Notes about the eve of the Arab conquests and about the perennial plague of anti-Semitism

Continuing with my manuscript, covering the period just after the Byzantine Christian defeat of the Sassanid Persians early in the seventh century AD:

But, yet again, the Christians weren’t to savor their victory for long. The Persians were not, it turned out, the greatest threat to Christian dominance in the Holy Land. Another power was rising that would destroy the Persian Empire, deal a critical blow to Zoroastrianism, and seriously wound the Byzantines within only a few years. A vast transformation was underway that would give almost all of the world’s Jews the chance to live under non-Christian rule. A virtually irresistible religious and political force would seize control of many of the Christian world’s greatest centers of thought and piety. It would permanently remove such illustrious cities as Alexandria and Aleppo, Antioch and Jerusalem from Christian control and would make into foreign territory the regions of North Africa that had produced Tertullian, Augustine, and others among the greatest thinkers of the early Latin Church. Yet the new empire that was tak­ing initial shape in distant, forgotten Arabia was one that nobody had anticipated. It was one that few, if any, were likely even to have imagined. Until some time after the Arabs had taken their first unplanned steps toward world empire, leaders of the great powers quite pardonably took no notice. If they had looked in that direc­tion—from which, as they thought, nothing important had yet come—they would, like Elijah’s servant, have seen on the horizon only “a little cloud …like a man’s hand.”[1] Nothing to worry about.

[1] 1 Kings 18:44.

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On a tenuously related subject:

This article, by the venerable writer and scholar Walter Laqueur (b. 1921), deals with by far the most influential piece of anti-semitic propaganda ever written:

“The Many Lives of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’: Born obscurely in turbulent times, the notorious text describing a Jewish conspiracy to enslave humanity lives on even today. Why?”

And Ben Cohen’s response is also worth reading:

“How Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorists Sustain Their Convictions: As the long life of the Protocols attests, anti-Semitic passions are not just sincere, they’re hard-wired beyond any possibility of disproof by reason.”

“The European upper-class could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, everyone a King David and Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers.” 

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography