The Jews of Medina are an important topic because they’re one of the footballs that get kicked around in the current ideological wars. Since anti-Semitism is a problem in many modern Muslim countries, we wonder if it has always been so. The Quran presents a very mixed picture of how to view Jews, coming out of the mixed experiences the Muslims had. The events in Medina were a large part of this.
The town of Medina, perhaps like all towns of its time in Arabia, was not organized like a European town, with a city hall and a main street. Each family group lived in a village clustered around a fortress-house where the tribal chief lived. When trouble came, they could all pull inside the fortress, which was impregnable to typical means and methods of the time. The Yathrib oasis was eight miles wide, with various farms and villages spread out through it. There were three main Jewish extended-family tribes, and their fortress-village were near Medina, enough to be part of the city life, but also separated a bit.
These Jews were very Arabicized, that is, very assimilated to the place where they had lived for a few hundred years. They practiced Judaism, but they spoke Arabic and lived by the same cultural rules as their neighbors. Somewhere I picked up the idea that they were probably Jews who had left Babylon after the Captivity. They may have still made use of a trade network extending back into Persia. The picture we get in the Muslim stories is that some of them were most active as date farmers, some as craftsmen, some as merchants. There was also an even larger Jewish settlement to the north, which they probably passed through on trips to Persia.
When the Arab tribes of Aws and Khazraj invited Muhammad to come be their judge and stop the endless feuding, the Jewish tribes had to work out their place in the new system. Each of the Jewish tribes had pre-existing alliances to one of those Arab tribes, as well as to other outside tribes. They had been caught up in the endless feud, too, through their allies. Muhammad asked them to sign a treaty that stipulated Judaism and Islam would be considered essentially the same (no need to convert) and they would leave each other alone, cooperatively, with Muhammad as chief arbiter of disputes. The treaty also stated that they were bound to mutual defense, and to boycotting the Quraysh of Mecca.
I wonder if the Jews knew how significant defense was going to be. “How often is Medina attacked?” they had to be thinking. They may not have realized to what extent the Muslims would actively go to war against Mecca, when they signed the treaty during the first six months.
The first tribe to have a treaty-breaking issue was the Bani Qaynuqa. They lived in two fortresses near the marketplace; they did not farm, but were craftsmen and goldsmiths. They kept close ties with the Quraysh, in spite of the treaty. They did not help in the Battle of Badr. They made it clear in various ways that they preferred the old order.
In the weeks after Badr, a Muslim woman went into a Jewish goldsmith’s shop, and they got into an argument. The Muslim woman’s legs were exposed in the scuffle, and a passing Muslim man killed the Jew; some Jewish men killed a Muslim. This budding feud (typical for life in this oasis) should have been arbitrated by Muhammad, but the Jewish tribe decided to go back to the old customs. They called for their allies and retreated into their fortress, and Muhammad sent Ali to lead a siege. The problem here is not that they were Jews, but that they refused to use the arbitration process, and small infractions and refusals were taken very seriously in a place with governments that were only as stable as they could enforce that they were. The Bani Qaynuqa fortress held out for two weeks, with as many as 700 fighting men inside, so most of the Muslims must have been involved in the siege. Their allies did not come to help, probably unwilling to break their own agreements with the Prophet and return to old feuding ways.
When the Bani Qaynuqa surrendered, the chief of the Arab Khazraj tribe, which had converted to Islam, pleaded for mercy for them. This Arab chief, known as Ibn Ubayy, was going to cause many worries for Muhammad. He had almost become the king of Medina, and he resented the Muslims but he also converted as a matter of form. (It was Ibn Ubayy who would soon take his 300 men home from the Battle of Uhud.) He negotiated with Muhammad for the tribe to be treated less harshly than full enemies would be. The outcome was an agreement for expulsion: the tribe left with what they could carry, leaving behind their weapons and tools. Along with their houses, these riches were distributed as spoils of war. The Bani Qaynuqa moved north, joining other Jewish communities in Syria.
The next problem came with the Bani Nadir, when Muhammad paid them a formal call to ask them to contribute to pay the blood-wite of a quarrel against their Arab allies. Everyone was on edge, but it should have been a simple matter, since the Jews agreed to help pay it. What happened next surely sounds different, depending on whose side you take.
Muhammad, Abu Bakr, Umar, and other Companions were in the Bani Nadir fortress to discuss the matter, and the chiefs asked them to stay for a meal. While the meal was being cooked, Muhammad received a direct revelation from Gabriel/Jibril that warned him the Jews were about to assassinate him. He got up and left quietly, and he walked out of their fortress and back to his home. It’s not clear that there was any evidence of a plot apart from the angelic message, but Muslim historical sources don’t ask for more evidence. It would be interesting to know how this story was told among the Jews, but we don’t know that. Did they admit to a plot, or did they feel wrongly accused?
The Prophet sent a message telling the Bani Nadir that they had ten days to leave. When the Jews protested to the Arab messenger that this message ran against all of their past history together, he said simply, “Hearts have changed.” I wonder if he told them that they were suspected of a plot, but that’s all we have. Now what? The Jews debated what to do, and here Ibn Ubayy got involved as well. He urged them to make a defiant stand. If all of their past allies came to their aid, both Arab tribes and the other Jews of the oasis, they could win. So when they delivered a message of defiance to Muhammad, he declared war on them.
Their fortress was in a date grove south of the main city. As the Jews withdrew and set archers on the walls, Muhammad walked an ad-hoc Muslim force to the settlement and began a low-level attack. Ali was in command of a force that camped outside the Bani Nadir for ten days, while the Jews learned, slowly, that none of their allies would come. Iby Ubayy had interfered and over-promised, but even his people were not coming. The other Jews of Medina didn’t want to touch it, and other Bedouin allies stayed home. Finally, the Jews in the fortress surrendered when Muhammad told some of his men to start cutting down date palms. If their agriculture was all ruined, what good would it be to try to stay?
The Bani Nadir were given just a few days to leave with whatever their camels could carry, except for armor and weapons. They took the order seriously. Some even removed pieces of their houses, like doors, as long as the camels could carry it all. When they walked out through the town, the Arabs were astonished to see how just much wealth was being carried out.
The Bani Nadir families went north to where many of them already owned land in the other Arabian Jewish settlement, Khaybar; it was stronger than Medina. The Muslims in Medina distributed the Bani Nadir land, houses, and arms, but they knew that a lot of portable property had just left the community. Many wondered if the terms had been too generous. Remaining in the community, there were still some small Jewish tribes, plus one more large one: the Bani Qurayzah. The Bani Qurayzah also had shaky allegiance to Muhammad, maintaining ties with his enemies. For now, they were stable in Medina’s economy, but the next big battle would spell their end.
These bad experiences with the Jews of Medina changed Muhammad’s view of Jews. He had hoped that they would all become Muslims, or that they’d at least assimilate enough that it wouldn’t matter. When he came to Medina, the Muslims had been facing Jerusalem to pray, to emphasize their Abrahamic origin. But after the Bani Qaynuqa siege, there was a revelation that now they should face Mecca, which Abraham had also established. That became the qibla, the prayer direction, from them on. Muhammad hadn’t declared all Jews to be evil, far from it. But he had realized that they did not view his new faith as either the same as theirs or better. They began to stand out among his enemies as the ones that would never give in, and they could work to undermine him. He began to see the Jews as a fifth column, an enemy in their midst.