Graetz credited Islam with shaping Judaism while blaming Christianity for persecution

Evidence

As a consequence of their shared “Semitic descent,” high rate of intermarriage, similar temperament, and shared love of poetry and language, Graetz saw Jews and Arabs as akin and extols the truly symbiotic relationship of the two peoples (5:76–82). In fact, he declared in a positive and extremely generous vein that Islam “has exercised an immense influence on the course of Jewish history and on the evolution of Judaism” (5:100). By contrast, Graetz barely conceals his rage when he writes, “The first utterance of Christianity on the very day of its victory [at the Council of Nicaea in 325] betrayed its hostile attitude toward the Jews, and gave rise to those malignant decrees of Constantine and his successors, which laid the foundation of the bloody persecutions of subsequent centuries” (5:100). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 392

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to modern scholarship on Jewish-Arab symbiosis and the myth of Islamic tolerance, e.g., Mark Cohen’s ‘Under Crescent and Cross.’