title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The restoration of the monarchy under Charles II (1660–85) also saw the restoration of a Catholic-influenced court like his father's. However, although Charles himself had Catholic leanings, he was first and foremost a pragmatist and realised the vast majority of public opinion in England was strongly anti-Catholic, so he agreed to laws such as the Test Act requiring any appointee to any public office or member of Parliament to deny Catholic beliefs such as transubstantiation. As far as possible, however, he maintained tacit tolerance. Like his father, he married a Catholic, Catherine of Braganza. (He would become Catholic himself on his deathbed.)


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Charles' brother and heir James, Duke of York (later James II), converted to Catholicism in 1668–1669. When Titus Oates in 1678 alleged a (totally imaginary, a hoax) "Popish Plot" to assassinate Charles and put James in his place, he unleashed a wave of parliamentary and public hysteria which led to the execution of 17 Catholics on the scaffold, and the death of many more over the next two years, which Charles was either unable or unwilling to prevent. Throughout the early 1680s the Whig element in Parliament attempted to remove James as successor to the throne. Their failure saw James become, in 1685, Britain's first openly Catholic monarch since Mary I (and last to date). He promised religious toleration for Catholic and Protestants on an equal footing, but it is in doubt whether he did this to gain support from Dissenters or whether he was truly committed to tolerance (contemporary Catholic regimes in Spain and Italy, for example, were hardly tolerant of Protestantism, while those in France and Poland had practised forms of toleration).


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: James earnestly tried "to improve the position of his fellow Catholics" and did so "in such an inept way that he aroused the fears of both the Anglican establishment and the Dissenters. In the process, he encouraged converts like the poet John Dryden, who wrote "The Hind and the Panther", to celebrate his conversion. Protestant fears mounted as James placed Catholics in the major commands of the existing standing army, dismissed the Protestant Bishop of London and dismissed the Protestant fellows of Magdalen College and replaced them with a wholly Catholic board. The last straw was the birth of a Catholic heir in 1688, portending a return to a pre-Reformation Catholic dynasty. Observing this was Princess Mary, James' daughter by his first wife, and her husband 'Dutch William,' whose wife stood to lose her future thrones through this new arrival."


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution, Parliament deemed James to have abdicated (effectively deposing him, though Parliament refused to call it that) in favour of his Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew, Mary II and William III. Although this affair is celebrated as solidifying both English liberties and the Protestant nature of the kingdom, some argue that it was "fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy".


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: James fled into exile, and with him many Catholic nobility and gentry. The Act of Settlement 1701, which remains in operation today, established the royal line through Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and specifically excludes any Catholic or anyone who marries a Catholic from the throne. In 2013, this law was partially changed when the disqualification of the monarch marrying a Catholic was eliminated (along with male preference in the line of succession). The law was also changed to limit the requirement that the monarch "must give permission to marry to the six persons next in line to the throne." Still, Catholics today once again are permitted to hold Wolsey and More's office of Lord Chancellor as did Catholics before the Reformation. Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart, the last Jacobite heir to publicly assert a claim to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland, died in Rome in 1807. A monument to the Royal Stuarts exists today at Vatican City. In the 21st century, Franz, Duke of Bavaria, head of the Wittelsbach family, is the most senior descendant of King Charles I and is considered by Jacobites to be heir of the Stuarts. Though direct descendant of the House of Stuart, Franz has said being king is not a claim he wishes to pursue.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The years from 1688 to the early 19th century were in some respects the lowest point for Catholicism in England. Deprived of their dioceses, four Apostolic Vicariates were set up throughout England until the re-establishment of the diocesan episcopacy in 1850. Although the persecution was not violent as in the past, Catholic numbers, influence and visibility in English society reached their lowest point. The percentage of the population that was Catholic may have declined from 4% in 1700 (population 5.2 millions) to 1% 1800 (population of 7.25 million) with absolute numbers halved. By 1825, however, the Bishop of Chester estimated that there were "about a half a million Catholics in England." Their civil rights were severely curtailed: their right to own property or inherit land was greatly limited, they were burdened with special taxes, they could not send their children abroad for Catholic education, they could not vote, and priests were liable to imprisonment. Writing about the Catholic Church during this time, historian Antonia Fraser notes: The harsh laws and the live-and-let-live reality were two very different things. This world was divided into the upper classes, the aristocracy and the gentry, and what were literally the working classes. Undoubtedly, the survival of Catholicism in the past [up until 1829] was due to the dogged, but hopefully inconspicuous, protection provided by the former to the latter. Country neighbours, Anglicans and Catholics, lived amicably together in keeping with this "laissez-faire" reality.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: There was no longer, as once in Stuart times, any notable Catholic presence at court, in public life, in the military or professions. Many of the Catholic nobles and gentry who had preserved on their lands among their tenants small pockets of Catholicism had followed James into exile, and others, at least outwardly in cryptic fashion, conformed to Anglicanism, meaning fewer such Catholic communities survived intact. For "obvious reasons", Catholic aristocracy at this time was heavily intermarried. Their great houses, however, still had chapels called "libraries", with priests attached to these places (shelved for books) who celebrated Mass, which worship was described in public as "Prayers". Interestingly, one area where the sons of working class Catholics could find religious tolerance was in the army. Generals, for example, did not deny Catholic men their Mass and did not compel them to attend Anglican services, believing that "physical strength and devotion to the military struggle was demanded of them, not spiritual allegiance". Fraser also notes that the role of the working class among themselves was important: ...servants of various degrees and farm workers, miners, mill workers and tradesmen, responded with loyalty, hard work and gratitude for the opportunity to practice the faith of their fathers (and even more importantly, in many cases, their mothers). Their contributions should not be ignored, even if it is for obvious reasons more difficult to uncover than that of their theoretical superiors. The unspoken survival of the Catholic community in England, despite Penal laws, depended also on these loyal families unknown to history whose existence is recorded as Catholics in Anglican parish registers. That of Walton-le-Dale parish church, near Preston in Lancashire in 1781, for example, records 178 families, with 875 individuals as 'Papists'. Where baptisms are concerned, parental occupations are stated as weaver, husbandman and labourer, with names such as Turner, Wilcock, Balwin and Charnley. A bishop at this time (roughly from 1688 to 1850) was called a vicar apostolic. The officeholder was a titular bishop (as opposed to a diocesan bishop) through whom the pope exercised jurisdiction over a particular church territory in England. English-speaking colonial America came under the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of the London District. As titular bishop over Catholics in British America, he was important to the government not only in regard to its English-speaking North American colonies, but made more so after the Seven Years' War when the British Empire, in 1763, acquired the French-speaking (and predominantly Catholic) territory of Canada. Only after the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and in 1789 with the consecration of John Carroll, a friend of Benjamin Franklin, did the U.S. have its own diocesan bishop, free of the Vicar Apostolic of London, James Robert Talbot.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The introduction of Vicars Apostolic or titular bishops in 1685 was very important at the time and ought not be misprized. For example, when John Leyburn, formerly of the English College, Douai, was appointed as Vicar Apostolic of England, it was the first time a Catholic bishop had been present in England for nearly sixty years. Up until that time, Archpriests were overseeing the church.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In Leyburn's combined tour north and visitation to administer Confirmation, in 1687, some 20,859 Catholics received the sacrament. Most Catholics, it could be said, retreated to relative isolation from a popular Protestant mainstream, and Catholicism in England in this period was politically invisible to history. However, culturally and socially, there were notable exceptions. Alexander Pope, owing to his literary popularity, was one memorable English Catholic of the 18th century. Other prominent Catholics were three remarkable members of the Catholic gentry: Baron Petre (who wined and dined George III and Queen Charlotte at Thorndon Hall), Thomas Weld the bibliophile, (and friend of George III) who in 1794 donated his Stonyhurst estate to the Jesuits to establish a college, along with 30 acres of land, and the Duke of Norfolk, the Premier Duke in the peerage of England and as Earl of Arundel, the Premier Earl. In virtue of his status and as head of the Howard family (which included some Church of England, though many Catholic members), the Duke was always at Court. It seemed the values and worth of aristocracy "trumped those of the illegal religion". Pope, however, seemed to benefit from the isolation. In 1713, when he was 25, he took subscriptions for a project that filled his life for the next seven years, the result being a new version of Homer's "Iliad". Samuel Johnson pronounced it the greatest translation ever achieved in the English language. Over time, Pope became the greatest poet of the age, the Augustan Age, especially for his mock-heroic poems, "Rape of the Lock" and "The Dunciad".


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Around this time, in 1720, Clement XI proclaimed Anselm of Canterbury a Doctor of the Church. In 1752, mid-century, Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Later in the century there was some liberalization of the anti-Catholic laws on the basis of Enlightenment ideals.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In 1778 the Catholic Relief Act allowed Catholics to own property, inherit land and join the army, provided they swore an oath of allegiance. Hardline Protestant mobs reacted in the Gordon Riots in 1780, attacking any building in London which was associated with Catholicism or owned by Catholics. The Catholic Relief Act 1791 provided further freedoms on condition of swearing an additional oath of acceptance of the Protestant succession in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This allowed Catholic schooling and clergy to operate openly and thus allowed permanent missions to be set up in the larger towns. Stonyhurst College, for example, was able to be established in 1794, as the successor establishment for the fleeing English Jesuits, previously at the Colleges of St Omer, Bruges and Liège, due to a timely and generous donation by a former pupil, Thomas Weld (of Lulworth), as Europe became engulfed in war.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In 1837, James Arundell, 10th Baron Arundell of Wardour, bequeathed to Stonyhurst the Arundel Library, which contained the vast Arundel family collection, including some of the school's most important books and manuscripts such as a Shakespeare "First Folio" and a manuscript copy of Froissart's "Chronicles", looted from the body of a dead Frenchman after the Battle of Agincourt. Yet Catholic recusants as a whole remained a small group, except where they stayed the majority religion in various pockets, notably in rural Lancashire and Cumbria, or were part of the Catholic aristocracy and squirearchy. Finally, the famous recusant Maria Fitzherbert, who during this period secretly married the Prince of Wales, prince regent, and future George IV in 1785. The British Constitution, however, did not accept it and George IV later moved on. Cast aside by the establishment, she was adopted by the town of Brighton, whose citizens, both Catholic and Protestant, called her "Mrs. Prince". According to journalist Richard Abbott, "Before the town had a [Catholic] church of its own, she had a priest say Mass at her own house, and invited local Catholics", suggesting the recusants of Brighton were not very undiscovered.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In a 2009 study of the English Catholic community, 1688–1745, Gabriel Glickman notes that Catholics, especially those whose social position gave them access to the courtly centres of power and patronage, had a significant part to play in 18th-century England. They were not as marginal as one might think today. For example, Alexander Pope was not the only Catholic whose contributions (especially, "Essays on Man") help define the temper of an early English Enlightenment. In addition to Pope, Glickman notes a Catholic architect, James Gibbs, who built Radcliffe Camera and returned baroque forms to the London skyline, and a Catholic composer, Thomas Arne, who composed "Rule Britannia". According to reviewer Aidan Bellenger, Glickman also suggests that "rather than being the victims of the Stuart failure, 'the unpromising setting of exile and defeat' had 'sown the seed of a frail but resilient English Catholic Enlightenment'." University of Chicago historian Steven Pincus likewise argues in his book, "1688: The First Modern Revolution", that Catholics under William and Mary and their successors experienced considerable freedom.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: After this moribund period, the first signs of a revival occurred as thousands of French Catholics fled France during the French Revolution. The leaders of the Revolution were virulently anti-Catholic, even singling out priests and nuns for summary execution or massacre, and England was seen as a safe haven from Jacobin violence. Also around this time (1801), a new political entity was formed, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which merged the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland, thus increasing the number of Catholics in the new state. Pressure for abolition of anti-Catholic laws grew, particularly with the need for Catholic recruits to fight in the Napoleonic Wars.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Despite the resolute opposition of George IV, which delayed fundamental reform, 1829 brought a major step in the liberalisation of most anti-Catholic laws, although some aspects were to remain on the statute book into the 21st century. Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, giving Catholic men almost equal civil rights, including the right to vote and to hold most public offices. If Catholics were rich, however, exceptions were always made, even before the changes. For example, American ministers to the Court of St. James's were often struck by the prominence of wealthy American-born Catholics, titled ladies among the nobility, like Louisa (Caton), granddaughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and her two sisters, Mary Ann and Elizabeth. After Louisa's first husband (Sir Felton Bathurst-Hervey) died, Louisa later married the son of the Duke of Leeds, and had the Duke of Wellington as her European protector. Her sister Mary Ann married the Marquess of Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington; and her other sister Elizabeth (Lady Stafford) married another British nobleman. Although British law required an Anglican marriage service, each of the sisters and their Protestant spouses had a Catholic ceremony afterwards. At Louisa's first marriage, the Duke of Wellington escorted the bride.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In the 1840s and 1850s, especially during the Great Irish Famine, while much of the large outflow of migration from Ireland was headed to the United States to seek work, hundreds of thousands of Irish people also migrated across the channel to England and Scotland and established communities in cities there, including London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, but also in towns and villages up and down the country, thus giving Catholicism in England a numerical boost.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: At various points after the 16th century hopes have been entertained by many English Catholics that the "reconversion of England" was at hand. Additionally, with the arrival of Irish Catholic migrants (Ireland was part of the UK until the partition, in 1922), some considered that a "second spring" of Catholicism across Britain was developing. Rome responded by re-establishing the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, creating 12 Catholic dioceses in England from existing apostolic vicariates and appointing diocesan bishops (to replace earlier titular bishops) with fixed sees on a more traditional Catholic pattern. The Catholic Church in England and Wales had had 22 dioceses immediately before the Reformation, but none of the current 22 bear close resemblance (geographically) to the 22 earlier pre-Reformation dioceses.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The re-established Catholic episcopacy specifically avoided using places that were sees of the Church of England, in effect temporarily abandoning the titles of Catholic dioceses before Elizabeth I because of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851, which in England favoured a state church (i.e., Church of England) and denied arms and legal existence to territorial Catholic sees on the basis that the state could not grant such "privileges" to "entities" that allegedly did not exist in law. Some of the Catholic dioceses, however, took the titles of bishoprics which had previously existed in England but were no longer used by the Anglican Church (e.g. Beverley – later divided into Leeds and Middlesbrough, Hexham – later changed to Hexham and Newcastle). In the few cases where a Catholic diocese bears the same title as an Anglican one in the same town or city (e.g., Birmingham, Liverpool, Portsmouth, and Southwark), this is the result of the Church of England ignoring the prior existence there of a Catholic see and of the technical repeal of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act in 1871. The Act applied only to England and Wales, not Scotland or Ireland; thus official recognition afforded by the grant of arms to the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, brought into being by Lord Lyon in 1989, relied on the fact that the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 never applied to Scotland. In recent times, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister John Gummer, a prominent convert to Catholicism and columnist for the "Catholic Herald" in 2007, objected to the fact that no Catholic diocese could have the same name as an Anglican diocese (such as London, Canterbury, Durham, etc.) "even though those dioceses had, shall we say, been borrowed".


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: A proportion of the Anglicans who were involved in the Oxford Movement or "Tractarianism" were ultimately led beyond these positions and converted to the Catholic Church, including, in 1845, the movement's principal intellectual leader, John Henry Newman. More new Catholics would come from the Anglican Church, often via high Anglicanism, for at least the next hundred years, and something of this continues.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: As anti-Catholicism declined sharply after 1910, the church grew in numbers, grew rapidly in terms of priests and sisters, and expanded their parishes from inner city industrial areas to more salubrious suburbs. Although underrepresented in the higher levels of the social structure, apart from a few old aristocratic Catholic families, Catholic talent was emerging in journalism, literature, the arts, and diplomacy.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: A striking development was the surge in highly publicised conversion of intellectuals and writers including most famously G. K. Chesterton, as well as Robert Hugh Benson and Ronald Knox, Maurice Baring, Christopher Dawson, Eric Gill, Graham Greene, Manya Harari, David Jones, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Arnold Lunn, Rosalind Murray, Alfred Noyes, William E. Orchard, Frank Pakenham, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Muriel Spark, Graham Sutherland, Oscar Wilde, Ford Madox Ford, and Evelyn Waugh. Pre-1900 famous converts included Cardinals Newman and Henry Edward Manning, the less famous like Ignatius Spencer as well as the leading architect of the Gothic Revival, Augustus Pugin, historian Thomas William Allies, and Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. G. E. M. Anscombe was also a notable convert during the early 20th century.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Prominent cradle Catholics included the film director Alfred Hitchcock, writers such as Hilaire Belloc, Lord Acton and J. R. R. Tolkien and the composer Edward Elgar, whose oratorio "The Dream of Gerontius" was based on a 19th-century poem by Newman.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: English Catholicism continued to grow throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century, when it was associated primarily with elements in the English intellectual class and the ethnic Irish population. Numbers attending Mass remained very high in contrast with some Protestant churches (though not the Church of England). Clergy numbers, which began the 20th century at under 3,000, reached a high of 7,500 in 1971.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: By the latter years of the twentieth century low numbers of vocations also affected the church with ordinations to the priesthood dropping from the hundreds in the late 20th century into the teens in 2006–2011 (16 in 2009 for example) and a recovery into the 20s thereafter, with a prediction for 2018 of 24.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: As in other English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia, the movement of Irish Catholics out of the working-class into the middle-class suburban mainstream often meant their assimilation with broader, secular English society and loss of a separate Catholic identity. The Second Vatican Council has been followed, as in other Western countries, by divisions between Traditionalist Catholicism and a more liberal form of Catholicism claiming inspiration from the council. This caused difficulties for not a few pre-conciliar converts, though others have still joined the Church in recent decades (for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge, Alec Guinness, and Joseph Pearce). And public figures (often descendants of the recusant families) include Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and writer. Radcliffe is related to three late cardinals – Weld, Vaughan and Hume (the last because his cousin Lord Hunt is married to Hume's sister) – and his family is connected to many of the great recusant English Catholic families, the Arundels, Tichbournes, Talbots, Stourtons, Stonors, Welds and Blundells. There were also the families whose male line has died out such as the Grimshaws, the de la Barre Bodenhams or the Lubienski-Bodenhams. Among others in this group are Paul Johnson; Peter Ackroyd; Antonia Fraser; Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC; Michael Martin, first Catholic to hold the office of Speaker of the House of Commons since the Reformation; Chris Patten, first Catholic to hold the post of Chancellor of Oxford since the Reformation; Piers Paul Read; Helen Liddel, Britain's High Commissioner to Australia; and former Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, These have no difficulty making their Catholicism known in public life. The former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was received into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2007. Catherine Pepinster, editor of "Tablet", notes: "The impact of Irish immigrants is one. There are numerous prominent campaigners, academics, entertainers (like Danny Boyle the most successful Catholic in showbiz owing to his film, "Slumdog Millionaire"), politicians and writers. But the descendants of the recusant families are still a force in the land."


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) the Church in England has tended to focus on ecumenical dialogue with the Anglican Church rather than winning converts from it as in the past. However, the 1990s have seen a number of conversions from Anglicanism to the Catholic Church, largely prompted by the Church of England's decision to ordain women as priests (among other moves away from traditional doctrines and structures). The resultant converts included members of the Royal Family (Katharine, Duchess of Kent, her son Lord Nicholas Windsor and her grandson Baron Downpatrick), Graham Leonard (former Anglican Bishop of London), Frances Shand Kydd (maternal grandmother of Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex), and a number of Anglican priests. Converts to Catholicism in Britain occur for any number of reasons, not least from "the mystical buoyant instinct" within each person to grow toward a profounder expression of what they believe. In 2019, Charles Moore, former editor of "The Spectator," "The Daily Telegraph," and authorized biographer of Margaret Thatcher, noted that his conversion in 1994 to Catholicism followed the Church of England's decision to ordain women, "unilaterally." The Church of England's "determination to do this," he said, "willy-nilly, come what may, meant that they weren't serious about Christian unity, because the Catholic and Orthodox had a different view." This view seems to match Graham Leonard's view and many other former Anglican clerics who, according to John Jay Hughes, have noted: "It is about authority, or lack of it, of the Church of England unilaterally to initiate a radical change in the priesthood, since it does not have its own, but only the priesthood of the whole Catholic church of which it had always claimed to be a part."


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The spirit of ecumenism fostered by Vatican II resulted in 1990 with the Catholic Church in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland joining Churches Together in Britain and Ireland as an expression of the churches' commitment to work ecumenically. In 2006, for example, a memorial was put up to St John Houghton and fellow Carthusian monks martyred at the London Charterhouse, 1535. Anglican priest Geoffrey Curtis campaigned for it with the current archbishop of Canterbury's blessing. Also, in another ecumenical gesture, a plaque in Holywell Street, Oxford, now commemorates the Catholic martyrs of England. It reads: "Near this spot George Nichols, Richard Yaxley, Thomas Belson, and Humphrey Pritchard were executed for their Catholic faith, 5 July 1589." This action, however, did not please some Catholics, as the chair of the Latin Mass Society, Joseph Shaw, noted in a letter dated 2020: "As Mgr. Ronald Knox pointed out: 'Each of them [martyrs] died in the belief that he was bearing witness to the truth; and if you accept both testimonies undiscriminately, then you are making nonsense of them both.'" And at Lambeth Palace, in February 2009, the Archbishop of Canterbury hosted a reception to launch a book, "Why Go To Church?", by Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, one of Britain's best known religious and the former master of the Dominican Order. A large number of young Dominican friars attended. Fr Radcliffe said, "I don't think there have been so many Dominicans in one place since the time of Robert Kilwardby, the Dominican Archbishop of Canterbury in the 13th century."


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Currently, along with the 22 Latin Church dioceses, there are two dioceses of the Eastern Catholic Churches: the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Holy Family of London and the Syro-Malabar Catholic Eparchy of Great Britain. The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, for Anglican-tradition converts to Catholicism, was erected by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The Church's principles of social justice influenced initiatives to tackle the challenges of poverty and social inclusion. In Southampton, Fr Pat Murphy O'Connor founded the St Dismas Society as an agency to meet the needs of ex-prisoners discharged from Winchester prison. Some of St Dismas Society's early members went on to help found the Simon Community in Sussex then in London. Their example gave new inspiration to other clergy, such as the Revd Kenneth Leech (CofE) of St Anne's Church, Soho, who helped found the homeless charity Centrepoint, and the Revd Bruce Kenrick (Church of Scotland) who helped found the homeless charity Shelter. In 1986 Cardinal Basil Hume established the Cardinal Hume Centre to work with homeless young people, badly housed families and local communities to access accommodation, support and advice, education, training and employment opportunities.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In 2006 Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor instituted an annual Mass in Support of Migrant Workers at Westminster Cathedral in partnership with the ethnic chaplains of Brentwood, Southwark and Westminster.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: On 3 November 2016, John Bingham, Head of Media at the Church of England, reported in "The Daily Telegraph" that Cardinal Vincent Nichols officially acknowledged that the Catholic Church in England and Wales had pressured young unmarried mothers in the country to put their children up for adoption in agencies linked to the Catholic Church throughout the decades following World War II and offered an apology.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In November 2020 the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse reported that between 1970 and 2015, the church in England and Wales had received more than 900 complaints involving more than 3,000 instances of child sexual abuse, made against almost 1,000 individuals, including priests, monks and church associates. In light of such serious and persistent allegations over decades, the Inquiry had hoped to gain the cooperation of the Vatican. In the event its repeated requests were thwarted. As a result, there have been calls for resignations of prelates in leadership roles both from victims, their families and supporters. The inquiry has not spared criticism of the church for prioritising its reputation over the suffering of victims. Cardinal Nichols was singled out in the inquiry report for lack of personal responsibility, or of compassion towards victims. However he has indicated he would not be resigning as he was "determined to put it right". In another article by Pepinster, she notes that the late Cardinal Basil Hume was "remembered for showing empathy to survivors but offered only pastoral care and kindness."


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The Catholic Church in England and Wales has five provinces: Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Southwark and Westminster. There are 22 dioceses which are divided into parishes (for comparison, the Church of England and Church in Wales currently have a total of 50 dioceses). In addition to these, there are four dioceses covering England and Wales for specific groups which are the Bishopric of the Forces, the Eparchy for Ukrainians, the Syro-Malabar Catholic Eparchy of Great Britain and the Personal Ordinariate for former Anglicans.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The Catholic bishops in England and Wales come together in a collaborative structure known as the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. Currently the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Gerard Nichols, is the president of the Bishops' Conference. For this reason in the global Catholic Church (outside England), he is "de facto" Primate of England though not in the eyes of English law and the established Church of England. Historically, the avoidance of the title of "Primate" was to eschew whipping up anti-Catholic tension, in the same way the bishops of the restored hierarchy avoided using current titles of Anglican sees (Archbishop of Westminster rather than "Canterbury" or "London"). However, the Archbishop of Westminster had certain privileges: he was the only metropolitan in the country until 1911 (when the archdioceses of Birmingham and Liverpool were created) and he has always acted as leader at meetings of the English bishops.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Although the bishops of the restored hierarchy were obliged to take new titles, such as that of Westminster, they saw themselves very much in continuity with the pre-Reformation Church. Westminster in particular saw itself as the continuation of Canterbury, hence the similarity of the coat of arms of the two sees (with Westminster believing it has more right to it since it features the pallium, no longer given to Anglican archbishops). At the back of Westminster Cathedral is a list of Popes and, alongside this, a list of Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury beginning with Augustine of Canterbury and the year they received the pallium. After Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic incumbent of Canterbury, the names of the Catholic vicars apostolic or titular bishops (from 1685) are recorded and then the Archbishops of Westminster, in one unimpaired line, from 597 to the present, according to the Archdiocese of Westminster. To highlight this historical continuity, dating back to Pope Gregory I's appointment of Augustine and his sequent bestowal of the pallium on the appointee, the installation rites of pre-Reformation Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury and earlier Archbishops of Westminster were used at the installation of the current Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Gerard Nichols. He also became the forty-third of the English cardinals since the 12th century.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In October 2009, following closed-circuit talks between some Anglicans and the Holy See, Pope Benedict made a relatively unconditional offer to accommodate disaffected Anglicans in the Church of England, enabling them, for the first time, to retain parts of their liturgy and heritage under "Anglicanorum coetibus", while being in full communion with Rome. By April 2012 the UK ordinariate numbered about 1200, including five bishops and 60 priests. The ordinariate has recruited a group of aristocrats as honorary vice-presidents to help out. These include the Duke of Norfolk, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith and the Duchess of Somerset. Other vice-presidents include Lord Nicholas Windsor, Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth and the Squire de Lisle, whose ancestor Ambrose de Lisle was a 19th-century Catholic convert who advocated the corporate reunion of the Anglican Church with Rome. According to the first Ordinary, Mgr Keith Newton, the ordinariate will "work on something with an Anglican flavour, but they are not bringing over any set of Anglican liturgy". The director of music at Westminster Abbey (Anglican), lay Catholic James O'Donnell, likens the ordinariate to a Uniate church or one of the many non-Latin Catholic rites, saying: "This is a good opportunity for us to remember that there isn't a one size fits all, and that this could be a good moment to adopt the famous civil service philosophy – 'celebrating diversity'." In May 2013 a former Anglican priest, Alan Hopes, was appointed the new bishop of East Anglia, whose diocese includes the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. In 2021, the former Anglican bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, joined the Ordinariate, noting: "I believe that the Anglican desire to adhere to apostolic, patristic and conciliar teaching can now best be maintained in the Ordinariate." Nazir-Ali also shared with Dr. Foley Beach, chairman of the Global Anglican Future Conference, "his willingness to continue to assist" that movement "in any way that might be suitable." In April 2022, Pope Francis granted Nazir-Ali the title "Prelate of Honour." He may now be addressed as "Monsignor."


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: There exists the Apostolic Exarchate for Ukrainians which serves the 15,000 Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Great Britain, with a cathedral and various churches across the country.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The Maronite Church in the United Kingdom is under the jurisdiction of the Maronite Eparchy of Europe. The Lebanese Maronite Order (OLM) is in charge of serving the Maronite Catholics in the UK and it is a registered Charity in England and Wales. The OLM is an order of the Maronite Catholic Church. Father Fadi KMEID is the parish priest for Maronites. The OLM runs a few churches, for example Our Lady of Lebanon in Paddington serving the Lebanese Maronite community and the church of The Holy Family of Nazareth serving the Cypriot Maronite community.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: There are also Catholic chaplains involved in the ministries of Eastern Catholic Churches (of Eritrean, Chaldean, Syriac, Syro-Malabar, Syro-Malankara, and Melkite communities). For information about the Syro-Malabar chaplaincy within the Diocese of Westminster in London, see Syro-Malabar Catholic Church of London.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: At the 2001 United Kingdom census, there were 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, some eight per cent of the population. One hundred years earlier, in 1901, they represented only 4.8 per cent of the population. In 1981, 8.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales were Catholic. In 2009, an Ipsos Mori poll found that 9.6 per cent, or 5.2 million persons of all ethnicities were Catholic in England and Wales. Sizeable populations include North West England where one in five is Catholic, a result of large-scale Irish immigration in the nineteenth century as well as the high number of English recusants in Lancashire.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Migration from Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries and more recent Eastern European migration have significantly increased the numbers of Catholics in England and Wales, although Pew Research data and stats of 2018 point to other factors at work. According to Pew researchers, 19% of UK adults identify as Catholic. The Eastern European members are mainly from Poland, with smaller numbers from Lithuania, Latvia, and Slovakia. According to the World Factbook , the ethnic/racial composition of UK was "white": 87.2%; "non-white": 12.8%. A 2022 report, however, noted the "white" population of England and Wales had dropped from 86% in 2011 to 81.7% in 2021.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The spiritual needs of migrating Catholic Poles in England and Wales over the past two centuries have been tied inexorably to the changing geo-political fate of their homeland. Most of the arrivals up to the 21st century were escaping political and other repressions. They were not all Catholics.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: On the accession of Poland to the European Union in 2004 there has been large-scale Polish immigration to the UK, up to 900 000 people as of 2017 have come. The Polish Catholic Mission reports that only about 10% of the newly arrived Poles attend church regularly. For those it has around 219 branches and pastoral centres with 114 priests. The Vicars Delegate who manage the "chaplaincy" of the Polish Catholic Mission since then have been Mgr. Tadeusz Kukla up to 2010, succeeded by the Mgr. Stefan Wylężek. In Poland, the Polish Bishops Conference has a bishop Delegate, with special responsibility for the spiritual needs of émigré Poles. The postholder since 2011 has been Bishop Wiesław Cichowski. "The Tablet" reported in December 2007 that the Polish Catholic Mission as stating that its branches follow a pastoral programme set by the Polish conference of bishops and are viewed as "an integral part of the Polish church".


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Polish-speaking Catholics first arrived in the United Kingdom in some numbers after the 19th century national insurgencies in 1831 and 1863 which had arisen, especially in the Russian sector, in the wake of the Partitions of the Lithuanian - Polish commonwealth during the late 18th century. In 1864 through the efforts of general Zamoyski and Cardinal Wiseman, Rev. Chwaliszewski was invited to come to London and lead services in the Polish chapel at St. Peter's Hatton Garden. Worthy of note in this period was the Polish figure of The Venerable Bernard Łubieński (1846-1933) closely associated with Bishop Robert Coffin and who, after an education at Ushaw College, in 1864 entered the Redemptorists at Clapham and spent some years as a missionary in the British Isles, before returning to his native land.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The Polish Catholic Mission was placed on a permanent footing in 1894 by Cardinal Vaughan, the then Archbishop of Westminster. The nucleus of the mission and its chaplaincy was formed by Blessed Franciszka Siedliska (1842-1902), founder of the Congregation of the Holy Family of Nazareth and its spiritual director, rev. Lechert CR. Sr. Siedliska and two sisters started a Polish language primary school. From then on Polish services were regularly held in a chapel first in Globe Street, then in Cambridge Heath Road in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, where most exiled Poles were living at the time.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: After World War I, the Polish chaplaincy was in the rented Polish church in Mercer Street in North London. In 1928 the local authority condemned the building as unsafe. That same year the exiled community was visited by cardinal Aleksander Kakowski with bishop Przeździeński from the diocese of Siedlce and Polish ambassador, Konstanty Skirmunt. After an extended search, a building was bought from the Swedenborg Society in Devonia Road, Islington. Cardinal Bourne of Westminster, helped the mission with a £1000 loan for refurbishment. It became the first Polish-owned ecclesiastical building in the British Isles. It was consecrated on 30 October 1930 by cardinal August Hlond, primate of Poland in the presence of cardinal Bourne. In 1938 rev. Władysław Staniszewski became chaplain to the mission.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: After World War II, the pastoral task had swelled to almost 200,000 displaced people - mainly soldiers. Many Polish servicemen were unable to return to their homeland following the annexation of half of Poland's territory by the USSR and the imposition of a communist regime in the newly reconfigured Poland. The Polish Resettlement Corps was formed by the British government to ease their transition into British life. They were joined by several thousand Displaced Persons (DPs), many of whom were their family members. This influx of Poles gave rise to the Polish Resettlement Act 1947 which allowed approximately 250,000 Polish Servicemen and their dependents to settle in Britain. Many assimilated into existing Catholic congregations. Among them were also 120 Military chaplains and priests, along with a minority of Orthodox, Lutheran and Armenian Christians with their own chaplains. There was also a minority Jewish contingent and a handful of Muslims among the soldiers.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In 1948, following a visit to Poland the previous year for talks with cardinal Hlond, and after consulting with the Catholic episcopate of England and Wales, Cardinal Bernard Griffin nominated the rector of the Polish Catholic Mission, rev. Staniszewski as "Vicar delegate for civilian Poles in England and Wales", with the powers of an Ordinariate. Around this time Archbishop Hlond had nominated Bishop Józef Gawlina, also a Divisional general and based in Rome, to be responsible overall for the Polish diaspora. Between them, this enabled the then rector in England to engage priests and organize regular pastoral care across 18 dioceses in England and Wales. The Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales agreed to the appointment of a "Vicar Delegate", nominated by the Polish Episcopate, with ordinary power over the Polish clergy throughout England and Wales, with certain exceptions relating to marriage.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: On the pastoral front, the temporary Polish parish hosted in Central London by the fathers of Brompton Oratory was able to be moved westward in 1962 to the newly acquired St Andrew Bobola church in Shepherd's Bush, the second Polish owned church in London since 1930. It is regarded as an unofficial garrison church with memorials to many historical Polish Army regiments. The Mission was boosted by the integration of male religious orders, the Polish Jesuits in Willesden, north-west London, the Marian fathers in Ealing and formerly the college at Fawley Court. Latterly, these have been joined by the Society of Christ Fathers, dedicated to minister to the Polish diaspora, who run a parish in Putney in London.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Since the original agreement between the English and Polish church hierarchies in 1948, whenever a Polish Catholic community emerges within England and Wales, the vicar delegate appoints a Polish priest to organise a local branch of the Polish Catholic Mission. A priest thus appointed is the Catholic version of a "priest in charge", but he is not actually a parish priest. There are strictly no Polish parishes or "quasiparishes" in England and Wales (in accordance with Canons 515 §1 and 516 §1) with the exception of the original church on Devonia Road in Islington. A Polish community is sometimes referred to as a "parish", but is not a parish in the canonical sense. Hence the Polish community attending a "Polish church" is not a "judicial person". The canonical judicial person which represents the interests of all Polish communities of worship is vested in the Polish Catholic Mission.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: In December 2007, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said: "I'm quite concerned that Poles are creating a separate Church in Britain – I would want them to be part of the Catholic life of this country. I would hope those responsible for the Polish Church here, and the Poles themselves, will be aware that they should become a part of local parishes as soon as possible when they learn enough of the language." Mgr Kukla stressed that the Polish Catholic Mission continues to have a "good relationship" with the hierarchy in England and Wales and said "Integration is a long process".


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: The Polish Catholic Mission co-operated with the English hierarchy's 2008 research inquiry into the needs of migrants in London's Catholic community. The inquiry had been commissioned by the Archdiocese of Westminster, Archbishop Kevin McDonald of Southwark and Bishop Thomas McMahon of Brentwood. Around 1000 people attending Mass in three London dioceses were surveyed using anonymous questionnaires available in Polish, Lithuanian, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English. The congregations were drawn from mainstream diocesan parishes, ethnic chaplaincies and churches of the Polish vicariate. The report findings described how 86% of eastern Europeans said the availability of Mass in their mother-tongue was a reason for their choosing to worship in a particular church. One of the report's recommendations emphasised cooperation with key overseas bishops conferences, dioceses and religious institutes on the recruitment and appointment of ethnic chaplains.


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: Two cases of alleged stigmata are associated with England, neither have been approved by the Vatican;


title: Catholic Church in England and Wales

text: See Catholic Church in the United Kingdom for English Saints, English Catholics declared Blessed, Venerable, and Servants of God, past and present. The list includes Welsh, Scot, Irish, and English saints.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Antisemitism in Islam refers to scriptural and theological teachings in Islam against Jews and Judaism, and the treatment and persecution of Jews in the Muslim world.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: With the rise of Islam in Arabia in the 7th century CE and its subsequent spread during the early Muslim conquests, Jews, alongside many other peoples, became subject to the rule of Islamic polities. The quality of Muslim rule varied considerably in different periods, as did the attitudes of the rulers, government officials, the clergy, and the general population towards various subjugated ethnic and religious groups, ranging from tolerance to open persecution.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Scholars have studied and debated Muslim attitudes towards Jews, as well as the treatment of Jews in Islamic thought and societies throughout the history of Islam.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Jews are not mentioned at all in verses dating from the Meccan period. According to Bernard Lewis, the coverage given to Jews is relatively insignificant.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Quran makes specific references to the "Banū Isrāʾīl" (meaning "the Children of Israel"), a term which occurs 44 times in the Quran, although it's unclear whether it refers exclusively to the Jews or both Jews and Christians as a single religious group. In the Quran, Jews are not an ethnic group but a religious group, while "Banū Isrāʾīl" were an ethnic group, and according to the Quran they weren't following Judaism.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Arabic term "Yahūd", denoting Jews, and "Yahūdi" occur 11 times, and the verbal form "hāda" (meaning "to be a Jew/Jewish") occurs 10 times. According to Khalid Durán, the negative passages use "Yahūd", while the positive references speak mainly of the "Banū Isrāʾīl".


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The references in the Quran to Jews are interpreted in different ways. According to Frederick M. Schweitzer and Marvin Perry, these references are "mostly negative". According to Tahir Abbas, the general references to Jews are favorable, with only those addressed to particular groups of Jews containing harsh criticisms.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Bernard Lewis and other scholars, the earliest verses of the Quran were largely sympathetic to Jews. Muhammad admired them as monotheists and saw them as natural adherents to the new faith, and Jewish practices helped model early Islamic behavior, such as midday prayer, prayers on Friday, Ramadan fasting (modelled after the Jewish Yom Kippur fast on the tenth of the month of Tishrei), and most famously the fact that until 623 CE Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem, not Mecca.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: After his flight ("al-hijra") from Mecca in 622 CE, Muhammad with his followers settled in Yathrib, subsequently renamed "Medina al-Nabi" ('City of the Prophet') where he managed to draw up a 'social contract', widely referred to as the Constitution of Medina. This contract, known as "the Leaf" ("ṣaḥīfa") upheld the peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, defining them all, under given conditions, as constituting the "Ummah", or "community" of that city, and granting the latter freedom of religious thought and practice. Yathrib/Medina was not homogeneous. Alongside the 200 odd emigrants from Mecca (the "Muhājirūn"), who had followed Muhammad, its population consisted of the Faithful of Medina ("Anṣār", "the Helpers"), Arab Pagans, three Jewish tribes, and some Christians. The foundational constitution sought to establish, for the first time in history according to Ali Khan, a formal agreement guaranteeing interfaith conviviality, albeit ringed with articles emphasizing strategic cooperation in the defense of the city.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: In paragraph 16 of this document, it states that: 'Those Jews who follow us are entitled to our aid and support so long as they shall not have wronged us or lent assistance (to any enemies) against us'.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Paragraph 37 has it that 'To the Jews their own expenses and to the Muslims theirs. They shall help one another in the event of any attack on the people covered by this document. There shall be sincere friendship, exchange of good counsel, fair conduct and no treachery between them.' The three local Jewish tribes were the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qurayza, and the Banu Qaynuqa. While Muhammad clearly had no prejudice against them, and appears to have regarded his own message as substantially the same as that received by Jews on Sinai, tribal politics, and Muhammad's deep frustration at Jewish refusals to accept his prophethood, quickly led to a break with all three.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Banu Qaynuqa were expelled from Medina in 624 CE. In March 624 CE, Muslims led by Muhammad defeated the Meccans of the Banu Quraysh tribe in the Battle of Badr. Ibn Ishaq writes that a dispute broke out between the Muslims and the Banu Qaynuqa (the allies of the Khazraj tribe) soon afterwards. When a Muslim woman visited a jeweler's shop in the Qaynuqa marketplace, she was pestered to uncover her hair. The goldsmith, a Jew, pinned her clothing such that, upon getting up, she was stripped naked. A Muslim man coming upon the resulting commotion killed the shopkeeper in retaliation. A mob of Jews from the Qaynuqa tribe then pounced on the Muslim man and killed him. This escalated to a chain of revenge killings, and enmity grew between Muslims and the Banu Qaynuqa.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Traditional Islamic sources view these episodes as a violation of the Constitution of Medina. Muhammad himself regarded this as "casus belli". However, Western scholars and historians do not find in these events the underlying reason for Muhammad's attack on the Qaynuqa. Fred Donner argues that Muhammad turned against the Banu Qaynuqa because as artisans and traders, the latter were in close contact with Meccan merchants. Weinsinck views the episodes cited by the Muslim historians used to justify their expulsion, such as a Jewish goldsmith humiliating a Muslim woman, as having no more than anecdotal value. He writes that the Jews had assumed a contentious attitude towards Muhammad, and as a group possessing substantial independent power, they posed a great danger. Wensinck thus concludes that Muhammad, strengthened by the victory at the Battle of Badr, soon resolved to eliminate the Jewish opposition to himself. Norman Stillman also believes that Muhammad decided to move against the Jews of Medina after being strengthened in the wake of the Battle of Badr.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Muhammad then approached the Banu Qaynuqa, gathering them in the market place and warned them to stop their hostility lest they suffer the same fate that happened to the Quraish at Badr. He also told them to accept Islam saying he was a prophet sent by God as per their scriptures. The tribe responded by mocking Muhammad's followers for accepting him as a prophet and also mocked their victory at Badr saying the Quraish had no knowledge of war. They then warned him that if he ever fought with them, he will know that they were real men. This response was viewed as a declaration of war. Muhammad then besieged the Banu Qaynuqa after which the tribe surrendered unconditionally and were later expelled from Medina.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: In 625 CE, the Banu Nadir tribe was evicted from Medina after they attempted to assassinate Muhammad. In 627 CE, when the Quraysh and their allies besieged the city in the Battle of the Trench, the Qurayza initially tried to remain neutral but eventually entered into negotiations with the besieging army, violating the pact they had agreed to years earlier. Subsequently, the tribe was charged with treason and besieged by the Muslims commanded by Muhammad. The Banu Qurayza eventually surrendered and their men were beheaded. The spoils of battle, including the enslaved women and children of the tribe, were divided up among the Islamic warriors that had participated in the siege and among the emigrees from Mecca who had hitherto depended on the help of the Muslims native to Medina. Although the Banu Qurayza never took up arms against Muhammad or the Muslims, they entered into negotiations with the invading army and violated the Constitution of Medina. However, Nuam ibn Masud was able to sow discord between the invading forces and Banu Qurayza, thus breaking down the negotiations.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: As a result, the direction of Muslim prayer was shifted towards Mecca from Jerusalem, and the most negative Quranic verses about Jews were set down after this time. According to Laqueur, conflicting statements about Jews in the Quran have affected Muslim attitudes towards Jews to this day, especially during periods of rising Islamic fundamentalism.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Bernard Lewis, there is nothing in Islamic theology (with a single exception) that can be considered refutations of Judaism or ferocious anti-Jewish diatribes. Lewis and Chanes suggest that, for a variety of reasons, Muslims were not antisemitic for the most part. The Quran, like Judaism, orders Muslims to profess strict monotheism. It also rejects the stories of Jewish deicide as a blasphemous absurdity, and other similar stories in the Gospels play no part in the Muslim educational system. The Quran does not present itself as a fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible but rather a restoration of its original message – thus, no clash of interpretations between Judaism and Islam can arise.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: In addition, Lewis argues that the Quran lacks popular Western traditions of 'guilt and betrayal'. Rosenblatt and Pinson suggest that the Quran teaches toleration of Judaism as a fellow monotheistic faith.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Lewis adds that negative attributes ascribed to subject religions (in this case Judaism and Christianity) are usually expressed in religious and social terms, but only very rarely in ethnic or racial terms. However, this does sometimes occur. The language of abuse is often quite strong. It has been argued that the conventional Muslim epithets for Jews, apes, and Christians, pigs derive from Quranic usage. Lewis adduces three passages in the Quran (, , ) used to ground this view. The interpretation of these 'enigmatic' passages in Islamic exegetics is highly complex, dealing as they do with infractions like breaking the Sabbath. According to Goitein, the idea of Jewish Sabbath breakers turning into apes may reflect the influence of Yemeni midrashim. Firestone notes that the Qurayza tribe itself is described in Muslim sources as using the trope of being turned into apes if one breaks the Sabbath to justify not exploiting the Sabbath in order to attack Mohammad, when they were under siege.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Stillman, the Quran praises Moses, and depicts the Israelites as the recipients of divine favour. The Quran dedicates many verses to the glorification of Hebrew prophets, says Leon Poliakov. He quotes verse as an example,


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: And We blessed him with Isaac and Jacob. We guided them all as We previously guided Noah and those among his descendants: David, Solomon, Job, Joseph, Moses, and Aaron. This is how We reward the good-doers. Likewise, ˹We guided˺ Zachariah, John, Jesus, and Elias, who were all of the righteous. ˹We also guided˺ Ishmael, Elisha, Jonah, and Lot, favouring each over other people ˹of their time˺.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Leon Poliakov, Walter Laqueur, and Jane Gerber, argue that passages in the Quran reproach Jews for their refusal to recognize Muhammad as a prophet of God. "The Quran is engaged mainly in dealing with the sinners among the Jews and the attack on them is shaped according to models that one encounters in the New Testament." The Muslim holy text defined the Arab and Muslim attitude towards Jews to this day, especially in the periods when Islamic fundamentalism was on the rise.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Walter Laqueur states that the Quran and its interpreters have a great many conflicting things to say about the Jews. Jews are said to be treacherous and hypocritical and could never be friends with a Muslim.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Frederick M. Schweitzer and Marvin Perry state that references to Jews in the Quran are mostly negative. The Quran states that wretchedness and baseness were stamped upon the Jews, and they were visited with wrath from Allah, that was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully. And for their taking usury, which was prohibited for them, and because of their consuming people's wealth under false pretense, a painful punishment was prepared for them. The Quran requires their "abasement and poverty" in the form of the poll tax jizya. In his "wrath" God has "cursed" the Jews and will turn them into apes/monkeys and swine and idol worshipers because they are "infidels".


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Martin Kramer, the Quran speaks of Jews in a negative way and reports instances of Jewish treachery against the Islamic prophet Muhammad. However, Islam didn't hold up those Jews who practiced treachery against Muhammad as archetypes nor did it portray treachery as the embodiment of Jews in all times and places. The Quran also attests to Muhammad's amicable relations with Jews.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: While traditional religious supremacism played a role in the Islamic view of Jews, the same attitude applied to Christians and other non-Muslims. Islamic tradition regards Jews as a legitimate community of believers in God (called "people of the Book") legally entitled to sufferance.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Quran clears Jews from the accusation of murdering the messiah, and states "That they said (in boast), 'We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah';- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them". They also argue that the Jewish Bible has not been incorporated in the Islamic text, and "virtuous Muslims" are not contrasted with "stiff-necked, criminal Jews".


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: However, due to the Quran's timely process of story-telling, some scholars argue that all references to Jews or other groups within the Quran refers to only certain populations at a certain point in history. Also, the Quran praises some Jews in :


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: "Indeed, the believers, Jews, Sabians and Christians—whoever ˹truly˺ believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good, there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve."


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Quran gives credence to the Christian claim of Jews scheming against Jesus, " ... but God also schemed, and God is the best of schemers." () In the mainstream Muslim view, the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion, and thus the Jewish plots against him ended in failure. According to Gerber, in numerous verses (; ; ; ; , , ; ) the Quran accuses Jews of altering the Scripture. According to Gabriel Said Reynolds, "the Qur’ān makes ‘the killing of the prophets’ one of the principal characteristics of the Jews"; although the Quran emphasizes the killing of the Jewish prophets by the Israelites, Reynolds remarks that none of them were killed by the Israelites according to the Biblical account.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: But the Quran differentiates between "good and bad" Jews, adding to the idea that the Jewish people or their religion itself are not the target of the story-telling process. Rubin claims the criticisms deal mainly "with the sinners among the Jews and the attack on them is shaped according to models that one encounters in the New Testament." The Quran also speaks favorably of Jews. Though it also criticizes them for not being grateful for God's blessing on them, the harsh criticisms are only addressed towards a particular group of Jews, which is clear from the context of the Quranic verses, but translations usually confuse this by using the general term "Jews". To judge Jews based on the deeds of some of their ancestors is an anti-Quranic idea.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Ali S. Asani suggests that the Quran endorses the establishment of religiously and culturally plural societies and this endorsement has affected the treatment of religious minorities in Muslim lands throughout history. He cites the endorsement of pluralism to explain why violent forms of antisemitism generated in medieval and modern Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, never occurred in regions under Muslim rule.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Some verses of the Quran, notably , preach tolerance towards members of the Jewish faith. According to Kramer, Jews are regarded as members of a legitimate community of believers in God, "people of the Book", and therefore legally entitled to sufferance.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: As one of the five pillars of Islam Muslims perform daily Salat prayers, which involves reciting the first chapter of the Qur'an, the Al-Fatiha. Most commentators suggest that the description, "those who earn Thine anger" in refers to the Jews. Israel Shrenzel, former chief analyst in the Arabic section of the research division of the Shin Bet and a current teacher in Tel Aviv University’s department of Arabic and Islamic studies wrote, "Given that there is contradiction between the content and message of the two groups of verses – those hostile to Jews and those tolerant toward them – the question is which group is to be adopted nowadays by the Muslim scholars and masses. The more dominant view adheres to the first group".


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: In 567, Khaybar was invaded and vacated of its Jewish inhabitants by the Ghassanid Arab Christian king Al-Harith ibn Jabalah. He later freed to the captives upon his return to the Levant. A brief account of the campaign is given by Ibn Qutaybah, and confirmed by the Harran Inscription. See Irfan Shahid's "Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century" for full details.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: In the 7th century, Khaybar was inhabited by Jews, who pioneered the cultivation of the oasis and made their living growing date palm trees, as well as through commerce and craftsmanship, accumulating considerable wealth. Some objects found by the Muslims when they entered Khaybar — a siege-engine, 20 bales of Yemenite cloth, and 500 cloaks — point out to an intense trade carried out by the Jews. In the past some scholars attempted to explain the siege-engine by suggesting that it was used for settling quarrels among the families of the community. Today most academics believe it was stored in a depôt for future sale, in the same way that swords, lances, shields, and other weaponry had been sold by the Jews to Arabs. Equally, the cloth and the cloaks may have been intended for sale, as it was unlikely that such a quantity of luxury goods were kept for the exclusive use of the Jews.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The oasis was divided into three regions: al-Natat, al-Shikk, and al-Katiba, probably separated by natural divisions, such as the desert, lava drifts, and swamps. Each of these regions contained several fortresses or redoubts containing homes, storehouses and stables. Each fortress was occupied by a separate family and surrounded by cultivated fields and palm-groves. In order to improve their defensive capabilities, the settlers raised the fortresses up on hills or basalt rocks.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Jews continued to live in the oasis for several more years afterwards until they were finally expelled by caliph Umar. The imposition of tribute upon the conquered Jews of the Khaybar Fortress served as a precedent. Islamic law came to require exaction of tribute known as "jizya" from "dhimmis", i.e. non-Muslims under Muslim rule.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: For many centuries, the oasis at Khaybar was an important caravan stopping place. The center developed around a series of ancient dams built to hold run-off water from the rain. Around the water catchments, date palms grew. Khaybar became an important date-producing center.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The words "humility" and "humiliation" occur frequently in the Quran and later Muslim literature in relation to Jews. According to Lewis, "This, in Islamic view, is their just punishment for their past rebelliousness, and is manifested in their present impotence between the mighty powers of Christendom and Islam." The standard Quranic reference to Jews is verse : "And remember ye said: "O Moses! we cannot endure one kind of food (always); so beseech thy Lord for us to produce for us of what the earth groweth, -its pot-herbs, and cucumbers, garlic, lentils, and onions." He said: "Will ye exchange the better for the worse? Go ye down to any town, and ye shall find what ye want!" They were covered with humiliation and misery; they drew on themselves the wrath of Allah. This because they went on rejecting the Signs of Allah and slaying His Messengers without just cause. This because they rebelled and went on transgressing."


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Two verses later we read: "And ˹remember˺ when We took a covenant from you and raised the mountain above you ˹saying˺, “Hold firmly to that ˹Scripture˺ which We have given you and observe its teachings so perhaps you will become mindful ˹of Allah˺.” Yet you turned away afterwards. Had it not been for Allah’s grace and mercy upon you, you would have certainly been of the losers. You are already aware of those of you who broke the Sabbath. We said to them, “Be disgraced apes!” So We made their fate an example to present and future generations, and a lesson to the God-fearing."


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Quran associates Jews with rejection of God's prophets including Jesus and Muhammad, thus explaining their resistance to him personally. (Cf. Surah ; , 61, 70, and 82.) It also asserts that Jews and Christians claim to be children of God (Surah ), and that only they will achieve salvation (Surah ). According to the Quran, Jews blasphemously claim that Ezra is the son of God, as Christians claim Jesus is, (Surah ) and that God's hand is fettered (Surah – i.e., that they can freely defy God). Some of those who are Jews, "pervert words from their meanings", (Surah ), and because they have committed wrongdoing, God has "forbidden some good things that were previously permitted them", thus explaining Jewish commandments regarding food, Sabbath restrictions on work, and other rulings as a punishment from God (Surah ). They listen for the sake of mendacity (Surah ), twisting the truth, and practice forbidden usury, and therefore they will receive "a painful doom" (Surah ). The Quran gives credence to the Christian claim of Jews scheming against Jesus, "... but God also schemed, and God is the best of schemers"(Surah ). In the Muslim view, the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion, and thus the supposed Jewish plots against him ended in complete failure. In numerous verses (Surah , ; , ; , , ; ) the Quran accuses Jews of deliberately obscuring and perverting scripture.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Martin Kramer argues that "Islamic tradition did not hold up those Jews who practiced treachery against Muhammad as archetypes—as the embodiment of Jews in all times and places." Thus for Muslims to embrace the belief that the Jews are the eternal "enemies of God", there must be more at work than the Islamic tradition. Islamic tradition does, however, provide the sources for Islamic antisemitism and "there is no doubt whatsoever that the Islamic tradition provides sources on which Islamic antisemitism now feeds." The modern use of the Quran to support antisemitism is, however, selective and distorting. The fact that many Islamic thinkers have spent time in the West has resulted in the absorption of antisemitism, he says. Specifically, Kramer believes that the twin concepts of the "eternal Jew" as the enemy of God and the "arch conspirator" are themes that are borrowed "from the canon of Western religious and racial antisemitism." In his view, Islamic antisemitism is "[l]Like other antisemitism" in that "it has its origins in the anti-rational ideologies of modern Europe, which have now infected the Islamic world."


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: During Muhammad's life, Jews lived on the Arabian Peninsula, especially in and around Medina. Muhammad is known to have had a Jewish wife, Safiyya bint Huyayy, who subsequently converted to Islam. Safiyya, who was previously the wife of Kenana ibn al-Rabi, was selected by Muhammad as his bride after the Battle of Khaybar.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Islamic sources, the Medinian Jews began to develop friendly alliances with Muhammad's enemies in Mecca so they could overthrow him, despite the fact that they promised not to overthrow him in the treaty of the Constitution of Medina and promised to take the side of him and his followers and fight against their enemies. Two Jewish tribes were expelled and the third one was wiped out. The Banu Qaynuqa was expelled for their hostility against the Muslims and for mocking them. The Banu Nadir was expelled after they attempted to assassinate Muhammad. The last one, the Banu Qurayza, was wiped out after the Battle of Trench where they attempted to ally themselves with the invading Quraish.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Samuel Rosenblatt opines these incidents were not part of policies directed exclusively against Jews, and Muhammad was more severe with his pagan Arab kinsmen. In addition, Muhammad's conflict with Jews was considered of rather minor importance. According to Lewis, since the clash of Judaism and Islam was resolved and ended with the victory of the Muslims during Muhammad's lifetime, no unresolved theological dispute among Muslims fueled antisemitism. There is also a difference between the Jewish denial of the Christian message and the Jewish denial of the Muslim message, because Muhammad never claimed to be the Messiah nor did he claim to be the Son of God, however, he is referred to as "the Apostle of God." The cause of Muhammad's death is disputable, though the Hadiths tend to suggest he may have eventually succumbed to poison after having been poisoned at Khaybar by one of the surviving Jewish widows.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Rosenblatt, Muhammad's disputes with the neighboring Jewish tribes left no marked traces on his immediate successors (known as Caliphs). The first Caliphs generally based their treatment of Jews upon the Quranic verses which encourage tolerance of them. Classical commentators viewed Muhammad's struggle with the Jews as a minor episode in his career, but the interpretation of it has shifted in modern times.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The hadith (recordings of deeds and sayings attributed to Muhammad) use both the terms "Banu Israil" and "Yahud" in relation to Jews, the latter term becoming ever more frequent and appearing mostly in negative context. For example, Jews were "cursed and changed into rats" in see also According to Norman Stillman:


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari record various recensions of a hadith where Muhammad had prophesied that the Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims and Jews fight each other. The Muslims will kill the Jews with such success that they will then hide behind stones or both trees and stones according to various recensions, which will then cry out to a Muslim that a Jew is hiding behind them and ask them to kill him. The only one not to do so will be the Gharqad tree as it is the tree of the Jews. Different interpretations about the Gharqad tree mentioned in the Hadith exists. One of the interpretations is that the Gharqad tree is an actual tree. Israelis have been alleged to plant the tree around various locations for e.g., their settlements in West Bank and Gaza, around Israel Museum and the Knesset. Other claims about the tree are that it grows outside Herod's Gate or that it is actually a bush that grows outside Jaffa Gate which some Muslims believe where Jesus will return to Earth and slay the Dajjal, following the final battle between the Muslims and unbelievers which some believe will take place directly below the Jaffa Gate below the Sultan's Pool. Another interpretation that exists is that the mention of the Gharqad tree is symbolic and is in reference to all the forces of the world believed to conspire with the Jews against Muslims.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The following hadith which forms a part of these Sahih Muslim hadiths has been quoted many times, and it became a part of the charter of Hamas.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Schweitzer and Perry, the hadith are "even more scathing (than the Quran) in attacking the Jews":


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: They are debased, cursed, anathematized forever by God and so can never repent and be forgiven; they are cheats and traitors; defiant and stubborn; they killed the prophets; they are liars who falsify scripture and take bribes; as infidels they are ritually unclean, a foul odor emanating from them – such is the image of the Jew in classical Islam, degraded and malevolent.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Jerome Chanes, Pinson, Rosenblatt, Mark R. Cohen, Norman Stillman, Uri Avnery, M. Klien, and Bernard Lewis all argue that antisemitism did not emerge in the Muslim world until modern times, because in their view, it was rare in pre-modern Islam. Lewis argues that there is no sign that any deep-rooted feeling of emotional hostility that can be characterized as antisemitism was directed against Jews or any other group. There were, however, clearly negative attitudes, which were partially due to the "normal" feelings of a dominant group towards subject groups. More specifically, the contempt consisted of Muslim contempt for disbelievers.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Lewis, the outstanding characteristic of the classical Islamic view of Jews is their unimportance. The religious, philosophical, and literary Islamic writings tended to ignore Jews and focused more on Christianity. Although the Jews received little praise or even respect and were sometimes blamed for various misdeeds, there were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, nor any charges of diabolic evil, nor accusations of poisoning the wells nor spreading the plague nor were they even accused of engaging in blood libels until Ottomans learned the concept from their Greek subjects in the 15th century.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Poliakov writes that various examples of medieval Muslim literature portray Judaism as an exemplary pinnacle of faith, and Israel being destined by this virtue. He quotes stories from "The Book of One Thousand and One Nights" that portray Jews as pious, virtuous and devoted to God, and seem to borrow plots from midrashim. However, Poliakov writes that treatment of Jews in Muslim literature varies, and the tales are meant for pure entertainment, with no didactic aim.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: After Ibn Nagraela, a Jew, attacked the Quran by alleging various contradictions in it, Ibn Hazm, a Moor, criticized him furiously. Ibn Hazm wrote that Ibn Nagraela was "filled with hatred" and "conceited in his vile soul".


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Schweitzer and Perry, some literature during the 10th and 11th century "made Jews out to be untrustworthy, treacherous oppressors, and exploiters of Muslims". This propaganda sometimes even resulted in outbreaks of violence against the Jews. An 11th-century Moorish poem describes Jews as "a criminal people" and blames them for causing social decay, betraying Muslims and poisoning food and water.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Martin Kramer writes that in Islamic tradition, in striking contrast with the Christian concept of the eternal Jew, the contemporary Jews were not presented as archetypes—as the embodiment of Jews in all times and places.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Jews, Christians, Sabians, and Zoroastrians living under early and medieval Muslim rule were known as "People of the Book" to Muslims and subjected to the status of "dhimmi", a status that was later also extended to other Non-Muslims like Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists. As "dhimmi" they were to be tolerated, and entitled to the protection and resources of the Ummah, or Muslim community. In return they had to pay a tax known as the "jizya" in accordance with Quran. Lewis and Poliakov argue that Jewish communities enjoyed toleration and limited rights as long as they accepted Muslim superiority. These rights were legally established and enforced. The restrictions on "dhimmi" included: payment of higher taxes; at some locations, being forced to wear clothing or some other insignia distinguishing them from Muslims; sometimes barred from holding public office, bearing arms or riding a horse; disqualified as witnesses in litigation involving Muslims; at some locations and times, dhimmis were prevented from repairing existing or erecting new places of worship. Proselytizing on behalf of any faith but Islam was barred.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: "Dhimmi" were subjected to a number of restrictions, the application and severity of which varied with time and place. Restrictions included residency in segregated quarters, obligation to wear distinctive clothing such as the Yellow badge, public subservience to Muslims, prohibitions against proselytizing and against marrying Muslim women, and limited access to the legal system (the testimony of a Jew did not count if contradicted by that of a Muslim). "Dhimmi" had to pay a special poll tax (the "jizya"), which exempted them from military service, and also from payment of the "zakat" alms tax required of Muslims. In return, "dhimmi" were granted limited rights, including a degree of tolerance, community autonomy in personal matters, and protection from being killed outright. Jewish communities, like Christian ones, were typically constituted as semi-autonomous entities managed by their own laws and leadership, who carried the responsibility for the community towards the Muslim rulers.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: By medieval standards, conditions for Jews under Islam were generally more formalized and better than those of Jews in Christian lands, in part due to the sharing of minority status with Christians in these lands. There is evidence for this claim in that the status of Jews in lands with no Christian minority was usually worse than their status in lands with one. For example, there were numerous incidents of massacres and ethnic cleansing of Jews in North Africa, especially in Morocco, Libya, and Algeria where eventually Jews were forced to live in ghettos. Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in the Middle Ages in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. At certain times in Yemen, Morocco, and Baghdad, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face the death penalty.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Later additions to the code included prohibitions on adopting Arab names, studying the Quran, selling alcoholic beverages. Abdul Aziz Said writes that the Islamic concept of "dhimmi", when applied, allowed other cultures to flourish and prevented the general rise of antisemitism. The situation where Jews both enjoyed cultural and economic prosperity at times, but were widely persecuted at other times, was summarised by G. E. Von Grunebaum:


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: It would not be difficult to put together the names of a very sizable number of Jewish subjects or citizens of the Islamic area who have attained to high rank, to power, to great financial influence, to significant and recognized intellectual attainment; and the same could be done for Christians. But it would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Schweitzer and Perry give as examples of early Muslim antisemitism: 9th-century "persecution and outbreaks of violence"; 10th- and 11th-century antisemitic propaganda that "made Jews out to be untrustworthy, treacherous oppressors, and exploiters of Muslims". This propaganda "inspired outbreaks of violence and caused many casualties in Egypt". An 11th-century Moorish poem describes Jews as "a criminal people" and alleges that "society is nearing collapse on account of Jewish wealth and domination, their exploitation and betrayal of Muslims; that Jews worship the devil, physicians poison their patients, and Jews poison food and water as required by Judaism, and so on."


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Jews under the Muslim rule rarely faced martyrdom, exile, or forced conversion to Islam, and they were fairly free to choose their residence and profession. Their freedom and economic condition varied from time to time and place to place. Forced conversions occurred mostly in the Maghreb, especially under the Almohads, a militant dynasty with messianic claims, as well as in Persia, where Shia Muslims were generally less tolerant than their Sunni counterparts. Notable examples of the cases where the choice of residence was taken away from them includes confining Jews to walled quarters ("mellah") in Morocco beginning from the 15th century and especially since the early 19th century.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The caliphs of Fatimid dynasty in Egypt were known to be Judeophiles, according to Leon Poliakov. They paid regularly to support the Jewish institutions (such as the rabbinical academy of Jerusalem). A significant number of their ministers and counselors were Jews. The Abbasids too similarly were respectful and tolerant towards the Jews under their rule. Benjamin of Tudela, a famous 12th-century Jewish explorer, described the Caliph al-Abbasi as a "great king and kind unto Israel". Benjamin also further goes on to describe about al-Abassi that "many belonging to the people of Israel are his attendants, he knows all languages and is well-versed in the Law of Israel. He reads and writes the holy language [Hebrew]." He further mentions Muslims and Jews being involved in common devotions, such as visiting the grave of Ezekiel, whom both religions regard as a prophet.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: With the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish Judaism flourished for several centuries. Thus, what some refer to as the "golden age" for Jews began. During this period the Muslims of Spain tolerated other religions, including Judaism, and created a heterodox society.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Muslim relations with Jews in Spain were not always peaceful, however. The eleventh century saw Muslim pogroms against Jews in Spain; those occurred in Córdoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews. The Muslim grievance involved was that some Jews had become wealthy, and others had advanced to positions of power.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Almohad dynasty, which seized rule over Muslim Iberia in the 12th century, offered Christians and Jews the choice of conversion or expulsion; in 1165, one of their rulers ordered that all Jews in the country convert on pain of death (forcing the Jewish rabbi, theologian, philosopher, and physician Maimonides to feign conversion to Islam before fleeing the country). In Egypt, Maimonides resumed practicing Judaism openly only to be accused of apostasy. He was saved from death by Saladin's chief administrator, who held that conversion under coercion is invalid.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: During his wanderings, Maimonides also wrote The Yemen Epistle, a famous letter to the Jews of Yemen, who were then experiencing severe persecution at the hands of their Muslim rulers. In it, Maimonides describes his assessment of the treatment of the Jews at the hands of Muslims: ... on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael [that is, Muslims], who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us... No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have... We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, their absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear... We have done as our sages of blessed memory have instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ishmael... In spite of all this, we are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness and their outbursts at any time. On the contrary, the more we suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose to act belligerently toward us.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Mark Cohen quotes Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, a specialist in medieval European Jewish history, who cautioned that Maimonides' condemnation of Islam should be understood "in the context of the harsh persecutions of the 12th century and that furthermore one may say that he was insufficiently aware of the status of the Jews in Christian lands, or did not pay attention to this, when he wrote the letter". Cohen continues by quoting Ben-Sasson, who argues that Jews generally had a better legal and security situation in Muslim countries than Jews had in Christendom.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: While some Muslim states declined, the Ottoman Empire rose as the "greatest Muslim state in history". As long as the empire flourished, the Jews did as well, according to Schweitzer and Perry. In contrast with their treatment of Christians, the Ottomans were more tolerant of Jews and promoted their economic development. The Jews flourished as great merchants, financiers, government officials, traders and artisans. The Ottomans also allowed some Jewish immigration to what was then referred to as Syria, which allowed for Zionists to establish permanent settlements in the 1880s.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Lewis states that in contrast with Christian antisemitism, the attitude of Muslims towards non-Muslims is not one of hate, fear, or envy, but rather contempt. This contempt is expressed in various ways, such as an abundance of polemic literature which attacks the Christians and occasionally, it also attacks the Jews. "The negative attributes ascribed to the subject religions and their followers are usually expressed in religious and social terms, very rarely are they expressed in ethnic or racial terms, though this sometimes does occur." The language of abuse is often quite strong. The conventional epithets are apes for Jews, and pigs for Christians. Lewis continues with several examples of regulations which symbolize the inferiority that non-Muslims who lived under Muslim rule had to live with, such as different formulae of greetings when addressing Jews and Christians than when addressing Muslims (both in conversations or correspondences), and forbidding Jews and Christians from choosing names that Muslims chose for their children during Ottoman rule.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Schweitzer and Perry argue that there are two general views of the status of Jews under Islam, the traditional "golden age" and the revisionist "persecution and pogrom" interpretations. The former was first promulgated by Jewish historians in the 19th century as a rebuke of the Christian treatment of Jews, and it was taken up by Arab Muslims after 1948 as "an Arab-Islamist weapon in what is primarily an ideological and political struggle against Israel". The revisionists argue that this idealized view ignores "a catalog of lesser-known hatred and massacres". Mark Cohen concurs with this view, arguing that the "myth of an interfaith utopia" went unchallenged until it was adopted by Arabs as a "propaganda weapon against Zionism", and that this "Arab polemical exploitation" was met with the "counter-myth" of the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history", which also "cannot be maintained in the light of historical reality".


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Antisemitism has increased in the Muslim world during modern times. While Bernard Lewis and Uri Avnery date the increase in antisemitism to the establishment of Israel, M. Klein suggests that antisemitism could have been present in the mid-19th century.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Scholars point to European influences, including those of the Nazis (see below), and the establishment of Israel as the root causes of antisemitism. Norman Stillman explains that increased European commercial, missionary and imperialist activities during the 19th and 20th centuries brought antisemitic ideas to the Muslim world. Initially these prejudices only found a reception among Arab Christians because they were too foreign to gain any widespread acceptance among Muslims. However, with the rise of the Arab–Israeli conflict, European antisemitism began to gain acceptance in modern literature.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: One of the most prominent acts of Islamic antisemitism took place in Yemen between 1679–1680, in an event known as the Mawza Exile. During this event the Jews living in nearly all cities and towns throughout Yemen were banished by decree of the Imam of Yemen, Al-Mahdi Ahmad.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: According to Mark Cohen, Arab antisemitism in the modern world arose relatively recently, in the 19th century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab nationalisms, and it was primarily imported into the Arab world by nationalistically minded Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it "Islamised").


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The Damascus affair occurred in 1840, when an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Immediately following it, a charge of ritual murder was brought against a large number of Jews in the city. All of them were found guilty. The consuls of Britain, France and Austria protested against the persecution to the Ottoman authorities, and Christians, Muslims and Jews all played a great role in this affair.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: A massacre of Jews also occurred in Baghdad in 1828. There was another massacre in Barfurush in 1867.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: In 1839, in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls. This is known as the Allahdad incident. It was only by forcible conversion that a massacre was averted.


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: Benny Morris writes that one symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. Morris quotes a 19th-century traveler: "I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gaberdine. To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mahommedan."


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: The origins of modern anti-Semitic trends in the Islamic World can be traced back to the ideas of the Syrian-Egyptian Salafist theologian Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865 - 1935 C.E), who turned highly anti-semitic after the British imperial designs on the Arab World after World War 1 and their co-operation with Zionists to further British objectives. The 1988 Hamas Charter, and particularly its Articles 7 and 22, represented a condensed version of the pan-Islamist anti-Jewish ideas cultivated by Rashid Rida. Rida believed that the international Jewry contributed to Germany’s defeat in the First World War; in exchange for Britain’s promise to grant them Palestine. Furthermore; he asserted that they controlled Western Banking System and Capitalist system, created Communism in Eastern Europe and led Freemasonry to plot against World Nations. He also drew from Islamic traditions that displayed hostility to Jews and popularised them; rendering the conflict with the Zionists an apocalyptic religious dimension. Rida would persistently cite "hadiths" regarding the End Times Jewish-Muslim conflicts; some of which would be included in the future Charter of Hamas, such as:


title: Antisemitism in Islam

text: "‘The Jews will fight you and you will be led to dominate them until the rock cries out: “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, kill him!”’Rashid Rida condemned the Jews for their arrogance towards the Prophets and arraigned them for abandoning religious values for materialism, all which made them recipients of Divine Wrath; which led to their downfall. He asserted that Allah decreed Muslims to construct Masjid al-Aqsa in the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem and favoured Muslims to rule the Holy Lands by implementing "shari'a" (Islamic law) and upholding "Tawhid". Rashid Rida's anti-Zionism was part of his wider campaign as a towering figure in the Pan-Islamist movement and would immensely impact subsequent Islamist, Jihadist and anti-colonial activists. He also severly rebuked Christian Zionists, writing: