What can I say, the man is simply brilliant, on top of what he writes about, and pulls no punches. What more can one ask from an academic?Antisemitism in the Hadith and Early Muslim Biographies of Muhammad: Motifs and Manifestations.
Spencer has kindly posted the second installment based upon materials from my (imminently!) forthcoming book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, this time describing the Antisemitic contents of the hadith and sira (earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad.
Underneath the picture (just below) of Georges Vajda (d. 1981)—the greatest scholar of the Antisemitic motifs in the hadith—I have posted the Abstract and Introduction to this essay. The full contents can be read at Dhimmi Watch.
(Edit: here’s a teaser:)
The contemporary pronouncements of the Islamic Center of Cleveland’s clerical “Imamate”—Fawaz Damra and his erstwhile replacement Ahmed Alzaree—illustrate an ancient, but continuous tradition of anti-Jewish incitement by Islam’s “popular preachers,” very much alive today. And the historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies—chronic oppression, punctuated by outbursts of mass anti-Jewish violence, forced conversion to Islam, or expulsion—has been consistent with such sacralized religious bigotry. Promoters of modern jihad genocide from the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, to contemporary Hamas clerics, have repeatedly invoked Islam’s Jew-exterminating eschatology.
George Vajda’s 1937 essay “Juifs et Musulmans Selon Le Hadit” (“Jews and Muslims According to the Hadith”)—a magisterial 70-page treatise discussed at some length herein—remains the definitive study of Jews and their relations with Muhammad and Muslims, as depicted in the hadith. Vajda’s research demonstrates how Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—and as per another tradition, the Dajjâl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan, or Jerusalem.
When the Dajjâl is defeated, he and his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to a canonical hadith—incorporated into the 1988 Hamas Charter (article 7)—if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”
More here. *L* KGS
