You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”
The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II is said to have made this disparaging remark about Spain’s Catholic king upon the latter’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492. Knowing what an asset the Jewish community of al-Andalus had been to the Arab kingdoms there, the sultan was astonished at Ferdinand’s edict and welcomed the Jewish refugees from his Christian foe.
Jewish history has been defined in large part by expulsions, and the search for places that accept them. In the past this included Muslim rulers. In 1940, Mohammed V of Morocco famously refused to implement the antisemitic edicts of the French Vichy regime allied with Nazi Germany. Considering himself Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) like his namesake the prophet, Mohammed V saw the Jews not as the wandering people as portrayed in Christian legend, but as People of the Book deserving of protection. “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.”
His firm act of defiance — understood by scholars today to have been on political as well as religious grounds — in support of his country’s quarter of a million Jews stood in starkly heroic contrast to the impotence and inaction (at best) of Pope Pius XII, later nicknamed “Hitler’s Pope” for his secret back channels of communication with the Nazi regime.
Sadly, more recent history has been one of ever fewer safe places for Jews. The Middle East, once a haven, has become largely Jewless (Israel excepted).
Through a mixture of expulsions, voluntary and semi-voluntary emigrations, and everything in between, the Jewish population of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East has gone from a million in 1948 to an estimated 15,000 today. (Israel currently has approximately 1.7 million Muslim citizens.)
The recent history of Christians in Muslim-majority countries hasn’t been much better. The Christian population of the Middle East has declined precipitously in the past 100 years as well. In 1910, Christians made up 13.6 percent of the population. Today they constitute between 3 and 5 percent. Europe itself is becoming less and less Christian over time — 95 percent in 1900, projected to be 65 percent by 2050 — and more Muslim. Africa, on the other hand, is expected to be home to 40 percent of the world’s Christians by the year 2060. All these changes in the monotheistic world suggest that, as at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish demography is undergoing enormous changes.
What distinguishes the Jews from other monotheistic faiths in this massive transformation is that while the Christian and Muslim worlds are becoming geographically more diverse, the once wildly diverse Jewish Diaspora has become dramatically less so. Jewish migration in recent decades has been almost entirely to Israel and the United States, such that 90 percent of world Jewry today are American or Israeli citizens, some both. Over 70 percent of the Jewish Diaspora resides in North America, the vast majority in the United States.
Read the rest of this piece at Sapir.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Map: Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.
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