The Dhimma

Why this Chapter exists

Half the story happened outside Europe.

In Christian Europe, anti-Jewish ideas moved from theology to libels, ghettos, expulsions, and race science. Yet for roughly five centuries after the rise of Islam, most of the world’s Jews did not live in Christian Europe. They lived under Muslim rule, in lands stretching from Spain to Persia (today’s Iran). That world had its own legal system and its own record.

Two popular views of this history compete. One describes a golden age of untroubled harmony, ended only by modern politics. The other describes an unbroken persecution, no different from Europe’s. The historian Mark R. Cohen, in Under Crescent and Cross, rejects both: the idea of an “interfaith utopia” and the idea that Jews under Islam were persecuted much as they were in Christian Europe. Each view rests on real episodes, and the record also holds the episodes the other view leaves out. The Misconceptions page takes up the underlying question directly. The system’s own documents survive: a legal contract, a ruler’s decree, a tax list a family once needed, and the reform decrees that ended the system in law.

Before and during the conquests

The world the conquests entered.

Islam began in Arabia in the early 600s CE. By then, Jews had lived in the region for centuries, split between two empires. The Land of Israel, Egypt, and North Africa lay under Christian Rome, the Roman Empire after it adopted Christianity. Rome’s laws barred Jews from public office and restricted their synagogues. Those laws are set out below. The years just before the conquests were among the hardest. Many Jews of the region had sided with Persia when it took Jerusalem in 614. When the emperor Heraclius won the region back, he expelled them from Jerusalem in 630 and ordered the Jews of his empire baptized by force. In Carthage, in 632, the order was carried out. Babylonia, in today’s Iraq, lay under Persia, where Jewish scholars had just completed the Talmud, the vast written record of Jewish law and debate. There the Jews had their own hereditary leader, the exilarch, who governed the community under the Persian kings. The Diaspora Chapter follows both worlds in detail.

Arabia itself was different again, and Jews held real power there. In Yemen, the kings of Himyar turned from the fourth century to an exclusive monotheism bound closely to Judaism. Historians debate how closely. The last of these kings, Dhu Nuwas, is described in the surviving sources as a Jew. Around 523 he massacred the Christians of Najran, an oasis city. The atrocity brought Ethiopian armies into Arabia and ended his kingdom. Jewish tribes farmed the oases of the northwest, including Yathrib, the city later called Medina. It was a world where Jews owned land, bore arms, and sometimes ruled, and where religious violence ran in more than one direction.

Outside Arabia, most people in these lands were not Arabs. From Syria to Egypt and across North Africa, Christian Rome’s provinces were home to Christians of several churches. Among them were the Copts, the Christians of Egypt, and the Syriac Christians of Syria, who spoke a form of Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew. Jewish communities lived among them. Across North Africa lived the Berbers, the native peoples of the region, who call themselves Amazigh. In Persia the state religion was Zoroastrianism, Persia’s ancient faith. In Arabia, many tribes worshipped many gods, alongside the Jewish and Christian communities there. Islam and Arabic became the faith and the language of most people in the region only over the centuries that followed.

Islam was born into this world. Around 610, a merchant of Mecca named Muhammad began to preach that there is one God and that he was God’s messenger. His recitations became the Quran, Islam’s scripture, and his followers became the first Muslims. Mecca’s leaders turned on them, and in 622 Muhammad led his followers north to Medina. The Muslim community’s early years there included conflict with the city’s three Jewish tribes. The earliest Islamic biographies of Muhammad, written down in the eighth and ninth centuries, record the outcome. Muhammad expelled two of the tribes. In 627, after a failed siege of the city known as the Battle of the Trench, came the harshest judgment. Ibn Ishaq, the earliest of those biographers, writes that during the siege the leader of the third tribe, the Banu Qurayza, was persuaded to side with the besieging Meccans. Afterward, he writes, Muhammad had trenches dug in the market of Medina, and the tribe’s men were beheaded there in batches. The women and children were enslaved. He puts the number of men killed at six or seven hundred, adding that some said as many as eight or nine hundred. The following year Muhammad’s forces besieged Khaybar, a Jewish farming oasis north of Medina. Its people stayed on the land as sharecroppers and kept their faith, giving half of every harvest, on terms that let the Muslims expel them at will. Later Muslim jurists treated those terms as a founding precedent. Fourteen centuries later, the oasis’s name is still used in a chant against Jews, documented on the Hate Symbols page.

The historian Milka Levy-Rubin traces the rules for non-Muslims to the surrender agreements made after the conquests, which drew on customs older than Islam from the worlds of both the conquerors and the conquered. The rulers who followed Muhammad carried the title caliph. Around 642, the caliph Umar expelled most of the remaining Jews from the Hejaz, the region around Mecca and Medina. These accounts are the tradition’s own record. Historians debate their details.

Then came the conquests. Muslim armies took the Persian empire whole and stripped Christian Rome of Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. Within little more than a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, Muslim rule ran from Spain to the edge of India. The new rulers now governed large populations of Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. Their status was settled by a contract.

The contract

Protection, for a price, on conditions.

Islamic law called them ahl al-dhimma, “the people of the pact,” and one protected person was a dhimmi: a Jew, a Christian, or, in Persia, a Zoroastrian, a follower of Persia’s older religion. Jews and Christians qualified because Islam counted them as “People of the Book,” communities holding genuine earlier scriptures. The Zoroastrians were extended the same treatment by later precedent. The dhimma itself was a standing contract. The state protected their lives, property, and worship. In exchange they paid the jizya, a yearly tax on adult men with its basis in the Quran (chapter 9, verse 29). Most jurists exempted the poor and infirm, though one opinion within the Shafi’i school of law did not, and collectors did not always honor the exemption. They also accepted a set of conditions that marked them as lesser. The most famous statement of those conditions is a document known as the Pact of Umar. It is written in the voice of the conquered: a letter in which the Christians of Syria promise their own restrictions to the caliph. It names Christians, not Jews. Its rules were applied to Jews by later legal analogy. In Egypt, papers from the Cairo Geniza (a medieval synagogue storeroom described below) show that many of those rules went unenforced for long stretches. Among the Pact’s conditions:

We shall not build in our cities or in their vicinity any new monasteries, churches, hermitages, or monks’ cells. We shall not restore, by night or by day, any of them that have fallen into ruin…

We shall not hold public religious ceremonies. We shall not seek to proselytize anyone. We shall not prevent any of our kin from embracing Islam if they so desire.

We shall show deference to the Muslims and shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit down.

We shall not ride on saddles… We shall not wear swords or bear weapons of any kind… We shall not build our homes higher than theirs.

The Pact of Umar, in the translation published by Norman Stillman in The Jews of Arab Lands (1979).

The document has a history of its own. Tradition attributes it to the caliph Umar I, who ruled from 634 to 644. Scholars who have studied its text, among them Milka Levy-Rubin and Mark R. Cohen, conclude that it took shape later, in the eighth and ninth centuries, as legal scholars worked out what the conquest arrangements should permanently mean. No surviving text is older than the tenth century, and the best-known version appears in a manual for rulers finished in Egypt in 1122. Levy-Rubin dates its standard form to the early Abbasid caliphs, the dynasty that ruled from Baghdad, in the first half of the ninth century.

The conditions had precedents. Christian Rome had already written special laws for Jews. In 388, Rome banned marriage between Jews and Christians. From 423, building new synagogues was banned, though existing ones were left standing. By 438, Jews were barred from public office. In 553, the emperor Justinian reached inside the synagogue itself, dictating which versions of scripture could be read there. Those laws grew out of the theology traced in the Adversus Judaeos Chapter, and they survive in the Roman legal codes cited below. These Roman laws belong to the older world that, in Levy-Rubin’s account, shaped the rules for non-Muslims. The Pact’s first promise, no new houses of worship, matches a rule Rome’s law had applied to synagogues since 423. One rule may have traveled the other direction. Rules requiring non-Muslims to dress differently appear in the eighth century. In 850 the caliph al-Mutawakkil ordered Jews and Christians across the empire to wear honey-colored clothing that marked them. More than three centuries later, in 1215, the Catholic Church’s Fourth Lateran Council ruled that Jews and “Saracens,” meaning Muslims, must be distinguished from Christians by their dress. Europe’s rulers then imposed badges on Jews country by country. The Adversus Judaeos Chapter records that requirement. Historians have suggested, though no document proves, that the idea traveled from these Islamic-world precedents.

Historians who compare the two worlds point to structural differences. The dhimma bound every protected non-Muslim alike, so in most of the Islamic world Jews were one minority among several. Its terms were also religious. Conversion to Islam ended the restrictions the same day, as baptism usually did in medieval Christian Europe. Islam’s scripture speaks of Jews in more than one way. One verse of the Quran says that “the most hostile to the believers are the Jews and those who associate other deities with God,” meaning people who worship other gods (chapter 5, verse 82). Another names “the [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians,” a religious community the Quran mentions. It says that “all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good” among them “will have their rewards with their Lord” (chapter 2, verse 62). Historians of the period, Bernard Lewis and Mark R. Cohen among them, point to three ideas that took hold in Christian Europe and not in Islam. One was that Jews were an evil force at war with the world. Another was that Jews had killed God. In 1965 the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council rejected that charge. Its declaration Nostra Aetate speaks of Jesus’ passion, his suffering and death. What happened in it, the declaration states, “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.” The third idea was that being Jewish was in the blood and could never be left behind. Even so, people sometimes doubted that converts had truly changed, as under the Almohads, a strict dynasty that ruled North Africa and Spain in the 1100s. Europe would eventually build a hatred that followed ancestry and could not be exited. The Racial Turn Chapter documents that construction.

Enforcement was uneven. For long stretches the conditions sat lightly or went unenforced. Synagogues rose, Jews rode horses, and viziers served kings while the dress rules stayed in the law books. Under a strict ruler, or in a tense decade, the conditions came back, sometimes with violence. How hard the contract pressed depended on who held power, where, and when.

The record

What the system allowed, and what it broke.

The record of twelve centuries contains periods of flourishing and periods of persecution. Both happened inside the same legal world, sometimes in the same city, sometimes in the same family.

The flourishing was real. In the 800s and 900s, under the caliphs of Baghdad, the ancient Jewish academies of Babylonia became the address of the Jewish world. Their heads, the geonim, answered legal questions sent from Spain to Yemen. The exilarch, the recognized head of the empire’s Jews, held a place at the ruler’s court. In Córdoba, the capital of Muslim Spain, the Jewish physician Hasdai ibn Shaprut served the caliph as diplomat and minister in the mid-900s. He also funded the poets and grammarians who began Hebrew’s golden age in Spain. In Granada by the 1030s, Samuel ibn Naghrela rose to vizier, the king’s chief minister, and, so his own battle poems record, commanded armies. One life spans both sides of that record. Maimonides, whose code of Jewish law is studied to this day, fled Córdoba as a boy in the 1140s, when the conquering Almohads offered Jews conversion, flight, or death. How the family lived through the years that followed is not settled. He ended his life in Egypt as a physician in the court circle of Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria.

The violence was real too, and it has dates. Granada, December 30, 1066: a mob storms the Jewish quarter, kills Joseph ibn Naghrela, and devastates the community in a single day. Medieval accounts put the dead in the thousands. Jewish Granada was rebuilt within a generation. The Almohad persecutions, from around 1146: convert, flee, or die, the choice that drove the Maimonides family out. The Mawza exile of 1679: Yemen’s ruler expels the country’s Jews, and only the Jews, to a barren coastal strip, where by some scholarly estimates as many as two-thirds die. The two years of attacks Sultan Moulay Yazid ordered on Morocco’s Jewish quarters from 1790. The massacre and forced conversion of the Jews of Mashhad, Iran, in 1839. Each is documented, with its sources, on this site’s Timeline and in the Unit 2 community Chapters.

The system could also harden into walls. In 1438, the Jews of Fez were confined to a walled quarter beside the royal palace, the first mellah. The word mellah became the name for Jewish quarters across Morocco. Communities lived inside it for five centuries. One of its synagogues, built by the Ibn Danan family in the seventeenth century, stands there still.

The same system could also open doors that Europe was closing. In 1492, when Spain expelled its Jews, the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim empire ruled from today’s Turkey, took many of the refugees in under Sultan Bayezid II. Over the next generation it became the largest home of the Sephardic exiles. As dhimmis, the refugees paid the jizya and lived under its conditions, with the protection the law gave them. Within two years, the exiles had founded the first printing press in Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. The Expulsions Chapter follows that dispersion. The communities the exiles built in Istanbul, Salonika, and Safed are told in Unit 2 · Ch. 06 · The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World.

Object Spotlight

The masterpiece and the tax list.

Two documents from one city, Cairo, show what the dhimma looked like from inside. The first is a masterpiece. In 1008, in Cairo, a scribe named Samuel ben Jacob finished copying a complete Hebrew Bible, and closed it with pages of gold interlace and patterned script, decoration in the style of the Islamic art of his day. In the center of one page, he signed his name. His book, known today as the Leningrad Codex, is the oldest complete Hebrew Bible in the world, and scholars still work from its text.

The second is a scrap, made a few decades later. It comes from the Cairo Geniza, the sacred storeroom of a Cairo synagogue where a thousand years of worn-out papers were kept rather than thrown away. It is a list, name after name, of people in one community who could not pay the jizya. It was drawn up so that others could pay the tax for them.

The tax was supposed to spare the poor. The Geniza’s records show collectors in Egypt taxing them anyway. The historian S. D. Goitein, who spent a lifetime reading these documents, found that for the poor it was the heaviest burden the system imposed. Families borrowed, begged, and sometimes fled ahead of the tax collector. What this list records is the community’s answer. Someone went name by name through the neighborhood and wrote down who needed help.

The Pact of Umar is the system as its jurists wrote it. These two pages are the system as one community lived it, in the same city, under the same rules, a few decades apart.

1839–1856

The contract ends.

The dhimma lasted longer than almost any legal arrangement in this Unit, and it ended in law with two decrees. In November 1839, the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled most of the region’s Jews, issued the Gülhane decree. It promised security of life, honor, and property to all subjects, whatever their religion. In 1856 a second decree, the Islahat, said the rest plainly: Muslim and non-Muslim subjects were equal before the law. On paper, after some twelve centuries, the contract was over. Practice moved slower. The jizya was abolished as a religious tax, and a new tax, paid in place of military service, took its place. Equality arrived unevenly and was resisted in the provinces. Outside the empire the status lasted longer still: in Morocco into the twentieth century, in Yemen in some forms until the community itself left for Israel around 1950.

In 1840, the year after the Gülhane decree, the blood libel appeared in Damascus, promoted by the French consul. The blood libel was medieval Europe’s invented charge that Jews murder Christians for ritual, and the Blood Libel Chapter documents the case. In the century after 1840, the European tradition this Unit has traced entered the region in documented stages: the conspiracy forgery, the race ideology, the broadcast propaganda. That import is the next Chapter’s subject, and what it eventually cost the region’s Jewish communities is told in Unit 2’s Departure from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa).

The analytical question

Two shapes.

Historians set the two systems side by side in different ways. In Christian Europe, a body of ideas about Jews specifically took hold: the deicide charge, the libels, and later the race science. Under Islam, the law built a category for non-Muslims generally. Subordination and protection were written into the same contract and enforced and relaxed by turns. Mark R. Cohen, in Under Crescent and Cross, concludes that relations between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages, though not utopian, were less confrontational and violent than relations between Christians and Jews in the West.

Samuel ibn Naghrela, the rabbi at the top of this Chapter, rose to vizier and general under a Muslim king, and his Hebrew battle poems survive. His son Joseph held the same office and was killed in the Granada massacre of 1066. Both careers, and the massacre, took place within the same system of law.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History: the rise of Islam, Muslim Spain, the Baghdad caliphate, and the Ottoman reforms, taught through the legal status of one minority across twelve centuries.
• Comparative Law & Religion: how premodern states categorized religious minorities, and reading a legal text (the Pact of Umar) against its uneven enforcement record.
• Sephardic & Mizrahi Studies: the legal frame behind the community histories of Unit 2, from Baghdad and Córdoba to Fez and Sana’a.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: chronicles against documentary evidence, and what the Cairo Geniza’s everyday papers correct in both grand narratives.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.5 (political powers and achievements, including the Islamic caliphates: the legal status of Jewish communities under Islamic rule).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.6 and RH.11–12.9 (source perspective, and integrating primary texts, documentary evidence, and scholarship into a coherent account).

Further Teaching Resources

• Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook, the Pact of Umar, the full text in translation for classroom use.
• The Princeton Geniza Project, a searchable database of Cairo Geniza documents, including thousands of everyday records like Halper 468.
• JIMENA, the Sephardic & Mizrahi bibliography, for deeper reading on the communities that lived this history.