, two of Muhammad's earlier wives. And what's even more fascinating is that they're in Islamized version of this idea that Avraham came and visited Ishmael after he had been driven out of his home, but in the Islamized version, Avraham helps him build the house around the Kabba stone, which becomes the central focus of Islamic worship. Now, Islam is born in the Arabian Peninsula in approximately the year 610, because that's the beginning of Muhammad's prophecies in the city of Mecca. There he begins to denounce idolatry and speak in the name of one God, and he is soundly rejected. It seems that this was so not just because of his theological threat to the pagan gods, but he was an economic threat as well to the powerful tribes who controlled the pilgrimage trade in Mecca, and so they drove him out of town.

And he retreated north to Medina in order to regroup after this initial rejection. Now it's important to note that Medina was a halfway Jewish town. In fact, the Jews of Medina were the dominant community until shortly before Muhammad's birth. so he assumed that the Jews, being monotheists after all would join him as he called them to what he saw as the true religion of the one true God now the Jews were no longer dominant Medina but the three Jewish tribes there were still a very powerful and important element of the local fabric unfortunately for them a critical element of Muhammad's success in Medina was in creating a trans-tribal community of believers around his preaching This had the effect of diffusing the tribal tensions and rivalries that were tearing the city and, frankly, much of the Arabian Peninsula apart.

But it also threatened the Jews, because with the dissolution of the traditional tribal structure, the Jews lost their security, unless, of course, they were willing to join the believers. And furthermore, they lost their special status in the eyes of the idolaters now that there was a competing Arab-based monotheism in town. There are actually stories of early converts who, when they heard of the coming of Muhammad, saw him as the one for whom they had been waiting for so long. But, since the general judgment by the Jews was that Muhammad did not fit the specifically Jewish vision of the Redeemer for whom they were waiting, he was more or less rejected by these tribes. What's interesting, and will have significant impact in our story going ahead, is the Quran explains the discrepancies between Muhammad's rendering of certain biblical themes in his arguments with the Jews, and those which the Jews held to be true, as due to the corruption of the Jews' very own tradition in their own hands.

Meaning, the accusation was that both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures were changed, and therefore are presumed to be invalid due to that tampering. Furthermore, the Jews were labeled as a stiff-necked people, who didn't properly follow even Moshe, and weren't true to their very own covenant, and therefore it wasn't to be surprising that they chose to refuse the prophet. And thus, the Jews fought Muhammad's rise in Medina. Now, in addition to the theological and to the tribal cultural, there was one more field of battle, and that was poetry. Now, it's ironic that poetry will actually become one of the greatest contexts for the melding of Jewish-Arabic culture in the coming centuries.

but in Medina it led to a showdown an epic battle of poets in the streets but lest you think it was just a battle of words it resulted in the assassination of the three leading Jewish poets who opposed Muhammad and ultimately when these tribes refused to join him two of them were exiled and in the case of the third, the Banu Kuraiza all the men were killed and the women and children were taken as spoils because as the Quran says about unbelievers kill the polytheists wherever you find them and seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them everywhere but if they repent and establish prayers and pay zakat charity tax given to the needy then open the way for them, God is forgiving and compassionate this tension between absolute judgment and therefore destruction of the idolaters and compassion and acceptance of the converts is going to have to find some middle ground for the Jews.

And we'll speak about that at the end of the episode. For now, despite the failure to convert the Jews of Medina, and despite this ultimate protected second-class status that Islam will eventually make available to them, many Jews did indeed convert. And the story of one of them is going to be particularly helpful in understanding how deeply intertwined the roots of Islam actually are with the Jewish story. And that one is Kab al-Akhbar. Akhbar is an ericized version of the word Haver, which means friend, but also can mean rabbi in other contexts. Now Kab's story comes to us in a variety of sources. There are extra-canonical collections of the Hadith, which are the fragmentary statements that describe the words, actions, and the habits of the Prophet Muhammad, collected by his contemporaries.

There are also what are known as the stories of the prophets. These are collections that preserve the popular religious literature of the early Islamic storytellers, and also through early biographers of the founders of Islam, like the Sirah of Ibn Ishaq. No matter what, little is known of his life before he converted. It is known that he was a rabbi, and that he was from southern Arabia, perhaps even from the tribe of the Himar. The Himar we mentioned in the last episode, And Ibn Ishaq, as I said, the 8th century biographer of Muhammad, actually speaks about the conversion of the Himar from paganism to Judaism in the late 4th or early 5th century. In fact, he says that there was a kingdom of Jews in the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, modern day Yemen, and modern scholarship has confirmed that this is indeed true.

But the legend told by Ibn Ishaq of the founding of the Himar kingdom was a favorite at Medina. You can imagine it went well with the Jews. He says that King Abu Karib and the Himerites at the time made war on Yathrib, which is the old name for Medina, and the Jews of Yathrib made peace by converting the king to Judaism. Upon returning to his kingdom, he actually brought with him two rabbis in order to demonstrate the superior of the power of God to his tribesmen. And Abu Karib set up an ordeal, a simple task by fire. He took the two rabbis and the Himerite pagan priests and threw them into the flames. The pagan priests and their images were burnt to cinders. And the two rabbis came out with their sacred books whole, sweating profusely, but otherwise unharmed.

And in that moment, the Himalites accepted the king's religion. Now whether Qab comes from it or not, it's a worthwhile story to know. So Qab is critical, actually, for the development of Islam, because counted amongst his students are such important early Muslim scholars, including Abdullah ibn Abbas, who's known as the originator of the Tafsir. Tafsir is exegesis, it's the exegesis of the Quran. In particular, he was the one who, rather than speaking just from tradition, used his own knowledge of the Arabic language to interpret the Quran Sounds like a rabbi to me So though Kab actually lived during the time of Muhammad he didn convert until the end of his life when he made his way northward to Medina, around the time of the reign of Omar, the second caliph.

We could probably put it at the year 635, 636. He even actually lived in Medina for a couple of years as a Jew, even though the Jewish tribes had already left town. Tradition describes him as actually teaching from a Torah school in the mosque, and using Biblical and Midrachic literature to interpret difficult verses in the Quran, and ultimately as the basis for his views in Islamic doctrine and tradition once he converts. But what's critical for our story is that according to Islamic tradition, Kaab also accompanies the Caliph Omar northward out of the Arabian Peninsula on the wave of conquest which follows from the foundation of Islam. And that means that they were together when Jerusalem fell to the advancing Arab armies in 637 of the Common Era.

Now, what's been happening in Jerusalem since then? There have been two decades of chaos which preceded the Muslim conquest. Remember, the Byzantine Empire inherits from Rome, and they have been in Jerusalem for hundreds and hundreds of years. But they're actually driven out of Jerusalem by a resurgent Sasanian Persian Empire in the year 614, aided, in fact, by the Jews under the leadership of Nehemiah ben Chushiel and Ben Yamin of Tiberias. You should look into the scroll of Zerubah Bell if you're interested in the whole story. But for our purposes, the Jews managed to return to Jerusalem and have some measure of self-rule there for 15 years. But after the 15 years, it's once again taken by the Byzantine Christians, and the Jews are massacred.

But when the Sidi is finally taken by the Islamic armies only a few years later, Legend has it that the only authority who remained behind to greet them was the patriarch Sophronius, and he agreed to surrender only to the caliph himself. And so Omar, accompanied by Kaab, headed north. Now when they entered the city, Kaab was ecstatic to be in Jerusalem, and Omar wanted to find the Temple Mount. Kaab helped him by locating the Gihon Spring, and measuring according to tradition to exactly where the Temple Mount would be. If you've seen the Temple Mount today, you might think that what I'm telling you is somewhat strange. But remember, according to Christian tradition, the Temple Mount was meant to be abandoned, and in fact it had become a trash heap in the time of the Byzantines.

And so therefore, the Muslims, following Qab's instructions, dug down and they located the mount. And Omar asked Qab where exactly to build the mosque on the Temple Mount. Now it's important to note that there are early Muslim traditions, which teach that the direction of prayer for Muslims was actually Jerusalem for a brief time when Muhammad was in Medina before he returned and conquered Mecca and therefore it makes perfect sense that he wanted to build a mosque on what was indeed a holy site. Cobb suggested that he place the mok to the north of the foundation stone. That's the point on the mount which Jewish tradition teaches was inside the Kodesh Kodeshim, inside the Holy of Holies and is the place from which creation began.

Umar's reply, however, was quite fateful. He said, You still incline toward the Jews, O Abu Ishak. The sanctuary will be to the south of the rock. His accusation was that Kaab wanted people to bow first to the temple and only afterwards be facing Mecca, whereas, as the situation is today, they turn their back on the temple site and face southward toward Mecca. this accusation against Kaab of trying to insert Jewish ideas into Islam which can be found in reference to way more than simply the location of the Mosque of Omar is what eventually caused the decline in Kaab's reputation within Islam and as the generations passed and Islam became an independent religious civilization the material associated with Kaab became tainted by the Jewish sources of his knowledge as opposed to what had been elevated by them in the beginning He's even accused in some sources of attempting to corrupt Islam from within, and his name was eventually excised from the canonical collections of the Hadith.

His teachings are still there, however, and they're often attributed to his students, like Ibn Abbas, because they're simply too important to be excluded. But Kab lives on in the collections of stories and in the non-canonical Hadith. You can still find them if you look. Now there's one more story I'd like to end with, which results from Umar's trip to Jerusalem which has nothing to do with the Jews in the immediate but it will affect us greatly as time goes by. You'll recall that when Umar entered Jerusalem it was the Byzantine Christian patriarch Sophronius who handed him the keys to the city. Muslim tradition teaches that Umar gave Sophronius an assurance of safety for the Christians of the city something which he apparently gave to many of the Christian cities conquered during this advance.

these assurances together with certain Quranic sources will become the basis in Islamic law of what is known as the Pact of Omar now you should know that there are many historians who don't believe that Omar himself wrote this pact and it doesn't really matter whether it happened in the early 7th century or the late 9th century we need to understand what it is and why it's so critical for the Jewish story this pact is a grant of security of person family and possession to peoples of the book who live within Muslim society. These are the Jews and the Christians who are seen by Muslims to be adherents of true monotheistic faiths, despite the fact that their belief is that Muhammad came along and finished the process of prophecy.

It's as if Judaism had God 1.0, and Christianity had God 2.0, and Islam was God 3.0. In return for this security of person, family and possession, the Jews and Christians must accept a second class status, which is known as the Dimi status, and pay the special head tax, which is known as Jiza. Now if you look at the particular articulations of this second class status, you'll see it sounds much like those regulating the Jews in the Theodosian and Justinian codes of the Byzantine Empire of the 5th and 6th centuries. No building new synagogues, no holding offices of authority over Muslims, no accepting converts, no punishments of Jewish converts to Islam. In all, it's clear that Jews and Christians are meant to have a posture of deferential submission toward Muslims.

Now, we have to be careful of indulging in historical anachronism. In today's liberal Western democracies, we would look at such a thing with horror. And in fact, there's a significant amount of rhetoric out there about dimitude that we don't need to indulge in at this moment. But I think it's critical to remember that in its day, that this actually was an expression of liberalism. so from the time of Muhammad's first prophecies in 610 it will take only a century for the Arab armies to carry Islam all the way to the gates of Constantinople across North Africa and even onto the European mainland through the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the challenge of life in the world of Islam therefore is not going to be like that of the challenge of life in the Greco-Roman world there the battle is over who is true Israel this is the hermeneutic battle Here, the major challenge will be how to maintain cultural and religious identity and integrity when faced with such a compatible conqueror.

And furthermore, nothing challenges like success. Islam's meteoric rise is going to open the door to rethinking many elements of the Jewish story. There will be plenty of converts, but there will also be plenty of cultural fusion. Now, this challenge is best expressed in the words of the Rambam, who, from the perspective of the 12th century, could really best see the full extent of the challenge. I'll read to you from some words in the Rambam's Law of Kings and Their Wars, the 10th chapter, 4th Law. And by the way, if you want to look it up, you need to find a modern-day copy because this was removed by the Christian censors. We'll speak about that phenomenon in a coming episode or three. Nevertheless, says the Rambam, the intent of the creator of the world is not within the power of man to comprehend.

For his ways are not our ways, nor are his thoughts our thoughts. Ultimately, all the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth and that Yishmaelite who arose after him will only serve to prepare the way for the Messiah's coming and the improvement of the entire world, motivating the nations to serve God together, as it says in the prophet Svanjah, chapter 3, verse 9, I will transform the people to a pure language that they will all call upon the name of God and serve him with one purpose. because on that day, when the Messiah comes, let it be soon, let it be now. The whole world will be part of the same conversation. I just want to thank a few people. First of all, the amazing group of 30 people who give their hard-earned money to make this material free, available, and syndicated.

I want to ask you, if you're listening right now, to join them. Go to www.patreon.com and you can find my Mike Foyer page there or you can just go to my Facebook page and you'll see it front and center. I want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network. Amazing that they provide a platform to get truth out to the world. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, p-a-r-d-e-s dot org dot i-l for giving me the opportunity to touch so many Jewish hearts and minds. I want to thank Zulam Yaakov. I love it because it's my home. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.