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Tuesday, May 09, 2023

How much influence did Christianity have on modern Arab antisemitism?

The impression I always has was that while Muslims have had antipathy for Jews since the time of Mohammed, they didn't frame that in terms of real hate until the late 19th or early 20th centuries. And I believe that this came primarily from Christian Arabs. 

If you do a search for "Jews" in arabic in Google Books for the 19rh century, a large proportion of the books that result are written by Christians. Certainly Arabic translations of the Old and New Testaments are featured prominently, but also some doctrinal works of antisemitism seem to have been eagerly translated to Arabic by the Arab Christians.

One example I found was an Arabic translation of works by 19th century German Catholic theologian August Rohling, a true Christian antisemite, who wrote a number of books mistranslating the Talmud into German to stoke Jew-hatred.  It seems that his works were relatively popular in Arabic translation by Youssef Nasrallah, with a number of editions and reprints.(Nasrallah is a popular Muslim and Christian surname.)



This is the Protocols before the Protocols. 

I'm not as familiar with this topic as I should be - I believe Bernard Lewis covers this - but I wonder how much Christian influence there was on today's doctrinal Muslim antisemitism. 






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