Talk:History of the Jews under Muslim rule

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Untitled

The section I have marked as NPOV is quite biased and presents a lot of info (esp. regarding Jewish tribes of Medina) out of context.Bless sins 23:25, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

this section also needs to reference where it is getting its info from.Bless sins 15:08, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

What's the problem?

I'm not sure what point-of-view problem "Bless Sins" finds in this section. If he outlines it specifically I'm happy to make some editions. As for sources, I note that its Albert Hourani (the Great Arab historian) as well as the Cambridge History of Islam. I figure I'm on pretty solid historical ground. But, I'm willing to be wrong... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Varangian (talk • contribs) 21:55, 14 January 2007 (UTC).

PS

Oh, and I used Bernard Lewis as an additional source. Note the "history" page.

NPOV

This article has a very strong anti-religious POV. This must be fixed. 203.158.42.118 10:49, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Plus the article is full of nonsense: Such as "prohibitions against proselytizing and marrying Muslim women" being called a mistreatment. With Jewry being completely religious at that point of time such a statement shows a misleading liberal anti-religious POV. The mistreatment of the Gaonim would on the other hand a more accurate statement. 203.206.248.147 11:01, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Anti Religious?

The comment (written not by me) in the introduction on the nature of Dhimmi status was indeed a bit silly--and I have fixed this. But my question is this: in the section of Jews in the Arabian peninsula, where is the "anti-religious bias". Very easy to criticise, dear interlocutor, but you must either provide a citation of what you think is wrong, or do it your self. I cannot read your mind. If you wish to criticise, please at least be constructive.

Varangian 22:57, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

NPOV

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia's own guidelines on NPOV disputes:

"If you come across an article whose content does not seem to be consistent with Wikipedia's NPOV policy, use one of the tags below to mark the article's main page. Then, on the article's talk page, make a new section entitled "NPOV dispute [- followed by a section's name if you're challenging just a particular section of the article and not the article as a whole]". Then, under this new section, clearly and exactly explain which part of the article does not seem to have a NPOV and why. Make some suggestions as to how one can improve the article. Be active and bold in improving the article."

So, please help me out with the suggestions. Perhaps (and I note that I am only responsible for the Arabian Peninsula section) I am missing something--I am willing to be put right. But I need to know what you perceive as anti-religious.

Varangian 23:04, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Anti-religion? more like anti-islam, this should be titled 'Muslim persecution of the Jew through the Ages', not 'Jews under Muslim rule', nowhere does it mention the freedom the jews lived under Muslim rule compared to the general persecution they recieved else where, no the safe havens offered. this article is a blatant attempt at inciting tensions, that frnakly dont need any help, between muslims and jews. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.10.94 (talk) 11:51, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

So-called fixes

Hi,

I've added a bunch of references that I hope suit you "Bless Sins". I'm having trouble with embedding the references but I'm sure someone will help me with that. I have also removed the NPOV marker not to start a flame war, but because I have added the citations you suggested, and because you have not yet indicated what specific NPOV faults there might be.

Cheers,

Varangian 16:43, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Eureka...

Okay, references in properly. Sorry about all that. Varangian 16:52, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Moved page

The previous name can be misinterperted to mean that Muslims always owed these lands which will lead to pov issues. Its better to strictly phrase it as under Muslim rule, because it went back and forth throughout history (Iran wasn't always Muslim, neither was Turkey).

Guy Montag 03:45, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Agree with the Change

I agree completely with the renaming of the page. It makes more sense in terms of thematic organisation. Varangian 11:06, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

I support it as well. ←Humus sapiens ^ну? 11:14, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Removed the following ...

Several decades ago, popular Moroccan society itself was deeply anti-Semitic; whether it still is and if so to what degree is not known. This is language hardly suitable for an encyclopaedia article, especially when there are no polls or other reliable sources to substantiate this daring claim. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.194.104.78 (talk) 19:26, 27 February 2007 (UTC).

OR from lead

As such, they were entitled to limited rights, tolerance, and protection, on the condition they 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. As dhimmi, Jews were typically subjected to several restrictions and mistreatments, the application and severity of which varied by time and place. Conversely, they sometimes attained high positions in government, notably as viziers and physicians. 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. The treatment of Jews in Muslim lands was generally better than that in Europe. As a result, many Jews sought refuge in Muslim ruled Middle East and North Africa (Maghreb) from persecution in Europe.

I am removing the following because it is original research, and selective POV forking from the Dhimmi article. This article is about history (grantit it needs expansion), not necessarily the treatment of muslims under the system of dhimmi. If the reader is intrested in how jews were treated there is an entire article that covers this content, and that is the dhimmi article. No need to fill the lead with this repeated POV forking from that article.--Sefringle^Talk 06:17, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Whither the Arab Jew?

There was a section here on Jews in the Arabian peninsula that has been moved to the page titled "Arab Jews", which is fine but there ought to be a link to it.

Also, the time lines given in this article are bumff. How is the 19th century "Pre-Modern"? This is, in all definitions of the historical profession, "Modern", with "early modern" being from 17th to 18th c. And why does it only start in the 1600 hundreds when Jews lived under Muslim rule from the 6th century onwards? Varangian —Preceding comment was added at 11:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Bat Yeor and "dhimmi"

Please remove this info and consider replacing with something more relevant or from a serious academic source —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.137.140.47 (talk) 16:30, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Kurdistan

I moved some text to talk page Kurdish Jews as section seemed to have undue weight.BobFromBrockley (talk) 17:07, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

NPOV

This article is extremely one-sided. It reads as "history of Muslim persecution of Jews". While we should not whitewash or edit out that history, there are plenty of other dimensions of the Jewish historical experiences in Muslim lands that are completely missing. I am, therefore, adding an NPOV tag to the article. BobFromBrockley (talk) 11:48, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

If you'd care to expand the article to cover some of these other dimensions and can cite sources, please go ahead. In the meantime, let's take care to distinguish between NPOV articles and incomplete articles. 207.207.126.218 (talk) 23:19, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

A broken link to "Hidden Jew"

Towards the end of the "Muslim Conquest section", there is a paragraph:

During the reign of the third Caliph of Islam Uthman, Abdullah ibn Saba' a Hidden Jew divided the Muslim nation into two sects Sunni and Shia.

The Hidden Jew is a reference to another wikipedia page which is non-existent. I would of removed it myself, but it seems like it's missing someone. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.1.166 (talk) 09:56, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Leon Poliakov reference

Under the heading "Middle Ages" the article states:

"During early Islam, Leon Poliakov writes, Jews enjoyed great privileges, and their communities prospered. There was no legislation or social barriers preventing them from conducting commercial activities. Commercial and craft guilds did not exist like the ones in Europe. Jewish people under Islamic Rule were no longer excluded from any specific profession and this helped lessen their negative stigma"

Although it is correct that Léon Poliakov did indeed state this in the work referenced in the article, it is also claimed by Ibn Warraq (October 2013) that:

"However, when he (Léon Poliakov) was in his eighties, he came into contact with the work of Bat Ye’or on the dhimmis, or the plight, persecution and periodic massacres of non-Muslims under Islam, and changed his mind completely."

Ibn Warraq claims that this was communicated to him by "Personal communication from Bat Ye’or".

Not sure what the status of this is or whether some note regarding this needs to be included in the article.

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

Best Wishes,

Prodos — Preceding unsigned comment added by Prodos (talk • contribs) 02:42, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Citation errors in Middle Ages section

Under the section titled "Middle Ages" the following citation errors exist:

"In North Africa, there were cases of violence against Jews in the Middle Ages,[14] and in other Arab lands including Egypt,[15] Syria.[16]"

• The links for 14, 15, and 16 lead to pages that speak nothing of the treatment of Jews in Muslim lands during the Middle Ages; therefore, they have no relevance to the section. Unless reliable sources can be provided, I want to remove this section.

• Also, all 3 citations use jewishvirtuallibrary.org. More citation variety in evidencing and legitimizing the statement's point would be ideal, but at the very least, as expressed above, the citations should be replaced with relevant sources that discuss Jews in Muslim lands during Middle Ages.

"In 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in an offensive manner. The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.[22][23]"

• The source for 23 has been removed, therefore, the citation should be removed itself.

Dbs edits (talk) 00:51, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

You are right. This article is in a terrible state. Drastic surgery is needed. For a start, articles from JVL which do not identify an author who is an acknowledged expert must be removed. JVL is a propaganda site whose mostly anonymous articles are written from a political position. The essay of Bennet is a slam-dunk WP:RS violation. Etc. Zero^talk 03:13, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Roman Catholic Inquisition, in Spain

Shouldn't it be referred to as the Spanish Inquisition?2601:346:303:A650:2177:282A:4431:848A (talk) 21:30, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

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Verifiability of source

The bottom half of the Ottoman Empire section of the article has large chunks that refer to Martin Gilbert's The Story of the Jewish People. Much of the book consists of letters written to the author's aunt. As a result, none of the mentioned letters are marked to any particular source, save a general bibliography at the end of the book. Since this book does not specify its sources, it is challenging to verify its accuracy. Asking for an alternative source to be supplied or perhaps the removal of the passages altogether per WP:V SomethingAppealing (talk) 07:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I looked at that book and agree that it fails RS. Given the large number of serious academic works we have to choose from, we don't this sort of popular chit-chat. Zero^talk 08:01, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I disagree, and have reverted. Martin Gilbert is a reliable historian. Andre🚐 08:17, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

This book does not seem like a scholarly affair at all, I see the same material in History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire (a partial fork I suppose). The only thing I could find on the net was this referring to a synagogue being pillaged in Tripoli but nothing about Jews being murdered (and by who anyway?) Selfstudier (talk) 12:13, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Shall we start a thread at WP:RSN? The source is presumed reliable unless you have a reliable source that says it isn't? Andre🚐 13:49, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

The claim lacks any detail on the murders (how many, by who? circumstances, all at once, individually) and is not footnoted, given that Gilbert is a biased source, I think we should not include this here without further secondary source verification. I would accept the synagogue plundering because I was able to find a second source. If not then yes, I think RSN is a good idea. Selfstudier (talk) 14:20, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Source bias like you say, should be balanced, not removed. Andre🚐 19:52, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Good editors look for the best sources rather than insisting that poor sources be used. This book of Gilbert is just a collection of anecdotes. It is patently not a real history book and it doesn't even pretend to provide a balanced picture. Moreover, the two events here (Tripolitania and Meshed) are quite easy to find in good sources. The Meshed event was serious and should be included (Encyclopaedia Judaica is a reasonable source). The Tripolitania event was trivial as history goes and should not be included. This article is not "List of every bad thing that ever happened to Jews". Zero^talk 14:36, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Am fine with including Encyclopedia Judaica as well, and searching for a 2nd source for the other portions. However, I don't agree there's a problem with the Gilbert book. History books aren't less reliable for being anecdotal; that is called microhistory. That is the nature of much history and journalism. The Gilbert books in general are widely cited, for example House of Ishmael. The one with the letters to his aunt is less widely cited, but I'd like to leave it in and find a 2nd source, not remove it altogether. I don't see any basis for removing it altogether. Andre🚐 19:51, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

This is what the source says "In Tripolitania in 1897 synagogues were plundered, and individual Jews murdered." That's it, nothing else.

and this is what is in the articles "In 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were murdered in Tripolitania." Seriously? OK, if it has to be RSN for this, fine. Selfstudier (talk) 21:48, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I mean, or we could just find another source for that sentence in addition to the Gilbert book. Andre🚐 21:52, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I looked and said above what I was able to find, if you can do better, OK. Selfstudier (talk) 22:08, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

No problem. There's Moshe Yegar and Raphael Israeli on p. 13., Andrew G. Bostom on p. 468,, The Routledge Atlas of Jewish History also by Gilbert and contains the same info, , Renzo De Felice p.22, , another book by Israeli p.23,, yet another book by Israeli p.69, and I believe it also appears in at least 1 or 2 other works by Gilbert as well. Andre🚐 22:23, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Andrew Bostom, are you kidding? I already consulted De Felice which is the best source here and it shows the danger of poor sources like Gilbert's anecdotes. Gilbert: "In Tripolitania in 1897 synagogues were plundered, and individual Jews murdered." De Felice (p20, details pp302-303): "In 1897 the synagogue of the Idder quarter in Misurata was sacked." One synagogue, not synagogues plural. (Actually Gilbert does this sort of generalising all the time, which is one reason I don't cite him.) On page 22 De Felice quotes a letter which mentions one man killed by thieves in Jebel and another person killed in some unnamed village. So, contrary to the implication of Gilbert's careless wording, the deaths were not related to or even in the same city as the synagogue plundering. So we have one synagogue vandalised and two unrelated murders. Neither of these even come close to satisfying WP:WEIGHT in an article that has to cover thousands of locations over more than a millennium. Zero^talk 02:06, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I believe you are mistaken regarding De Felice. On p.22 and 23 he mentions 2 synagogues, the Idder synagogue and the Zlitin synagogue. It says the Arabs destroyed the latter synagogue and looted the contents. Andre🚐 02:09, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I removed Bostom, but Gilbert, who I still maintain is correct in this case and also generally reliable and widely cited, the 2 Israeli historians, and De Felice, which in fact corroborates the 2 synagogues with the quoted letter and as well mentions the murdered person in the next para, are plenty of sufficient weight. Andre🚐 02:17, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Weight isn't determined by how many people copy the same stuff. Look at Israeli, almost exactly the same words as Gilbert. And it's you who is misreading De Felice. The letter on page 23 says "some time before", but on page 20 De Felice identifies that as 1867. Even if the second reference is to a different event that is nowhere described in the book (I looked at every mention of Zlitin), "some time before" in a letter written in February 1897 is hardly support for an event in 1897. Besides that, we should use De Felice's words, not the words of an anonymous letter writer. And it still remains completely bloody obvious that two isolated murders do not belong on this page. Zero^talk 03:44, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

While I'm stating the obvious, it shouldn't even need discussing whether works like Gilbert's Atlases that have no more than a few words on any topic are suitable sources. Zero^talk 03:57, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Multiple historians seeing fit to cite this series of incidents lend weight to it in my view, even if they didn't add anything new about it. The fact that Gilbert saw fit to mention this series of events in at least 3 different books, the Israeli historians in at least 3 books, and De Felice, who indeed discusses several synagogue incidents, one defnitively in 1897, one definitively in 1867 and in the letter, one "some time beforehand" 1897. Whether that is the same 1867 incident (which also appears in Benoussan who also mentions the murder of a notable in 1870) is the same one as the one possibly in 1897 or they were referring to a different one (since, the letter says the synagogue was destroyed and looted, but Felice simply says it was set on fire in 1867). That's also what the other writers thought, so it's not necessary for us to insert our own interpretation if those other experts did it for us. You believe Gilbert misinterpreted what was written, but what is your source for that? I suppose we could look and see if there's a source for whether the synagogue was set on fire in 1867 and destroyed in 1897, or simply the former; but it's not at all clear that Gilbert messed up. And regarding the weight, how many events like this appear in this many books? I'm happy to workshop the specific text or make sure the facts are correct and well-represented based on the best sources, I just don't agree with your idea that this event isn't significant. Andre🚐 04:10, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Neither of us have any idea whether Gilbert misinterpreted what was written because he doesn't tell us where he got it from. I don't have to prove that, either. My policy (which in other places but not here you claim to be also your policy) is to use the best available source for everything. Moreover, it isn't "also what the other writers thought", it is what it suited them to copy. Find another reliable source with an independent citation of a primary source. There is lots and lots of arrant rubbish copied from polemic book to polemic book, and it is our job to weed it out, not to force it into articles on the excuse "so-and-so is a reliable source" or because lots of polemic authors have repeated it. I can show you lists of pogroms that never happened and more, all in "reliable sources". Restricting ourselves to the best sources is our best defence. Zero^talk 04:55, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Wow, 7 sources now! Why stop there; go for 70. Zero^talk 05:10, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

• (1)Gilbert is not a good source for historic details, with the exception, certainly, of his magisterial multi-volumed biography of Churchill with its total command of all the relevant literature, archival and secondary. Back in 2009, when the figures for the slain in the 1929 Hebron massacre were discussed at length - they varied from 63,65 67 etc., and I noted that Gilbert's account gave 59. The reason for the variation was that in his history of Israel, Gilbert made wide use of contemporary newspapers - a terrible tendency - and in this case that was what the Jerusalem Post reported the first day. (I went to the trouble of confirming this with Sir Gilbert, while reminding him that the secondary historical literature gave significantly higher figures). These variations were significant because 59 were ascertained as dying from murders immediately after, and 8 later died of heart attacks or of wounds sustained during the pogrom. These nuances failed to get into the text because of an editor's bludgeoning for only mentioning the top figure, all as 'slain'. The point here is that Gilbert is a generalist in this area, relied too much on newspapers and is not useful for the details which eminently specialized scholarship like De Felice's book provide.
• (2) Andrevan. You appear to have no grasp of what microhistory does. When Zero commented that,'This book of Gilbert is just a collection of anecdotes,' you replied:

History books aren't less reliable for being anecdotal; that is called microhistory.

I must presume you actually read the linked wiki article, but didn't take the practice outlined there on board. When George Stewart devoted 300 pages to elucidating the 20 minutes of the last charge that decided the battle of Gettysburg in the context of the 15 hours surrounding that event, he invented microhistory. That masterpiece wasn't just a list of anecdotes: everything trawled up from the documentary record was fitted into a comprehensive analytical framework. Anecdotes just for the sake of telling a story don't figure. The same goes for the other historian mentioned on that page Carlo Ginsburg, perhaps our most distinguished microhistorian. He likewise uses minute, even marginal details to reconstitute the history at ground level lost by historians via close anthropological analysis of what a scarce datum or peripheral anecdote can be made to yield up. His early masterpiece The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, outlines the methodological (and in my view this is an issue you consistently ignore in google trawling) issues at stake, between microhistory and historiography in the broader sense (I see there is a link online for the English translation. I only have the Italian original (il formaggio e i vermi Einaudi 1976) where this is outlined on pp.xi-xxxi), So justifying the use of a poor general source as 'microhistory' is a misdirection based on not grasping what that exacting discipline, with its extremely close glossing on minutiae (not anecdotes), is all about. Nishidani (talk) 12:39, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

• (3) On the other article where you are extremely busy on the talk page, Zionism, Levivich suggested a stringently short list of best sources to write out an outline of that movement and ideology. This was methodologically sound, tweaked as it was with margins to then use further strong sources for details. You opted, as here, for a much wider ambit of RS, with the result that confusion now prevails. One of the reasons I supported Levivich's hard work on this was that we all know by now that meme replication is one of the outstanding problems in IP sourcing, even recurrent in otherwise works of a very high order. The greater the scope, the greater the risk of meme recycling. The same goes for you adducing several texts here to buttress your case for Gilbert: three works alone by an historian, Raphael Israeli, who is a feverishly hyperbolic twister of history, with what looks like an entrenched islamophobic approach to the Arab world (20% of Israel's population, Arabs, constitute a 'fifth column'; Europe is sinking under a massive Islamokaze wave of Muslim violence etc., etc.) Anyone who knows his background should grasp immediately that using him is 'barrel-scrapping', esp. since we have such, as Zero is trying to tell you, a very substantial academic historiograpjy on all of these question. Nishidani (talk) 12:57, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
• (4) Renzo De Felice is a magnificent source, whose authority trumps all of those you mention, meaning the others may be dispensed with. One could perhaps even classify him as a microhistorian (his life and times of Mussolini on my shelves runs to 7 volumes, and perhaps I missed something). However, if you actually read the pages he devotes to this specific issue (pp.9-23) the picture of all of those details, as represented by your cherrypicked datum, utterly reduces a complex area reality in Jewish history, dating from 1785 to 1911) to a single, to you for this page, theme: persecution by Arabs. This is one of the most devastatingly negative approaches to Jewish history, one that blemishes almost all wiki articles. Sources are trawled by keywords like 'pogrom','antisemitism', 'anti-Jewish riots' and, with the desired tragic incidents fished up, ripped out of the historical tapestry rethreaded into a Zionist version of what Salo Wittmayer Baron famously called 'lachrymose conception of Jewish history.' That is, 2,500 years of Jewish history was one of alienation and persecution (nothing else - Ariel Toaff in his works on medieval Italian Jews complains of this bias which completely underestimates or ignores all of the dense interactions, intermarriages etc., which Jews and Christians did have), so that the reason for Israel as a sanctuary from endless persecution is strengthened by this kind of reductive and distortive history of an extremely diversified and complex story. Let me illustrate why these 'episodic' lists of violence against Jews listed here consciously ignore over a thousand years of Jewish life in Islamic countries, by paraphrasing all that De Felice writes, almost all of which is ignored in order to cherrypick a pro-Israeli narrative of unrelenting violence (POV pushing).Nishidani (talk) 13:13, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
• (5)This is what rich material De Felice's book which Andrevan cites provides us with for these articles. I have bolded the only part of the text Andrevan considers worthy of inclusion.

Despite the dramatic conditions suffered during the brief Almohadic interim, generally from medieval times down to the early modern period, both personal and intercommunal relations between Libyan Jews, who had become highly Arabized, and Muslims had been quite amenable, Jews enjoying greater security than was the case with their confreres in Christian countries, in line with the religious and traditional applications of the Pact of Umar. The result was a kind of symbiotic complementarity. The sense of mistrust, resentment and hostility towards a minority, reflecting also economic and religious differences remained latent, aside from occasional explosions of violence. The practice of usury was the main cause of animosity. The standard interest rate for pledged monies was 60% per annum, which could reach as high as 90% for smaller amounts of the kind Arab hinterland borrowers depended on. General discontent spread during the final years of the Karamanli dynasty coinciding with a notable economic downturn, in what long remained a mere subsistence economy.

The return of Ottoman rule to Tripoli in 1835 brought about an improvement in both the legal and economic conditions for Jews in the area. The Jewish population witnessed a sharp rise in growth so that by 1911, well over a century after the ravages of the 1785 plague which decimated both communities, Jews, exclusive of those who were considered foreign immigrants (the wealthier Dutch, Italian, Austrian and Spanish Jewish traders), constituted 14,283 of the 523,716 natives of the Tripolitanian region. The growth of markets led to a trend towards urbanization, and the growth of new settlements, in both communities. Earlier guarantees to the Jewish community were strengthened by an Imperial Decree in 1865 that accorded them an autonomy, and endowed local rabbis with the right to independently represent their community.

Established along the main trade routes, Libyan Jews assumed an important role in credit by loans and deferral of incumbent payments, and were so trusted that Arab women would allow Jewish commercial agents access to their homes, something denied to other Muslims. The small scattered hinterland Jewish communities were not beneficiaries of these general improvements. There, custom allowed the harassment of Jews, who had to dismount until a passing Arab was out of right, and each household was subject to the suzerainty of an Arab saheb.

Some structural vexations nonetheless remained, to create difficulties for these flourishing communities in the later 19th century: namely, a laxness in the application of Islamic law, often arbitrary, and the venality of local officials. A further issue was the expanding wealth gap opening up between resident foreign Jews and the poorer indigenous Jews. After 1861, pressure from European powers, duly informed of abuses by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), mitigated the impact of some abuses, and the growth of charities and schooling alleviated stress, though conducive to a certain fatalistic passiveness, which was considered to have traditionally marked these communities, whose ‘vegetative’ superstitiousness, and lifestyle in highly cramped and disease-ridden ghetto (hara) hovels, together with ignorance, was complained of by several AIU reports.

Overall, by the end of the 19th century, while economic conditions did improve both for the hinterland and richer Tripoli communities of Jews, conditions for the urban masses of Jews worsened, exacerbated by both a high birth-rate and the influx of Jews from the outlying territory, which also led to a a deterioration of relations with Muslims. Complaints about usury by the latter were often associated with a perception that wealthy foreign Jews had undue influence over the government. As modernizing changes increased their pace, many Jews assumed a mediating role between the crumbling order institutional world and the emerging new society, and bore the brunt for the upheavals of change. Sectors of the Muslim community itself, exposed to emergent trends in Europe, began to develop their own rudimentary form of nationalism, taking on board the anti-Semitism which tainted the latter. The government, though it did impose a special tax on those who did not do military service, opposed this drift in order to balance the pressure of European expansion, by recognizing the importance of developing the local economy where wealthy Jews played a significant role. A number of international incidents also contributed to local outbursts of xenophobia, like the French occupation of Tunisia and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) The resulting bigotry occasioned riotous outbreaks which targeted Jews, who were increasingly viewed as allied to European interests.

The aggravated conditions in the late Ottoman period in Libya led to a marked rise in intolerance and contempt as anti-Jewish sentiments, formerly unknown, set down roots. Illustrative examples of such attitudes were the sacking of synagogues in Misrata in 1864 and 1897; an arson attack on that in Zliten in 1867, for which damages were later paid. In 1880 the synagogue at Az-Zāwiyah was plundered. Due to the negligence of the authorities such as the resident walis in punishing the culprits, frequent attacks on Jewish families and theft of their property led to cases of murders in reports for 1880 and 1897. In 1870, a Jewish notable, Saul Raccah was murdered. His killer was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment but later amnestied. A Jewish moneylender was murdered in 1880. Exceptions to such abuses are known. An incident of plundering at Amruss in 1901 lead to full redress and a return of stolen property thanks to the intervention of the local wali.

A lesson from this can be learned for all IP editors, but I need a beer.Nishidani (talk) 17:20, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Figures. Selfstudier (talk) 17:53, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

• (1) The article starts reasonably but quickly degenerates into a polemical farce whose only purpose appears to be to reduce Jews under Muslim rule to a purely victim population. Take the passage Andrevan edited to increase this theme:

In 1834, in Safed, Ottoman Syria, local Muslim Arabs carried out a massacre of the Jewish population known as the Safed Plunder.[20] In 1840, the Jews of Damascus were falsely accused of having murdered a Christian monk and his Muslim servant and of having used their blood to bake Passover bread. A Jewish barber was tortured until he "confessed"; two other Jews who were arrested died under torture, while a third converted to Islam to save his life. In 1864, around 500 Jews were killed in Marrakech and Fez in Morocco. In 1869, 18 Jews were killed in Tunis, and an Arab mob on Jerba Island looted and burned Jewish homes, stores, and synagogues. In 1875, 20 Jews were killed by a mob in Demnat, Morocco; elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight. In 1867, 1870, and 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were murdered in Tripolitania.

So there you have it.This is the picture of what Jews suffered from the 14th to the early 20th century under Ottoman rule, showcased by 10 violant incidents over 63 years from Damascus to Fez. Rather than remedy this glaringly defective distortion, Andrevan, you have intervened only to accentuate its bias in highlighting anti-Jewish outbreaks in the last century of a 7 centuries' long massively extensive Empire.Nishidani (talk) 22:00, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I did not change the text, I only corrected the years, as it had listed 1897 and as was pointed out, that is an oversimplification of events that occurred in 1867, 1870 and 1897. I didn't write this article text at all and have scarcely edited this article, I only added a source since another source was removed for "citation needed" tag and I don't agree that Gilbert or the other Israeli historians are without value or are "polemical." reliable sources are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject.... though a source may be biased, it may be reliable in the specific context. When dealing with a potentially biased source, editors should consider whether the source meets the normal requirements for reliable sources, such as editorial control, a reputation for fact-checking, and the level of independence from the topic the source is covering. Bias may make in-text attribution appropriate Andre🚐 22:05, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Correct me if I am wrong but in response to one edit by Zero, correctly challenging the utility of a poor source, you made a further 19 edits to the page, with no sign as far as I can see of any interest in actually editing in anything except references to Arab violence against Jews. There is a massive lacuna here, as stated above, in our coverage, and the page is not about Jewish suffering under Muslims, but about Jewish life under Muslim rule, an extremely vast topic almost invisible here. You cite a very rich source just on this for Libya only to extract from it marginal data about three burnt synagogues. Did you read that chapter, or just google for the mayhem on p.22-3? 22:13, 5 October 2024 (UTC)Nishidani (talk)

Nearly all of my edits were expanding and repairing citation tags, basically WP:WIKIGNOME work that new users could do. I made no changes to the article structure or text. Yes, I read through the Felice material, but not with an eye to expanding the article, simply to fix the problem that was pointed out. This is how Wikipedia generally works - volunteers can decide if they want to focus on technical work, prose work, or whatever suits their particular skills. A broader expansion or fleshing out of the article isn't within the scope that I can take on right now, but I agree Felice has some good material and I encourage you, or anyone else, to expand it, provided you don't remove reliably sourced material that's already there. I personally believe that when someone adds a {{cn}} tag, we should try to fill that cite as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and we should not be removing apparently reliable sources and replacing them with cn tags. I agree that you could write more on this article, and make it more well-rounded. Maybe I will, and you also can if you wish. It's not POV pushing to correct citations tags or to provide citations for existing text, see WP:PRESERVE. If you have concerns about this article's balance and unduly focusing on lachrymose events, that is a content issue that you or any other editor may freely address, or not, at their leisure. Andre🚐 22:20, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

Independence of sources

Here is proof that the three books of Raphael Israeli are derivative works that cannot be regarded as independent sources on this topic. The comparison is actually eyebrow-raising; it is not our task to police copyright outside Wikipedia, but if we were to paraphrase as closely as this our edits would be deleted and probably revdelled. It could also be argued that WP:COPYLINK forbids us from linking to these works, but I'm not making that argument here. I'm only certifying that my earlier judgement was correct: Israeli is not an independent source. Note that all these quotations appear within one page in each source and that none of them give citations. The three works of Israeli are word-for-word identical to each other except that one of them has "Ottoman" instead of "Islamic" in the first example. Zero^talk 05:30, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Gilbert	Israeli
Throughout the 1860s the Jews of Libya were subjected to punitive taxation.	Throughout the 1860s, the Jews of Libya, then under the Islamic Empire were subjected to punitive taxation...
In 1864 as many as five hundred Jews were killed in the Moroccan cities of Marrakech and Fez.	...and in 1864, around 500 Jews were massacred in Marrakech and Fez in Morocco.
In 1869 a further eighteen Jews were killed in Tunis.	In 1869, another 18 Jews were killed by a mob in Tunis...
On Jerba Island, an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and shops, burning synagogues and striking fear into the whole community.	...and an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores, and burned synagogues, on Jerba Island.
In 1875 twenty Jews were murdered by the Muslim mob at Demnat, in Morocco.	In 1875, 20 Jews were attacked and killed by a mob in Demnat, Morocco.
In Morocco Jews continued to be set upon in the streets and murdered, often in broad daylight.	...elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight.
In Tripolitania in 1897 synagogues were plundered, and individual Jews murdered.	In 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were murdered in Tripolitania.

Zero^talk 05:30, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Close paraphrasing doesn't make a source unreliable or disqualify it from determining weight, and I don't think this qualifies as plagiarism either. Israeli has published many books, not all of them persuasive arguments or advocacy works, and is de facto a legitimate historian. Publishing at least one polemical work doesn't render all works polemical. This doesn't prove the source doesn't count, or please explain that with policy-based arguments. Andre🚐 20:23, 12 December 2024 (UTC)