The Position of the Jews in Egypt and Syria in the Late Middle Ages (Prof. Mazor)

The legal position of the Jews in the medieval Muslim world was clearly defined in Islamic law: Jews are considered part of “the protected people” (Arabic: ahl-aldhimma, or: dhimmīs), together with other non-Muslim groups who live under Islamic rule, such as Christians, whose religion is acceptable to Islam. As dhimmīs, individual Jews have the right to observe their faith and to run their affairs without interference, as well as the right to protection for their life and property, as long as they take upon themselves two commitments:

• a) The regular payment of the poll tax (jizya) to the Muslim state.
• b) Observance of a list of discriminatory laws, called “the Pact of Umar,” attributed to one of the early Muslim caliphs. These laws included, for instance, symbolic acts meant to humiliate and distinguish the dhimmīs from the Muslims, such as the requirement to rise in the presence of Muslims when the latter was sitting down, to refrain from riding horses or using saddles and bearing arms, to construct their houses at a lower elevation than those belonging to Muslims, and to distinguish themselves from Muslims by avoiding the use of honorific names (such as names beginning with Abū), and, of special importance—by dressing in distinct garb. In addition, the “Pact of Umar” also prohibited non-Muslims from building new houses of worship and even from making repairs to existing buildings that had fallen into ruin, or displaying their religion publicly (M. R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 52–72).

The attitude of the Mamluk sultans toward Jews and Christians stood in sharp contrast to the policies of the preceding heterodox Shīʿī Fatimid Caliphs, who ruled between 969 and 1171. Except for a short period under the caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (1007–1021), in which dhimmīs were persecuted, during the long Fatimid period Jews and Christians enjoyed a distinguished position. Cairo Genizah documents indicate that the requirements for dhimmīs to wear distinguishing clothing, one of the better known laws of the “Pact of Umar,” were not normally enforced, nor were other discriminatory laws. Moreover, Jews were employed as high state officials and physicians (Cf. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1993), 2:285–87; 2:374–80; N. Stillman, “The non-Muslim Communities: the Jewish Community,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt: 640–1517, ed. C. F. Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 201).

The situation of the Jews worsened under the Ayyubid Sultanate, founded in Egypt by Saladin in 1171. Deposing the Shīʿī Fatimid Caliphate after two hundred years, Saladin restored Sunnism as the only legitimate religious rite of the state. In order to strengthen Sunnism in Egypt and Syria and to justify his image as a holy warrior (mujāhid) against the infidel Crusaders, his rule inclined to orthodox zeal, including the implementation of some of the Pact of Umar laws. For instance, Muslim historians note that during Saladin’s reign, for the first time, dhimmīs were not allowed to ride on mules (in addition to horses, which was always forbidden) (A. b. ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī, Kitāb al-Sulūk li-Maʿrifat al-Duwal wa-al-Mulūk (Cairo: Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa al-Tarjama wa al-Nashr, 1934–1973). Both Muslim sources and Jewish sources—that is, the Cairo Genizah documents—indicate that toward the end of the Ayyubid period, around the mid-thirteenth century, Jews in Cairo wore distinctive yellow marks on their turbans, whereas Christians wore their distinctive belt, the zunnār (A. b. ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ wa-l-Iʿtibār bi-Dhikr al-Khiṭaṭ wa-l-Āthār fī Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira (Cairo: Bulaq, 1854), 1:367, l.29; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:288; N. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 68; Stillman, “The non-Muslim Communities,” 207–8).

The pressure on the non-Muslims became much stronger in the Mamluk period. This was due to several circumstances, mainly political and economic. First, the offensive policy against the Crusades—conducted by the early Mamluk sultans—increased the hatred felt by Muslims against Christians, and—to a lesser extent—also against the infidel Jews. Second, the economic crises that befell Egypt due to the Mongol invasions from the north, alongside severe epidemics and droughts, increased the frustration of the people and brought about religious persecution. Finally, and perhaps the most important factor, is related to the nature and origins of the Mamluk regime. The Mamluk rulers were initially non-Muslim military slaves who originated in the north-eastern areas of the Muslim world and beyond. They were imported to the lands of Islam from these regions as young boys and were acculturated as Muslims. Thus, they were anxious to prove their loyalty to their new religion and to gain the support of the Muslim religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) in order to legitimate and strengthen their rule. Hence, they tended to accept the demands of the ʿulamāʾ and the people, and to increase the burden on the dhimmīs.

Therefore, during this long period, Sultans declared again and again the renewal of the discriminatory laws, most of them originating in known ordinances of the “Pact of Umar,” but sometimes, new restrictions were added. Among these laws were the prohibition of Jews and Christians from riding mules, and sometimes even donkeys, and the dismissal of dhimmī officials from the state bureaucracy. The most innovative and—from a historical perspective—perhaps the most terrifying law, concerned the distinguishing color of the dhimmīs’ clothing. Jews were obliged to wear yellow turbans (see: E. Ashtor and R. Amitai, “Mamluks,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 2007), 13:438–41). In Egypt, as we mentioned, Jews were ordered to bear yellow marks on their turbans in the mid-thirteenth century, though we do not know for how long this restriction was implemented. However, it was only in the Mamluk period that yellow was identified exclusively, distinctively, and consistently with the Jews, whereas other colors became identified with other religious groups: Christians with blue and Samaritans with red. Several testimonies of Christian European travelers, as well as Muslim and Jewish sources, indicate unequivocally that Jews in Egypt and Syria wore yellow clothes, whereas Christian and Samaritans wore blue and red respectively (E. Ashtor, The History of the Jews in Egypt and Syria under Mamluk Rule (Jerusalem: Mossad Ha-Rav Kook, 1944–1970), 2:210–14). Similarly, we have sufficient indications to conclude that the law that prohibited Jews and Christians from riding horses and mules was also enforced. Dhimmīs were allowed to ride donkeys inside the cities during the fourteenth century, while in the fifteenth century, dhimmīs were allowed to ride donkeys only outside the cities (Ashtor, History, 2:214–16). One should bear in mind, however, that Muslims who were not part of the Mamluk elite were also prohibited from riding horses and sometimes even mules.

Popular riots accompanied state policy. In cities like Alexandria and Cairo, people attacked and destroyed parts of dhimmī buildings that were higher than those of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were attacked in the streets by mobs. Although synagogues appear to have escaped unscathed during most attacks on dhimmī houses of prayer, Muslim and Jewish sources attest that at the beginning of the fourteenth century, synagogues were closed and Jews forbidden to pray in them for about ten years. We do know, however, that two synagogues were demolished by the state during this period: a Karaite synagogue in Damascus in 1321 and a Rabbanite synagogue in Dammūh, near Cairo, in 1498. In 1442 a partial destruction of a Rabbanite synagogue in Fusṭāṭ had been carried out by the authorities after an anti-Islamic blasphemy was discovered in its dais, and in 1474, the synagogue in Jerusalem was demolished by the people but was renovated based on the sultan’s order (Ashtor, History, 2:401–15, 2:503; D. Arad, “Being a Jew Under the Mamluks: Some Coping Strategies,” in Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period, ed. S. Conermann and B. Walker (Göttingen: V&R unipress; Bonn University Press, 2017), 22–23; T. el-Leithy, “Sufis, Copts and the Politics of Piety: Moral Regulation in Fourteenth Century Upper Egypt,” in Le développement de soufisme en Égypte a l’époque mamelouke, ed. R. McGregor and A. Sabra (Cairo: Institute français d’archéologie orientale, 2006), 80n22; M. R. Cohen, “Jews in the Mamlūk Environment: the Crisis of 1442 (a Geniza study, T-S. AS 150.3),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47 (1984): 425–28; J. Kraemer, “A Jewish Cult of the Saints in Fāṭimid Egypt,” in L’Egypte Fatimide: son art et son histoire, ed. M. Barrucand (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), 598).

In the fifteenth century, due to the deteriorating economic situation, the imposition of heavy taxes on the dhimmīs became more common. Sultans increased the poll tax of the dhimmīs, imposed tariffs on the production and consumption of wine and on family events and costumes (Ashtor, History, 2:310–16). The economic crises brought about a clear demographic decline in the Jewish population. Jewish communities in little towns dwindled and sometimes vanished. Forarecent survey of Jewish communities in Mamluk Egypt, see: D. Arad, “The Mustaʿrib Jews in Syria, Palestine and Egypt 1330–1700” (Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2013), 26–36 [Hebrew].

The deteriorating status of Jews could be also examined through the prism of Jewish physicians. During the Mamluk period, a generally increasing opposition of orthodox Muslims to the treatment of Muslim patients by Jewish and Christian physicians is noticeable. Muslim scholars warn in their writings against hiring non-Muslim physicians as well as against buying medicine from them. It also seems that more Muslim physicians refused to teach non-Muslims (M. Perlmann, “Notes on the Position of Jewish Physicians in Medieval Muslim Countries,” Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972): 316–19; S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 17:175, 378n61; E. Ashtor, “Prolegomena to the Medieval History of Oriental Jewry,” Jewish Quarterly Review 50, no. 2 (1959): 154–55; Ashtor, History, 1:107–8; 1:341–43; Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 72; D. Behrens-Abouseif, Fatḥ Allāh and Abū Zakariyya: Physicians Under the Mamluks (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1987), 14; P. B. Lewicka, “Healer, Scholar, Conspirator: The Jewish Physician in the Arabic-Islamic Discourse of the Mamluk Period,” in Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period, ed. S. Conermann (Göttingen: V&R unipress; Bonn University Press, 2017), 121–44). In 1448, the Mamluk Sultan even issued a decree that for the first time prohibited nonMuslim physicians from treating Muslims. The decree was not enforced for too long. However, it marks, as noted by Norman Stillman, “a momentous reversal of the longstanding non-confessional nature of the medical profession in the Islamic world.”

1. Up to then, the medical occupation in the Muslim world had always been nonsectarian, characterized by a universal spirit, in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as Goitein puts it, “formed a spiritual brotherhood that transcended the barriers of religion, language and countries” (Stillman, “The Jewish Community,” 209; Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 71–72; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 2:241).
2. First, most of the discriminatory and humiliating regulations against dhimmīs were enforced for limited periods or not at all. This is admitted by contemporary Muslim historians and that is the reason for the need to reinforce these laws again and again. Jewish bureaucrats continued to serve in state offices and in the households of Mamluk officers throughout the Mamluk period, though their number and status was much lower than those of the Christians. Jews served mainly in financial offices, such as customs officials, state lessees, and especially as money changers (Ashtor, History, 2:170, 2:176–77). Most of the Jews mentioned in contemporary Muslim sources were money changers (ṣayrafīs) (See, for instance, Behrens-Abouseif, Fatḥ Allāh, 23; Ashtor, History, 1:205, 2:29n9, 91–93, 177). Second, generally, dhimmīs received the protection of the authorities against the attacks of Muslim figures and the mob. Muslim chronicles mention several episodes in this regard. Third, the wearing of yellow clothes should be put in the right cultural context. This practice was not considered an act of outstanding humiliation for Jews, in stark contrast to medieval and modern Europe. Whereas in late medieval Europe Jews wereatiny isolated minority, different in its external appearance from the vast majority of the Christian population, in the Islamicate society of the Mamluk sultanate, there were several ethnic and class groups, each one adopted a color and other external features of its own, which were considered a mark of identity and, to a certain extent,asign of self-definition (Cohen, Under Crescent, 110–11).

The members of the Mamluk elite were identified by the horses they rode on, their distinctive headgear and their fancy robes. The Muslim religious elite, the ulamā’, were discerned by their wide white turbans, the Christians by their blue turbans, the Samaritans by their red ones, the Georgians by their black turbans, and the Jews by their yellow ones. Jews, hence, were only one group among several others.

Moreover, the yellow clothes were much less inflammatory than the blue clothes of the Christians. It was the dominant community of the Christians that formed the target of most mob riots. This was due to the fact that they occupied the highest positions in the state bureaucracy. Despite Jews also being affected, since they were part of the dhimmīs, they were only secondary victims of the anti-dhimmī decrees and riots. It was mainly churches and monasteries that were destroyed in Mamluk Egypt. Instructive examples of the better position of the Jews are cases mentioned in contemporary Islamic sources, in which Christians borrowed the yellow clothes of Jews in order to escape the rage of the mob (Little, “Coptic Conversion,” 564; Ashtor, History, 1:338–39; al-Maqrīzī, Khiṭaṭ, 2:516, l.26–7). Christian Copts were also the main target for conversion. Though conversion was definitely a more common phenomenon among Jews, too, compared to preMamluk periods, their number was much lower than the Copts and included mainly individuals such as merchants and especially prominent physicians. In contrast, numerous Christian state officials converted in order to maintain their high positions and offices. It seems that the middle of the fourteenth century marks the turning point after which the majority of the population in Egypt, for the first time, became Muslim (Little, “Coptic Conversion,” 567–69).

1. Similarly, anti-dhimmī polemics were not written particularly against Jews but against dhimmīs in general, and in fact, mainly against the majority among the infidels—the Christians. Polemical literature was written only against the single unique big “infidel” majority—the Jews; anti-Jewish works were not only an ideal but in many cases obligatory state laws (Ashtor, History, 1:104 ff; 209–10; Cohen, Under Crescent, 52). The Jews in Mamluk Egypt and Syria by no means were an isolated community. They never lived in total “ghettolike” isolation as in Europe. There were mosques and other Islamic institutions in the Jewish districts in Muslim cities (I. M. Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 85–86, 271; S. D. Goitein, “Cairo: An Islamic City in the Light of the Geniza Documents,” in Middle Eastern Cities: A Symposium on Ancient, Islamic, and Contemporary Middle Eastern Urbanism, ed. I. M. Lapidus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 80–81).
2. Jews, together with Christians and Muslims, also used to worship at the same sacred sites; they participated in joyous and sorrowful “national” events, and they still maintained social, cultural, and intellectual contacts with the Muslim environment (Ashtor, History, 1:328–35; 1:350–56; 2:105. For Mamluk Syria, see: N. Hofer, “The Ideology of Decline and the Jews of Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria,” in Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Middle Islamic Period, ed. S. Conermann (Göttingen: V&R unipress; Bonn University Press, 2017), 102–3, 114; see also: M. R. Cohen, “Sociability and the Concept of Galut in Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Middle Ages,” in Judaism and Islam: Boundaries, Communication and Interaction. Essays in Honor of William M. Brinner, ed. B. H. Hary et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 37–51). Whereas during the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century European Jews fell victims to massive pogroms and were believed to have poisoned wells “in the attempt to destroy Christian civilization,” nowhere in the Mamluk Sultanate at that time were Jews blamed for the epidemic, which was perceived as a natural disaster. Moreover, in Damascus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews prayed together, pleading the one God for salvation and the removal of the evil destiny (Cohen, Under Crescent, 169; Ibn Kathīr, Al-Bidāya wa-l-Nihāya (Beirut: Dār al-Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-‘Arabī, 1413/1993), 14:261. This episode was also witnessed by the famous traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, see: Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah: texte arabe accompagné d’une traduction par C. Defrémery et B. R. Sanguinetti (Paris: 1853), 1:227–29). Could we speak of antisemitism in the Mamluk period? According to most scholars, the answer to this question is negative. Antisemitism did not exist in the Mamluk Sultanate, or in the medieval Muslim world in general.