Patrick,
I agree with your assessment of the European treatment of the Jewish population and while the Jewish situation today is a bit better then in some of that history, and much better then other times, one could hope for a better general attitude towards Jews and their state from Europe. It will be enough to be left to be. I disagree with you regarding the Jewish situation in the Middle East.
In the long history of Jewish life in Persia, from the time of Cyrus until just a few decades before the Arab conquests, Jews did quite well. We had great Jewish centers of learning in cities such as Sura and Pumbadesta. Many of the sages of the late Biblical Period to the time when the Talmud was written came to the Land of Israel from Persia. One of the lower kings, he who represented the Jews in the Persian Imperial Court, was a line of princes descended from King David. This office, and many of the honors bestowed on it by the Jewish population and the Persian nobility, was intact at the time of the Arab conquest.
From the time of the Jewish Rebellion in 70AD until the fall of the Byzantine Empire (again to the Arab Conquests) the Jews eked out some sort of life between pogroms. Much of the hatred from the Romans to the Jews stemmed from the fact that Jews in the Land of Israel held very good relations with those Jews living in Persia. Those communities respected each other, traded with each other, and advised each other even as the Romans were at war with the Persians. Much as Jews in America tried to help Jews living under the Soviets, Jews in Persia did what they could to relieve the suffering of Jews under the Romans. The Romans used interpretation of Christian texts to justify various State and Church directed programs meant to undermine their native Jewish population. This might be one root of some of the conspiracy-style myths told about the Jews by anti-Semites to this day.
Towards the end the Persian Empire, it’s long tradition of accepting the diversity of population exhausted, they gave into their worries over imperial survival and began to enforce a homogeneity of culture. This, of course, became a struggle for the Jews no different then the Spanish Inquisition (predating the Spanish by a few centuries) and lasted for a number of decades. When the Persians fell to the Arab Conquests most of those recent converts to Zoroastrianism (I’m not sure how many Jews succumbed to the Zoroastrian pressure but many other people who had lived under the Persian for centuries did convert to the Fire Cult of Zoroaster) quickly took on Islam, as it was easier to do business, work and gain office if one was Muslim.
The Muslims restored some freedoms to the Jews of Persia and Babylon. Ultimately all Jews in all the Muslim lands fell under Sharia Law. While Jews could practice as Jews, there were special taxes and various jobs and offices unavailable to Jews and the threat of, many times the experience of, violence was present through out the whole period. Many Jews wound up in the new centers of learning, eventually in Spain, Vilna, all over the place. Jews had lived in Egypt during Roman times, Alexandria being one center, and with the Arab Conquests they reunited with many of their Jewish brethren in Persia, sometimes meeting even in the Land of Israel. As the Muslim World declined, and certainly by the Ottoman Period, the Great Jewish Centers were in Europe. Some for a time in Spain, some in France but most notably in Eastern Europe.
Life for Jews in Muslim lands was mostly bearable, so long as life for Muslims was and the Jews knew their Sharia Law. The reason that the leadership which eventually organized the nearly hundred year old project of reestablishing a sovereign Jewish State in the Land of Israel is that Jews in Muslim countries had no legal right to organize in this way. Ironically it was Europe which developed a culture of liberty. It was long in coming to the Jews but it came. The ascendancy of the European powers (who held little chauvinism as regards the Land as to which faith laid claim to it), American Evangelicism, and a resurgent Jewish will to migration all provided their considerable energy to making the State of Israel possible. Once the land was made open to Jews, the Jews living under Sharia Law did all they could to escape to it. Some left behind considerable wealth to come to Israel. I know people who had to trek through the desert, smuggling themselves and their families through hostile lands and borders to get to Israel. Today, the largest Jewish population in Israel are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants from Muslim lands.
I wouldn’t be so quick in suggesting that the Europeans were uniquely responsible for the Jews returning to their land. The false starts in Jewish history were like a dream in which mass movements of population imagined themselves living the Exodus only to have the waters fall on them and not Pharaoh. Shabbatai Zvi (stopped by the Muslim Turks, btw) was just one dream differed. It just so happened that the hard work of the late 2nd millennium Jewish Centers in Europe was what eventually woke the dreamers so we could live a miracle.
