Jews in post-medieval Islam

With brief exceptions during periods of foreign rule, Islamic countries remain under legal systems that do not recognize the equal rights of non-Muslims and so have not yet become emancipated. Any Jews still living in these countries (like Christians and other non-Muslims) remain Dhimmi, second-class citizens, with rights limited by religious law as defined in versions of the Pact of Umar. For Jews in north Africa, then, apart from the years of French or Italian rule, civic emancipation was achieved only by emigration, and so the linguistic situation was unchanged until then. In the Near East, too, except under British or French rule, the same situation applied (see Map 11). As these countries became independent, they restored restrictions on Jewish residents and expelled most of them in the middle of the twentieth century.

In the Far East, in contrast, Jews came as traders, occasionally converting their servants but not establishing major communities. In this chapter, we will see the strengthening of Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian, and the addition of some European and Asian languages to the sociolinguistic repertoire of the Jews.