This is the most delicate subject in the whole field, and it must be handled with the most care, for nothing is easier than to do it badly. To say that there is hostility toward the Jew in the foundational texts of Islam is, to one ear, simply a statement of documented fact; to another ear it is the opening note of the very hatred it claims to describe. We mean to make the statement and to avoid the hatred, and the only way to do both is to proceed slowly, to define our terms, to quote fairly, to grant every honest qualification, and never once to forget that we are speaking of texts and traditions and not passing judgment on the soul of any living person. The Jew has been hated by Christians too, and bitterly, and the believer who raises this subject had better raise it on his knees.

We proceed, then, not to score a point against a rival faith, but because the safety of a people we love is bound up with what certain texts say, and because love that will not look at hard things is only sentiment. The reborn State of Israel lives surrounded by populations among whom these texts are read and preached, and the most violent of her enemies cite them by chapter and verse as warrant for her destruction. A Christian who stands with Israel cannot afford to be ignorant of the scriptural fuel that is poured, by some hands, upon the fire.

Two Kinds of Hostility

At the outset we must draw a distinction that the careless collapse and the propagandist exploits, the distinction between theological hostility and racial hatred. Theological hostility is the rejection of a people on the ground of their beliefs and their refusal of a rival revelation; it says, in effect, you are wrong, and your wrongness is culpable. Racial hatred is the rejection of a people on the ground of their blood, irrespective of what they believe or do; it says you are vermin, and nothing you can think or choose will change it. The two are not the same, though they bleed into each other with terrible ease, and the history of the Jewish people is in large part the history of the second growing out of the first.

The hostility we find in the early Islamic sources is, in its origin, of the first kind. It is the polemic of a new revelation against the older people who would not receive it, charged with breaking their covenant, distorting their scriptures, and rejecting the prophet sent to them. This is theological, and in form it resembles the supersessionist polemic that the Christian church also turned against the synagogue. But the danger is that theological contempt, once lodged in a sacred text, becomes a permission and a vocabulary that later and angrier generations can fill with a hatred far darker than the original. The seed is doctrinal; the harvest can be murderous. We must trace both.

The People of the Book

The Islamic posture toward the Jew is not simple loathing; it is something more complicated and, for that reason, more durable. The Jew, together with the Christian, is a person of the Book, an heir of a genuine if corrupted revelation, granted under classical Islamic rule a protected and tolerated status denied to the mere idolater. He was permitted his synagogue and his Sabbath; his life and property had a recognized, if inferior, standing in the law. There is a real ambivalence here, and the apologist seizes upon the tolerant half of it with justice. Islam did not, as a rule, demand that the Jew convert or die; that grim choice it reserved for the pagan.

But the toleration was the toleration of the subordinate, and it came at the price of a permanent and institutionalized humiliation, the condition the law called that of the protected and the demeaned at once. The Jew might live, but he must live low, marked, taxed, and silent, a standing illustration of the rightness of the faith that had surpassed him. This is the cradle in which the Quranic image of the Jew was rocked, and the texts that we must now examine cannot be understood apart from it. The honored heir and the humbled subject are the same man, and the tension between those two faces runs through the whole tradition.

The Verses of Rebuke

The Qur’an contains a sustained polemic against the children of Israel, and there is no use pretending otherwise. They are charged, in passage after passage, with having broken their covenant with God, with having slain their prophets, with having taken usury that was forbidden them, with having concealed and altered the scriptures entrusted to them, and with having earned in consequence the divine displeasure. The longest chapter of the book opens with an extended address to them, alternating between the memory of God’s favors and the rebuke of their ingratitude. These are not obscure verses; they stand at the front of the most-recited chapter in Islam, and every literate believer encounters them early.

The fair reader will note that much of this polemic has a recognizable ancestry. The charge that Israel slew her prophets and broke her covenant is, after all, a charge the Hebrew prophets themselves made against their own people in the sternest terms, and which the Christian Scriptures echo. A book that arose in the same prophetic stream would naturally carry the same indictments. But there is a crucial difference. In the mouth of Isaiah or Jeremiah the rebuke is the lover’s rebuke of a covenant that remains; God wounds in order to heal and swears never to cast off the seed of Israel. In the Islamic polemic the rebuke serves to justify the transfer of favor to a new and final community, and the door of return is, for the unbelieving Jew, shut. The rebuke is no longer the chastening of a kept people but the verdict upon a discarded one.

The Apes and the Swine

Among these verses are three that have done incalculable harm, the passages in which a group of transgressing Israelites are said to have been transformed, as a punishment, into apes, and in one place into apes and swine. Whatever the original referent—and the classical commentators debated whether the transformation was literal or a metaphor for spiritual degradation, and whether it touched a particular Sabbath-breaking community or stood for something wider—the image entered the bloodstream of the tradition and never left it. To call a man an ape or a pig is, in the cultural world shaped by these texts, not a random insult but a scriptural one, and it has been hurled at Jews from medieval polemic to the sermons of last week.

Here the distinction we drew at the outset earns its keep. A contextualist scholar may argue, and not without force, that these verses describe a specific ancient transgression and were never meant as a standing description of the Jewish people as such. That is a defensible reading of the text in isolation. But texts do not live in isolation; they live in the use that communities make of them, and the use made of these has been, across long centuries and into the present hour, to furnish a vocabulary of dehumanization ready to the hand of anyone who wishes to strip the Jew of his humanity before striking him. The verse may be innocent in the grammarian’s study. It has not been innocent in the street.

The Tribes of Medina

The decisive turn came not in doctrine alone but in history, in the encounter between Muhammad and the three Jewish tribes of Medina. The traditional accounts, written by devout Muslim biographers, record a swift descent from alliance to enmity to catastrophe. Two of the tribes were expelled, their property seized; the third, after the failure of a siege of the city, was destroyed—the men, by the tradition’s own telling, put to the sword, and the women and children enslaved. The chroniclers relate this not with shame but as the just punishment of treachery, and because the conduct of the prophet is normative for the believer, the episode became more than a memory. It became a paradigm.

This is the heart of the matter, and it cannot be evaded. In the foundational narrative of Islam the relationship between the prophet and the Jews of his own city ends in their betrayal and their slaughter, recorded as righteous. Whatever the historical truth behind the sources—and modern critical scholarship raises real questions about them—it is the sources as received, not the events as they may have happened, that have formed the Muslim imagination for fourteen centuries. And in that received story the Jew appears as the archetypal traitor whose plotting against the prophet earned a deserved destruction. One sees how easily such a paradigm can be reached for, and pointed at a living people, by men who wish to.

The Tradition of the Stones and the Trees

If the reader will bear one more hard text, it is the most consequential of all, because it has passed directly from the medieval collections into the founding documents of a modern movement sworn to Israel’s annihilation. There is a tradition, recorded in the most authoritative collections of the prophet’s sayings and therefore carrying the highest weight, which foretells a final battle at the end of days in which the Muslims will fight and kill the Jews, until the very stones and trees behind which the Jews hide will cry out, O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him—all save one tree, which is said to be the refuge of the enemy and so will not betray its man.

This is not an obscure relic. It is quoted, in full and as warrant, in the founding charter of Hamas, the movement that governs Gaza and whose stated purpose is the obliteration of the Jewish state. There the end-times slaughter of the Jews is not a distant eschatological curiosity but a present program, the religious engine beneath the political slogan. When a Christian hears the chant for a land cleansed of the Jew from the river to the sea, he is hearing, whether the chanter knows it or not, the distant echo of a tradition about stones that inform on the men who hide behind them. The text is fourteen centuries old. The charter that quotes it was written in living memory. The wire was picked up, and it was live.

An Honest Look in the Mirror

Now we must do the hard thing and turn the examination upon ourselves, for a Christian who indicts another faith’s treatment of the Jew while concealing his own is a hypocrite, and the Scripture has stern words for such. The church’s record is not clean. The doctrine that the church had replaced Israel, that God had finished with the Jew and transferred his every promise to the gentile congregation, took root early and bore poisoned fruit for centuries. From it grew the contempt that herded Jews into ghettos, the libels that accused them of monstrous crimes, the expulsions and the massacres, and at the last it furnished the cultural soil in which a pagan and racial antisemitism could grow to its industrial horror. Much of that was done by baptized men under the sign of the cross.

We say this not to change the subject, and not to plead that two wrongs make a right, but because the truth requires it and because it guards us from the self-righteousness that would poison our witness. The Christian Zionist, of all people, must repudiate replacement theology root and branch, must grieve the church’s long sin against the Jewish people, and must understand that his standing with Israel is in part an act of repentance. Only a man who has confessed his own house’s share in the long sorrow has any right to speak of another’s. We have confessed it. Now we may continue.

The Defenders and the Reformers

The case for the defense deserves its fullest hearing, for there are Muslims of conscience who labor to disarm these texts, and they are not frauds. They argue that the rebukes of the Qur’an fell upon particular communities in a particular quarrel and were never a charter against the Jewish people for all time. They point out, truly, that for long centuries Jews fared better under Islamic rule than under Christian, that the great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages flourished in a Muslim world, and that the venomous racial antisemitism of the twentieth-century Middle East was in large measure an import from Christian Europe, not a native growth. They insist that the violent traditions can and must be read in the light of the verses that forbid aggression and command justice even toward an enemy.

All of this has weight, and the honest examiner grants it without grudging. The history of Jewish life under Islam is genuinely more mixed than the polemicist on either side allows, with long stretches of relative security that the bloodier Christian record cannot match. The reformer who reads his tradition toward peace is doing holy work, and he deserves the prayers and not the sneers of the Christian. But we are bound again to the sober conclusion. The texts he must tame are central and not marginal; the paradigm of the treacherous and punished Jew is woven into the founding story; and the most powerful movements in the contemporary Muslim world have chosen the militant reading and inscribed it in their charters. The reformer swims against a strong current. We wish him a following wind, and we do not mistake our wish for the weather.

From the Page to the Pulpit

The proof that these are not dead letters lies in the living use made of them, and that use is documented beyond any reasonable dispute. The sermons broadcast from certain pulpits, the textbooks printed for certain schoolchildren, the speeches of certain leaders, return again and again to the same well—the Jews as the descendants of apes and swine, the Jews as the eternal conspirators, the coming day when the stones and trees will give them up to the sword. This is not the fevered invention of Israel’s advocates; it is recorded, translated, and available to anyone willing to look, in the words of the preachers themselves. The texts are old. The preaching is current. The line between them is unbroken.

And this is why the comfortable evasion will not serve, the evasion that says such language is mere rhetoric, the overheated speech of a region given to overstatement, signifying nothing. The men who wrote a charter of annihilation and quoted scripture to justify it were not engaged in rhetoric; they were stating a program, and on a terrible morning they carried a portion of it out. To dismiss the words as theater is to make the naive’s error in its purest form, to refuse to believe that anyone means what he plainly and repeatedly says. The believer who loves Israel does her no service by joining that refusal. He honors her by believing her enemies.

When Two Hatreds Married

The antisemitism that convulses the modern Middle East is not the pure descendant of the old theological hostility; it is the offspring of a marriage, and the second parent came from Christian Europe. In the early twentieth century the most poisonous products of European Jew-hatred—above all the forged conspiracy tract that purported to expose a secret Jewish plot to rule the world—were translated into Arabic and pressed into eager hands. During the Second World War the propaganda of the Third Reich was broadcast in Arabic across the region, and a notorious religious leader of Jerusalem spent the war years in Berlin, lending the prestige of his office to the cause of the exterminators. The racial hatred that the church’s long contempt had bred in Europe was thus exported to a soil already prepared by an older, theological hostility, and the two grew together into something more virulent than either had been alone.

This history is double-edged, and the honest examiner must hold both edges. On the one side it confirms the defenders’ claim that the crudest racial antisemitism of the modern Middle East is in part a European import and not a pure native growth, and that is true and worth saying. On the other side it shows how readily the imported poison found a home, grafting itself onto the existing stock of the apes and the swine and the treacherous tribe and the stones that betray. A graft does not take upon a tree wholly foreign to it. The European hatred took because the theological soil received it, and the union of the two is the antisemitism that now arms itself with both a forged protocol and a quoted hadith. To understand the modern hatred one must see both its parents.

The Question of the Heart

Through all of this we must keep returning, lest we lose our way, to the man himself, the individual Muslim who has never read a charter or a forgery or perhaps even reflected upon the hard verses at all. He exists in his hundreds of millions, and he is not the subject of our indictment. A tradition is one thing and a heart is another, and the gap between them is the whole space in which mercy and friendship and the gospel do their work. Many a Muslim has lived and died without a thought of harming a Jew, and many a Muslim has loved and sheltered Jews at the risk of his own life; such men shame the texts they were raised on, and God sees them.

To forget this is to commit, in the realm of antisemitism, the very sin we are condemning—to assign to a whole people the guilt of their worst, to read the heart from the label, to hate the man for the book in his house. The Christian, of all people, must refuse this, for he knows that he too is judged not by the failures of his tradition’s worst sons but by the mercy of God in Christ. He examines the texts with rigor and he regards the persons with hope, and he holds the two together because his Lord did. The doctrine is fair game for the sharpest scrutiny. The soul of the man is the object of prayer.

What Friendship Requires

Why, then, do we undertake so painful an examination at all, if not to indict a people? Because friendship requires it. The flatterer tells his friend only what is pleasant; the friend tells him what is true, especially when the truth concerns a danger to his life. Israel lives among neighbors some of whom read these texts toward her destruction, and a friend of Israel who will not study the scriptural fuel of that destruction, who averts his eyes for fear of seeming unkind, is no friend at all but a sentimentalist whose comfort is purchased at his friend’s expense. Real love looks hard things in the face, names them, and stands the closer for having seen them.

And there is a second reason, which the Christian dare not omit. He examines the hatred of the Jew in another’s scriptures partly to be cured of any remnant of it in his own heart and his own history. To trace how a sacred text becomes a license for contempt is to be warned against doing the same with his own; to grieve the church’s long sin against Israel is to be inoculated against repeating it. The examination is thus an act of repentance as much as of vigilance, a looking outward that drives him to look inward, and a standing with Israel that begins with a confession before it ventures a critique. Friendship of this kind is costly, and it is the only kind worth the name.

The Long Memory of a People

There is one more thing the examiner must understand, and it concerns not the texts but the people they are aimed at. The Jewish people possess the longest memory of any nation on earth, a memory schooled by exile and pogrom and the ovens of Europe to take seriously every word that wishes them gone. When a Jew hears the cry for a land cleansed of him, he does not file it under rhetoric; he files it under history, beside Pharaoh and Haman and Hadrian and Hitler, all of whom announced their intentions before they acted on them, and most of whom were dismissed as exaggerators by the comfortable of their day. The Jew has learned, at a cost no other people has paid in such measure, to believe the men who say they want him dead.

The Christian who would stand with Israel must learn the same lesson, and learn it from her. It is a peculiar arrogance of the secure to instruct the endangered that their fears are overblown, to lecture the survivor that the threat he hears in a sermon or a charter is not really meant. He has heard such reassurances before, from well-meaning men, and he has buried the cost of believing them. To take the hostile texts seriously, then, is not to indulge in alarm; it is to extend to the Jewish people the elementary courtesy of believing their own assessment of their own danger, informed as it is by a memory we can scarcely imagine. We believe Israel’s enemies because Israel, who has every reason to know, believes them. That is what it means to stand with a friend who has been hunted before.

The Covenant That Cannot Be Cursed

Against all of this the Christian sets a single, immovable truth, and it is the rock on which his whole posture rests. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has bound Himself to the seed of Israel in a covenant He has sworn never to revoke, and no later text, however sacred to those who hold it, can loose what God has bound. He has declared that as long as the sun gives light by day and the moon and stars by night, so long shall the seed of Israel not cease from being a nation before Him; and that ordinance has outlasted Pharaoh and Babylon and Rome and every empire that swore the Jew would not endure. The verses of rebuke in any book cannot overturn the verse of promise in His.

This is why the Christian Zionist reads the hostile texts without fear, though not without grief. He grieves the hatred they have fed, and he labors and prays for the day when those who now read them toward death will read their own better verses toward life, and beyond that for the day when both Jew and Muslim shall know the Messiah who is the desire of all nations. But he does not tremble for Israel’s survival, because Israel’s survival was never in the hands of her enemies or in the strength of her own arm; it was pledged by the only One who keeps every promise He makes. Stones may be commanded to betray her. The Rock of Ages will not.

The Apple of His Eye

So we end as we began, on our knees, and with love as the last word and not hatred. We have examined hard texts and named hard truths, and we have done it because a Christian who will not see cannot truly stand. But the seeing is not the point; the standing is, and the standing is an act of love—love for the Jewish people whom God calls the apple of His eye, the pupil of the eye, the tenderest and most fiercely guarded thing; and love, too, for the Muslim, made in the same image of God and held in the same darkness from which only Christ can deliver. We hate no one. We fear no text. We tell the truth, and we tell it weeping, and we stand.

Let the reader who has followed this far carry away one thing above the rest. The antisemitism that lies coiled in certain texts is real, and it has killed, and it will kill again where it is believed; to deny this is folly and a betrayal of its victims. But it does not have the last word, and it never will, because the last word was spoken before these texts were written, by the One who said He would bless them that bless His people and curse them that curse them. To stand with Israel is to stand on that word. It has never failed. It will not fail now. And he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.