The Rise of Islam - The Jews of Babylon

The Rise of Islam

   

Mohammed reacted with anger when Jews refused to recognize him as the last of the prophets.

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In the previous chapter, we discussed at length the Jewish impact on intellectual Rome prior to the advent of Christianity. Similarly, Jews living on the Arabian Peninsula impacted positively on their Arab neighbors.

During the days of Jewish clashes with the Roman Empire, Jews fled to areas outside the control of Rome and founded many towns and villages in Arabia. One very famous town, almost certainly founded by Jews, was Yathrib. Today Yathrib is better known as Medina and is considered Islam’s second holiest city (after Mecca).

As in Rome, the local Jews attracted significant numbers of converts to their way of life and many more admirers.

M. Hirsch Goldberg, in the Jewish Connection (p. 33), sums up the story before the early 600’s:

“In Arabia, whole tribes converted to Judaism, including two kinds of the Himyarites. French Bible critic Ernest Renan remarked that ‘only a hair’s breadth prevented all Arabia from becoming Jewish.’”

One of those impressed by the Jews’ uncompromising devotion to monotheism was a young trader named Mohammed ibn Abdallah.
In the early stages of his spiritual awakening, Mohammed came to be greatly impressed by the Jews.

Although his travels had exposed him to Christianity and he was clearly influenced by it, he found aspects of it troublesome—in particular, the doctrine of the Trinity did not seem strictly monotheistic in his eyes. He is recorded as having said:

  “Unbelievers are those that say, ‘Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary’ ... Unbelievers are those that say, ‘Allah is one of three.’ There is but one God. If they do not desist from so saying, those of them that disbelieve shall be sternly punished.” (Koran, Sura 5:71-73)

However, there is no doubt that in the early stages of his spiritual awakening, Mohammed came to be greatly impressed by the Jews. Writes S.D. Goiten in Jews and Arabs (pp. 58-59):

“The intrinsic values of the belief in one God, the creator of the world, the God of justice and mercy, before whom everyone high and low bears personal responsibility, came to Muhammad—as he never ceased to emphasize—from Israel.”

He clearly had some knowledge of the Torah as later he would quote Moses (though usually not accurately) more than one hundred times in the Koran, the record of his teachings which became the holy book of his newfound religion. Of the 25 prophets listed in the Koran, 19 are from Jewish scripture, and many ritual laws, as well as civil laws, of Islam parallel Judaism—circumcision and prohibition against eating pork, for example.

CHILDREN OF ISHMAEL

Mohammed believed the ancient tradition that the Arabs were the other children of Abraham - through the line of his son Ishmael by the Egyptian maidservant Hagar - and that they had forgotten the teachings of monotheism they had inherited ages ago. He saw his mission as bringing them back. Paul Johnson, in his History of the Jews (p. 167), explains:

  “What he [Mohammed] seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways. He accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture - the Koran being an Arabic substitute for the Bible - and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts.”

There is no argument that the Arab world into which Mohammed was born was badly in need of moral values and social reform. The Mecca of his day was a central place of pagan worship. The Arab tribesmen of the region worshipped a pantheon of gods there, including Al-Lat, the sun goddess, and Al-Uzza, a goddess associated with the planet Venus, both of whom were daughters of the chief deity, known as Al-Ilah, (Allah) or “the God.”

In Mecca stands Kaaba, the shrine enclosing the famous black meteorite, a former site of pagan worship.

The Kaaba, the shrine enclosing the famous black meteorite which was worshipped in Mecca before Mohammed’s time, was also a site for an altar where blood sacrifices were offered to these and other gods.

The morality of the neighboring tribesmen could, charitably, be described as chaotic. Huston Smith, in his classic The Religions of Man, (p. 219) goes so far as to call the Arab society before the advent of Mohammed “barbaric.” Tribal loyalties were paramount; other than that, nothing served to mitigate the blood feuds, drunken brawls and orgies that the harsh life of the desert gave sway to.

MOHAMMED’S VISION

Mohammed was repelled by the cruel and crude reality around him. In the year 610, at the age of 40, he escaped to a desert cave where, according to Muslim tradition, he experienced a series of mystical visions, including revelations from the Angel Gabriel. He returned from the desert imbued with a spiritual mission to transform the pagan society around him.

Preaching an end to licentiousness and need for peace, justice and social responsibility, Muhammad advocated improving the lot of slaves, orphans, women and the poor, and replacing tribal loyalties with the fellowship of a new monotheistic faith - which he called Islam, meaning “surrender to God.” (One who submits is a Muslim.)

Islam, according to Mohammed, was built on five pillars:

• Faith in one God (“there is no God but Allah”)
 
• Prayer (five times a day)
 
• Charity (2.5% of one’s income)
 
• Pilgrimage to Mecca called Haj (once in a lifetime)
 
• Fasting (a fast lasting from dawn to dusk for 30 days during the month ofRamadan)

Another fundamental principle of Islam is Jihad. ( While most people think the term Jihad means holy war the actual meaning of Jihad is “struggle” and can be used to refer to both the internal struggle between good and evil that occurs with in all of us as well as external struggle between the world of the Muslim (dhar al Islam) and the world of the non-Muslim called the World of War (dhar al Hare). The earliest use of the term Jihad as mentioned in 7th century Islamic law codes (sharia) refers to external struggle against the non-Islamic world.) (1)

Initially, he attracted very few followers. After three years, Mohammed had barely forty converts. But, imbued with a passion that has been the hallmark of the truly great visionaries of the world, Mohammed would not give up. And, little by little, he built a steady following of committed loyalists.

The more followers he attracted, the more attention, and with it, the more hostility. The merchants of Mecca, whose livelihood depended on the pagan sites and rites of the city, weren’t going to be easily displaced. A murder plot was hatched, but Mohammed escaped just in the nick of time.

While persecution of the Muslims was mounting in Mecca, the city of Yithrab was experiencing problems of internal strife and a delegation decided that the fiery preacher from Mecca would be the man to bring order to chaos. After winning the pledge of city representatives to worship only Allah, Mohammed agreed to migrate. His journey to Yithrab in the year 622 CE, the year 1 of the Islamic calendar, was immortalized as theHegira.

Thus his life was saved and a new horizon opened for his teachings. It was in Yithrab—heretofore to be known as Medina, “the city of the prophet”—that Islam took hold in a major way.

Once he had made Medina his stronghold, Mohammed mobilized an army of 10,000 men and, in 630 CE, moved against Mecca, meaning to purify the Kaaba and turn it into a center of worship of the one God, Allah.

His success is legendary. Two years later, when he died all of Arabia was under Muslim control.

MOHAMMED AND THE JEWS

The one problem Mohammed had faced in Medina - and elsewhere - were the Jews, who were not prepared to accept his Arab version of Judaism. In the same way they had previously rejected Christianity, so too did they reject Islam.

It must be pointed out, however, that Jews had a lot less problems with Islam than they did with Christianity. Islam was purely monotheistic, whereas Christianity incorporated a lot of pagan mythology into itself. Islam did not claim that Mohammad was “god” or “son of God” or that God came in three parts. Islam followed many Jewish laws and customs, unlike Christianity which disavowed the law of the Torah in favor of faith in Jesus.

The most important agreement was that Abraham was the father of both the Jews and the Arabs.

The most important agreement was that Abraham was the father of both the Jews (through his son Isaac) and the Arabs (through his son Ishmael). This made the two peoples half-brothers. But the chief disagreement came on the issue whether Mohammed was indeed the last of the prophets to be sent by God and that his word was the final revelation. The Jews found the idea unthinkable since prophecy had end long before and the words of the Torah could never be superseded.

Their rejection was painful to Mohammed who reacted with hostility toward the Jews and took great pains to pointedly separate Islam from its Jewish roots. The holiest day of the week was changed to Friday; direction of prayers was changed from Jerusalem to Mecca; most of the Jewish dietary laws were excised from Islam with the exception of the slaughter rituals, prohibition on pork and consumption of blood.

Further, Mohammad maintained that the Jews had distorted their own Bible: Abraham did not attempt to sacrifice Isaac to God at Mount Moriah, one of the hills of Jerusalem; rather, Abraham took Ishmael to Mecca, where he offered to sacrifice him to Allah on the Black Stone of Kaaba.

If Jews had previously rebuffed Mohammed’s claims to prophecy, they now openly sneered at what they considered a complete fabrication. This only made things worse. Mohammed’s anger and curses against the Jews are recorded in the Koran:

• “And humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with wrath from God.” (Sura 2:61)
• “Of all men you will certainly find the Jews ... to be the most intense in hatred of those who believe.” (Sura 5:85)
• “Vendors are they of error and are desirous that you go astray from the way ... But God has cursed them for their unbelief.” (Sura 4:48-49)

Mohammed’s anger toward the Jews was not just rhetoric. The period from 622 C.E. until Mohammed’s death in 632 C.E. was punctuated by periods of intense anti-Jewish violence as he systematically expelled, plundered and even slaughtered the Jewish tribes of Nadir, Khaybar and Banu Qurayza who lived in and around Mecca. Mohammed’s victories of the Jews are discussed in great length in Sura 59 of the Koran.

After Mohammed’s death some of his followers would interpret such statements as license to purge the world of the Jews. Other Muslims would concentrate more on the commonality of heritage and belief that Mohammed had also emphasized, and they would treat the Jews a bit better . (We will see how in future chapters of this series.)

JIHAD

At the time of Mohammed’s death in 632, Arabia was united and poised for jihad, the “holy war” or “holy struggle” to bring the world to Allah. Shortly, it moved with a fearsome power against the Byzantine and Persian empires.

What did that mean for the Jews?

Answers Rabbi Berel Wein in Echoes of Glory (p. 299):

  “Most Jewish historians (until the recent revisionist-historians) are convinced that the Byzantine Church would have attempted to eradicated Judaism totally if the Church itself had not been defeated and its plan for hegemony in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean basin thwarted by the rising tide of Islam. Thus the coming of Islam may be seen as a providential occurrence that allowed the Jews to slip between the cracks Islam made in Byzantine Church persecution. However, as is the case in all historic ‘gifts’ in Jewish history, the rise of Islam would prove to be only a mixed blessing for Israel.”

Jews were classified as ahl al-dhimma, “protected people,” and were allowed to live in Islamic countries without being forced to convert. But a whole code of law applied to them, most of it designed to set them apart, humiliate and emphasize their inferior status.

For example, a Jew could never have his head higher than a Muslim. So if a Jew was walking along, and a Muslim passed by, the Jew had to step into the gutter in deference to the Muslim’s superior status. A Jew could never testify against a Muslim in court (which basically meant there was no justice for Jews). A Jew could not have a house of worship that was higher than a mosque, which is why (for example) the Four Sephardic Synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem are subterranean. It should be noted that throughout history some of these laws were not uniformly enforced, and there were periods of time when Jews living in Muslim countries were openly persecuted and others when they were treated very well.

Next we are going to look at one important Jewish community, which at least for a time, flourished under Muslim domination.

1. For a good explanation of the concept of Jihad see: Bernard Lewis, The Middle East-A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.(New York, 1995), 233-8.

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#42 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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The Jews of Babylon

   

The oldest and most stable of Jewish communities was saved from the Christians by Muslims sweeping through the Middle East.

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The story of the Jews of Babylon of necessity begins some 1,000 years before our current timeline—in the 434 BCE, when the Babylonians first marched on Israel as part of their campaign to stake claim to the former Assyrian empire. In that first foray, the Babylonians did not destroy the Temple, nor send the Jews into exile. However, they did succeed in taking into captivity 10,000 of the best and brightest Jews.
(See Part 22)

While it seemed like tragedy at the time, these brilliant men, Torah scholars all, immediately established a Jewish infrastructure upon arrival in Babylon. A dozen years later when the Temple was destroyed, the Jews who were exiled to Babylon found there yeshivas, synagogues, kosher butchers, etc., all the essentials for maintaining a Jewish life. (See Part 23)

Seventy years later, when the Babylonians fell to the Persians and the Jews were permitted to return, only a small number did. Of what was probably a million Jews living in the Persian Empire, only 42,000 went back, meaning that the vast majority stayed in Babylon under Persia domination.

During the Second Temple period, up until its destruction in 70 CE, the Jewish community in Babylon—far from the eye of the storm that raged in the Land of Israel—continued to flourish.

Indeed, this is where the center of Jewish rabbinic authority came to rest after the Roman Empire shut down the Sanhedrin in 363 CE.

The head of the Jewish community of Babylon—who was officially recognized by the Persian authorities—was called Resh Galusa in Aramaic, which means Rosh Galut in Hebrew, and “Head of the Diaspora” in English.

The Resh Galusa was a person who was a direct descendant of the House of King David. Even though he was not a king in the land of Israel, he was recognized as not only being the representative of the Jewish community in Babylon but as also having noble status.

Over 1,500 year history of the Jewish community in Babylon approximately 40 people held that title, all tracing their ancestry back to King David. This was a noble line that was always preserved in Jewish history.

SASSANIAN DYNASTY

Part of the reason for the stability of the Jewish community in Babylon was that the area was held by the Persian Sassanian dynasty from the 3rd century CE on. The Sassanians managed to keep out of their kingdom first the Romans and then the Byzantines. (For more on the Byzantines see Part 41) In this way the Jews of Babylon were protected from harm that the Byzantine Christians inflicted elsewhere.

In this atmosphere, Jewish scholarship was able to flourish in the great yeshivas at Sura (which was founded by Rabbi Abba Ben Ibo better known as Rav) and at Nehardea (which was founded by the Babylonian sage Shmuel) and which later moved to Pumbedita.

This is where the Babylonian Talmud was written, as we saw in Part 39, immortalizing the great rabbis of Babylon, especially Abbaye and Rava. As historian Berel Wein relates in Echoes of Glory (p. 267):

“Their stamp of analysis and discussion appears in countless numbers of debates and discussions that form the Talmud. In fact, the surname of the Talmud is “the discussions of Abbaye and Rava.”

(Another great rabbinic scholar in Babylon was Rav Ashi, the editor-in-chief of the Babylonian Talmud in the early 5th century.)

These rabbis, as we explained in Part 39, are known in Jewish scholarship as Amoraim, “explainers” or “interpreters.” The Amoraim lived from about 200 CE to about 500 CE.(1) They were followed by the Gaonim, the “great ones” or “geniuses.” The Gaonim were the heads of the yeshivas in a time when Jewish scholarship thrived in Babylon.

But then the situation changed.

Things began to worsen for the Jewish Babylonian community in the middle of the 5th century when the Persian priests, fighting against encroaching Christian missionaries, unleashed anti-Christian persecutions and included Jews in the mayhem. Writes Wein (p. 277):

“The worsening situation in Babylonia came as a shock to the Jewish community, for nothing of this sort had officially been in Babylonia for almost a millenium. Jewish confidence was shattered.”

Things went from bad to worse—with the Reish Gelusa executed at one point—as Babylonia became embroiled in civil war and as the Byzantines continued their encroachments.

In the midst of this chaos, the Moslem conquest of the Middle East in the 7th century brought unexpected benefits to the Jewish community in Babylon.

CALIPH OMAR

Mohammed had died in 632 leaving no successor, a situation which led to immediate strife and a split in the nascent Muslim world. The candidates for caliph were two: 1) his cousin Ali, who married Mohammed’s daughter Fatima; and 2) his first convert and father-in-law, Abu Bakr.

This struggle gave rise to the creation of two Muslim sects: 1) the Shi’ites who recognized Ali as Mohammed’s rightful successor ; and 2) the Sunnis, who recognized Abu Bakr as the rightful successor.

Today, the Shi’ites are the minority in the Muslim world, making up 16% of all Muslims. The majority of the Muslims are Sunnis, followers of Abu Bakr and his successor Omar, who founded the first major Islamic dynasty, the Omayyad (sometimes spelled Umayyad).

Caliph Omar recognized that the road to unity was to have a common enemy. He therefore embarked on a series of foreign wars of conquest, in which the Muslims were remarkably successful.

As part of his conquests Caliph Omar invaded Jerusalem in 638, taking it away from the Byzantines.

To see the remains of Byzantine homes from that period, you can visit today the archeological excavations below the southern end of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was this area, in particular, that Omar turned over to 70 Jewish families following his conquest. (Until then the Byzantines had forbidden the Jews from living in Jerusalem at all.)

He found the Temple Mount site in ruins and covered with garbage as the Byzantines had deliberately decreed that garbage should be dumped there to humiliate the Jews. Omar had the site cleared and may have prayed at the southern end (toward Mecca) which could well be the first time that a small mosque was erected there, though historians are not certain.

It must be made clear that up to this time, Jerusalem had no special significance to Muslims. During his lifetime already, Mohammed had changed the direction of prayer to Mecca, and the Koran does not mention Jerusalem even once!

Possibly out of concern that the magnificent Christian holy sites in Jerusalem would attract Moslems to Christianity a connection was later made between Islamic tradition and Jerusalem through the story of Mohammed’s midnight ride—which is recorded in the Koran in Sura 17-al Isra(2)—In that dream, Mohammed rides his flying horse, El Burak—a steed with the body of a woman and the tail of a peacock—to the “farthest place.” The farthest place in Arabic is El Aksa. There he meets Jebril(Gabriel) and goes up to heaven for a forty-day sojourn, meeting all the prophets and talking to Moses and Jesus etc.(3)

The Omayyad leadership decided that the farthest place (El Aksa) had to be the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And that the center of the Temple Mount, where a huge stone protruded, must be the spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven.

In 691, some fifty years after Omar’s conquest, an Omayyad ruler named Abd al Malik built the Dome of the Rock, called Qubbat as Sakrah, there. It still stands today and dominates the Jerusalem skyline.

Note that the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. Rather it is a shrine built around the huge rock, which Jews believe to be the same stone where Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed, where Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven, and where the Holy of Holies once stood. The mosque—El Aksa—is another building altogether, built at the southern end of the Temple Mount by Abd al Malik’s son, El Walid in 701. The Dome of the Rock together with the El Aksa mosque are the first great religious building complex in the Islamic world and pre-date the building of the great Mosque in Mecca.

The Dome of the Rock was not always golden as it is today. It was covered with anodised aluminum in 1956, and more recently, the late King Hussein of Jordan, sold one of his houses in London and gold-plated it with 80 kilos of gold. Today, this site is the third holiest to Suni Muslims and the fourth holiest to Shi’ite Muslims, who list Karabala, after Mecca and Medina.

The Temple Mount is known to Muslims as Haram el Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary.” Jerusalem is known to Muslims call El Quds, “the Holy.”(4) The taking of Jerusalem was a big blow to the Christians, reeling from other Muslim conquests that were sweeping the world. Jews greeted it more favorably, as the Christians had been merciless to the Jews. The Muslims might humiliate them, but they would not slaughter them outright.

Indeed, when Omar defeated the Persians and took over Babylonia, he immediately re-instituted the authority of the Reish Galusa to head the Jewish community. As a matter of fact, Omar was so fond of the Reish Galusa—Bustenai Ben Haninai—that when he himself decided to marry the daughter of the Persian king, he insisted that Bustenai marry her sister. Thus in a bizarre twist of fate, the Reish Galusa became brother-in-law to the caliph.

(After the death of Bustenai, his sons by an earlier wife sought to delegitimatize his sons by the Persian princess, claiming that she never converted to Judaism. However, this was unlikely as the case of a Reish Galusa marrying a non-Jewish woman without conversion would have caused a furor and public condemnation. Indeed the Gaonim of the day ruled that all his children were legitimate Jews.)

THE KARAITES

During the long history of Babylonian Jewry, sometimes the Reish Galusawielded more power, sometimes the Gaonim. Much depended on the political climate and the personalities involved. Generally, however, the position of the Gaon was determined by scholarship, while the position ofReish Galusa was depended on lineage (as the Reish Galusa was traditionally the descendant of King David.)

And it was a dispute over lineage that gave rise to a splinter sect in 8th century Baghdad—a splinter sect that came to be known as the Karaites.

When Shlomo, the Reish Galusa, died childless in 760, two of his nephews Hananiah and Anan vied for the position. Hananiah got the job and Anan went off to start his own religion.

This is another example of a pattern we have seen previously—a split among the Jews due to pride and ego. (We saw it, for example, in Part 20 with Rehoboam and Jeroboam.)

The sect that Anan started in some ways was similar to the Sadducees. Like the Sadducees, the Karaites didn’t recognize the authority of the Oral Torah and hence they read the Written Torah literally. (Their name, Karaites, comes from the Hebrew verb, kara, meaning “read.”)

As we saw earlier, it is impossible to live a Jewish life without the Oral Torah as so much of the Written Torah is not specific enough. Thus, where the Torah commands “and you shall write them [these words] upon the doorposts of your home,” how can anyone know which words of the Torah, or indeed, if the entire Torah is to be written on the doorpost? It is the Oral Torah that explains that this passage refers to the words of theShema prayer, which are to be written on a parchment scroll and then affixed in a specified place and manner on the doorpost. The mezuzah!

As a result of their literal reading of the Torah, the Karaites came to observe Shabbat in total darkness, unable to leave their homes all day except to go to the synagogue. They did away with the observance of Chanukah because it is not mentioned in the Written Torah, as well as with the separation of meat and milk for the same reason. Ironically, because so many statements in the Bible cannot be explained with out the Oral Law, the Karaites had to create their own oral law as a way of translating these statements in the Bible into practical applications.

One might think that this sect would have little appeal but, this was not the case. The Karaites began to attract those Jews who wanted to dismiss the opinions of the rabbis; this turned out to be a huge draw. (5)

That is, until the great sage, the Sa’adiah Gaon entered the picture.

SA’ADIAH GAON

Sa’adiah Gaon is famed for his writings, particularly the Book of Belief and Opinions, and for his critiques of the Karaites which made mincemeat of their beliefs. In addition to being the Rosh Yeshiva (The Dean) of the great Yeshiva of Sura, he was one of the greatest Jewish legal and philosophical minds of the period.

His arguments stopped the spread of Karaitism which could have overwhelmed the entire Jewish world. It was so popular at one point that in the 10th century the majority of Jews in the Land of Israel may well have been Karaites.

However, the Karaites never recovered from the assault of Sa’adiah Gaon on the logic of their beliefs. Their numbers shrunk with time, though unlike the Sadducees, they never completely disappeared.

(During the 19th century, in the Russian Empire, the status of the Karites change until eventually they were legally considered to be a religion totally separate from Judaism. During World War II, the large Karaite community in the Crime was spared by the Nazis who also did not consider them to be Jewish.)

Today, there is a small number of Karaites left, living chiefly in Israel, though no one is sure how many as the Karaites forbid census-taking. Their population has been variously estimated at 7,000 all the way up to 40,000. Until recently the Karaites were reputed to be very religious people, and from the outside appear indistinguishable from Orthodox Jews, though they are forbidden to marry other Jews and marry only each other.

When the Sa’adiah Gaon died in 942, the period of the Gaonim of Babylon was almost over. It would officially end in 1038 with the death of Chai Gaon. By then, a great many Jews had left Babylon, following the opportunities that were opening up for them in other parts of the world conquered by Muslims, especially in Spain.

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1) There was a brief, transitional period (475 C.E.-590 C.E.) between the Tannaim and the Amoraim alled the Savoraim. The Savoraim put the “finishing touches” on the Babylonian Talmud by completing the final editing of the text. 2) Sura 17:1-3 reads: “Glory be to Him (Allah) who carried his servant ( Mohammed) by night from the sacred place (masjid-mosque) of Mecca to the sacred place (masjid-mosque) that is more remote (el Aksa ) whose precinct we have blessed…” 3) For an excellent short explanation of the early Islamic connection to Jerusalem see: Bernard Lewis, The Middle east-A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.New York: Touchstone Books, 1995. pp. 68-71. Lewis points out that one of the earliest Islamic names for Jerusalem was Bayt al-Maqdis, clearly derived from the Hebrew phrase for the Jewish Temple, Bayt ha-Miqdash. He also mentions that an equally early Islamic tradition mentions that el Aksa means “heaven” and the claim that it meant Jerusalem was a Jewish plot to Judaize Islam.
4) It is interesting to contrast the Christian and Muslim treatment of the Temple Mount. Part of the early Christian world view was that God had destroyed the Temple and exiled the Jews because the Jews had rejected Jesus. Leaving the Temple Mount in ruins and filled with garbage was the “Christian way” of proving this theological point. The Byzantines then built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (the traditional site of crucifixion and burial of Jesus) to the west of Temple Mount and above the remaining Temple Mount platform. This served as a physical demonstration of the victory of Christianity over the Judaism.
The Muslims, on the other hand, chose to clean off the Temple Mount and build their structure (The Dome of the Rock) over the site where the Jewish Temple stood. Building over Judaism’s holiest site was their way of “proving” that Islam had supplanted Judaism. In addition, the dome of the Dome of the Rock is slightly larger than the dome of the Holy Sepulcher and Arabic inscription on the inside of the Dome of the Rock is taken from Sura 112 of the Koran which reads: “Say: He is God alone: God the eternal! He has no children, and He was not born…” an obvious attack against the Christian concept of Jesus as the son of God. (Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet and that the notion that God has children is a pagan idea. On this Judaism would also agree.) The Dome of the Rock is therefore an architectural demonstration of Islamic theology: Islam is the one true faith. Judaism and Christianity are false.
5) Karaism reached the peak of it’s popularity in Israel the 10th and 11th centuries. After the Crusader conquest of the land in 1099 C.E. the center of the movement shifted to Constantinople and later the Crimea and Lithuania.

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#43 of 70 in the Aish.com Jewish History Series
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