The Story Of Medina And The Jews. Not Pretty

BRUTAL Meme Reveals HARD TRUTH About Islam and Refugees

November 23, 2015 By Steve Straub 606 Comments

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Here’s a short history lesson on Muhammad and his entrance into Islam’s now holy city of Medina as a refugee via Eretz Yisrael:

Although the fact is little publicized, more than one historian has affirmed at the Arab world’s second holiest city, Medina, was one of the allegedly “purely Arab” cities that actually was first settled by Jewish tribes.1

And like the 16th Century English Protestants who financed their endeavors through the plunder of Catholic monasteries in England, the roots of Islamic anti-Semitism might be found in the initial plunder of Jewish settlements, and the imposition of a “poll tax” to fund Arab campaigns.

Bernard Lewis writes:

The city of Medina, some 280 miles north of Mecca, had originally been settled by Jewish tribes from the north, especially the Banu Nadir and Banu Quraiza. The comparative richness of the town attracted an infiltration of pagan Arabs who came at first as clients of the Jews and ultimately succeeded in dominating them. Medina, or, as it was known before Islam, Yathrib, had no form of stable government at all. The town was tom by the feuds of the rival Arab tribes of Aus and Khazraj, with the Jews maintaining an uneasy balance of power. The latter, engaged mainly in agriculture and handicrafts, were economically and culturally superior to the Arabs, and were consequently disliked…. as soon as the Arabs had attained unity through the agency of Muhammad they attacked and ultimately eliminated the Jews.2

In the last half of the fifth century, many Persian Jews fled from persecution to Arabia, swelling the Jewish population there.3 But around  the sixth century, Christian writers reported of the continuing importance of the Jewish community that remained in the Holy Land. For the dispersed Arabian Jewish settlers, Tiberias in Judea was central. In the Kingdom of Himyar on the Red Sea’s east coast in Arabia, “conversion to Judaism of influential circles” was popular, and the Kingdom’s rule stretched across “considerable portions of South Arabia.”

The commoners as well as the royal family adopted Judaism, and one writer ports that “Jewish priests (presumably rabbis) from Tiberias … formed part the suite of King Du Noas and served as his envoys in negotiations with Christian cities.”4

According to Guillaume,

At the dawn of Islam the Jews dominated the economic life of the Hijaz [Arabia]. They held all the best land … ; at Medina they must have formed at least half of the population. There was also a Jewish settlement to the north of the Gulf of Aqaba…. What is important is to note that the Jews of the Hijaz made many proselytes [or converts] among the Arab tribesmen.5

The first “Palestinian” or Judean refugees — the Jews — had resettled to become prosperous, influential Arabian settlers.

The prosperity of the Jews was due to their superior knowledge of agriculture and irrigation and their energy and industry. Homeless [Jewish] refugees in the course of a few generations became large landowners in the country, [the refugees who had come to the Hijaz when the Romans conquered Palestine] controllers of its finance and trade…. Thus it can readily be seen that Jewish prosperity was a challenge to the Arabs, particularly the Quraysh at Mecca and … [other Arab tribes] at Medina.

The Prophet Muhammad himself was a member of the Quraysh tribe, which coveted the Jews’ bounty, and

when the Muslims took up arms they treated the Jews with much greater severity than the Christians, who, until the end of the purely Arab Caliphate, were not badly treated.6

One of the reasons for “this discrimination” against the Jews is what Guillaurne called “the Quran’s scornful words” regarding the Jews7 The Jews’ development of land and culture was a prime source of booty in the Arabian desert peninsula. Beginning at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam8from the expulsions, depredations, extortion, forced conversions or murder of Jewish Arabians settled in Medina to the mass slaughter of Jews at Khaibar — the precedent was established among Arab-Muslims to expropriate that which belonged to the Jews. Relations between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews were “never … easy”: