Muslim-Jewish History: What Actually Happened

In 637 CE, Jerusalem had gone roughly five centuries without a resident Jewish community. The Byzantines had banned it after Emperor Hadrian’s expulsion. When the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab took the city that year, he reversed the ban and, by most historical accounts, invited around seventy Jewish families to resettle on the Temple Mount’s southern end. That’s one real, specific, well-documented moment in a much longer history. This piece covers that history honestly, including the parts where the popular version oversells it.

The Reopening of Jerusalem

Umar’s decision wasn’t a minor courtesy. Byzantine rule had enforced Jewish exclusion from Jerusalem for so long that the 637 reversal marked the first time in nearly 500 years that Jewish families could live in the city again, not just visit it. Later Islamic legal tradition built on this moment with formal protections for non-Muslim residents (Jews and Christians alike) under Muslim rule, covering safety, property, and freedom to worship, in exchange for a tax and a set of civic terms. Those terms shifted by era and ruler, sometimes generous, sometimes not, and describing the whole thousand-plus years that followed as uniformly tolerant would flatten real variation across regions and centuries. The 637 reopening itself, though, is solid.

Refuge After 1492, and a Geography Correction

When Spain expelled its Jewish population in 1492 under the Alhambra Decree, roughly 100,000 people fled, and the majority went to Ottoman territory. Sultan Bayezid II ordered his provincial governors to receive them, reportedly sending the Ottoman navy under Kemal Reis to help transport refugees out of Spain. The cities that became genuine centres of Sephardic Jewish life afterward were Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne, Sarajevo, Damascus, and above all Salonica (modern Thessaloniki), which had such a large Sephardic population for centuries afterward that it was known as “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.”

Isfahan doesn’t belong on that list. It’s a Persian city, never under Ottoman rule, and it has no real connection to the 1492 Sephardic resettlement story. Wherever that detail came from, it’s a straightforward geographic error, corrected here.

Two Real Examples From Muslim Spain

The clearest cases of Jewish figures holding genuine political power under Muslim rule both come from Al-Andalus, not Baghdad.

Hasdai ibn Shaprut served the Umayyad caliphs of Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman III and his son Al-Hakam II, through the 10th century as a physician and de facto foreign minister, negotiating directly with Christian European courts on the caliphate’s behalf. “Prime minister” overstates the formal title a little, but not the real influence.

Samuel ibn Naghrillah (known in Hebrew sources as Shmuel HaNagid) went further still: in 11th-century Granada he served as vizier and, unusually for anyone, Muslim or otherwise, personally led the Taifa of Granada’s army in several military campaigns. A Jewish general commanding a Muslim army is about as concrete a counterexample to assumptions about the period as history offers.

The translation movement usually credited here, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, is worth a more careful claim than it usually gets. It drew scholars from across the region’s faiths, Muslim, Christian, Sabian, Zoroastrian, and Jewish, but its most central, best-documented translators were Nestorian Christians, particularly Hunayn ibn Ishaq, whose renderings of Greek medical and philosophical texts shaped Arabic scholarship for centuries. Jewish scholars were genuinely part of that world; they weren’t its most prominent translators at Baghdad specifically. The stronger, better-documented Jewish-Muslim intellectual story is the one above, in Córdoba and Granada.

Maimonides: A Complication Worth Including

Musa ibn Maymun, known as Maimonides, is genuinely one of the towering figures of both Jewish and Islamic-world scholarship, his philosophical and medical writing shaped both traditions for centuries. But his own biography complicates a purely rosy narrative, and leaving that out would be a worse kind of dishonesty than the one this rewrite is trying to fix elsewhere.

Maimonides was born in Córdoba in 1138. His family fled the city roughly a decade later, when the Almohad dynasty imposed forced conversions on Jews and Christians across its territory. They eventually settled in Fustat, near Cairo, under the more tolerant Ayyubid dynasty, where Maimonides became a physician at Saladin’s court. His life is a genuine Muslim-Jewish coexistence story and a genuine story of Muslim-on-Jewish persecution, from two different Muslim dynasties, one generation apart. Both halves are true.

Morocco in World War II: A More Honest Version

The widely repeated story is that Sultan Mohammed V flatly refused to hand over Morocco’s Jews to Vichy France and the Nazis. Historians, including Georges Bensoussan, have pushed back hard on that framing, because the sultan did sign the Vichy regime’s antisemitic decrees; formal legal power over Morocco during the occupation sat with Vichy, not with him.

What the archival record does support is more limited but still real: French state records quote him telling Vichy officials, “I absolutely do not approve of the new antisemitic laws… The Jews are under my protection, and I reject any distinction that should be made among my people,” and he’s credited with slowing a Vichy census of Jewish property that would have enabled its confiscation. Morocco’s Jewish community was not deported to Nazi death camps, unlike Jews in mainland France. Whether that outcome reflects the sultan’s direct intervention, the limits of Vichy’s practical control in Morocco, or both, is exactly what historians are still arguing about. The honest version is: real protective gestures, inside a system where he’d also signed the discriminatory laws himself, not a clean act of defiance.

The Paris Mosque: Real, Disputed Only on the Numbers

The Grand Mosque of Paris, under its rector Si Kaddour Benghabrit, did shelter Jews during the Nazi occupation, forging birth and conversion certificates to pass Jewish refugees off as Muslim and hiding some in the mosque’s catacombs while they waited for documents or an escape route. That much is documented and not seriously disputed.

What’s genuinely unresolved is scale. Published estimates range from as few as 100 to as many as 1,700 people sheltered, and historians haven’t settled on a number. Repeating the largest figure as fact would be the same mistake made elsewhere in this piece’s original version: reaching for the most impressive version of a true story instead of the most accurate one.

For the broader translation and preservation movement that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars all contributed to, see Islam and Modernity: What Changes, What Doesn’t. For the life of the Prophet ﷺ referenced in the earliest Muslim-Jewish encounters in Medina, see Life of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ: A Brief History and Timeline.

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Frequently asked questions

Did Muslims allow Jews to return to Jerusalem? Yes. When Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab took Jerusalem in 637 CE, he reversed a roughly 500-year Byzantine ban and, by most historical accounts, invited around seventy Jewish families to resettle in the city.

Where did Jews go after being expelled from Spain in 1492? Mostly to Ottoman territory, following an invitation from Sultan Bayezid II. Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne, Sarajevo, Damascus, and especially Salonica (Thessaloniki) became major centres of Sephardic Jewish life for centuries afterward.

Who was Hasdai ibn Shaprut? A Jewish physician and diplomat who served as a de facto foreign minister to the Umayyad caliphs of 10th-century Córdoba, negotiating with Christian European courts on the caliphate’s behalf.

Did Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco save Moroccan Jews from the Holocaust? The popular version, that he flatly refused Vichy’s antisemitic laws, is disputed by historians, since he did sign those decrees. What’s documented is more limited: he pushed back rhetorically, slowed a property census targeting Jews, and Morocco’s Jewish community wasn’t deported to Nazi camps, unlike Jews in mainland France.

Did the Paris Mosque really shelter Jews in WWII? Yes, this part isn’t disputed. Its rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, forged documents identifying Jewish refugees as Muslim and sheltered some in the mosque. The exact number saved, estimates range from about 100 to 1,700, is not agreed on by historians.

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