According to journalist Adi Schwartz from Haaretz, the fact that she is not an academic and has never taught at any university, but has worked as an independent researcher, has, along with her opinions, made her a controversial figure. He quotes professor Robert Wistrich, head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, who notes that "p until the 1980s, she was not accepted at all. In academic circles they scorned her publications. Only when Bernard Lewis published the book 'Jews of Islam' with quotations from Bat Ye'or did they begin to pay any attention to her. A real change toward her emerged in the 1990s, and especially in recent years."^[38]

Craig R. Smith in a New York Times article referred to her as one of the "most extreme voices on the new Jewish right."^[39]

Johann Hari, a British journalist, argues that "There are intellectuals on the British right who are propagating a conspiracy theory about Muslims that teeters very close to being a 21st century Protocols of the Elders of Mecca" and that Bat Ye'or is a "scholar" who argues that Europe is on the brink of being transformed into a conquered continent called "Eurabia".^[40]

Israeli peace activist Adam Keller—a founder of Gush Shalom— in a letter of protest sent on June 2, 2008 to the Israeli publisher of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, wrote:

In 1886 the French antisemite Edouard Drumont published 'La France Juive' (Jewish France), creating the false nightmarish image of a France dominated by Jews, and sowing the poisonous seeds which came to fruit when Vichy French officials collaborated in the mass murder of French Jewry. [...] 'Bat Ye'or' follows in notorious footsteps indeed by creating the false nightmarish image of a Europe dominated by Arabs and Muslims.^[41]

According to David Aaronovitch:

[Eurabia] is a concept created by a writer called Bat Ye’or who, according to the publicity for her most recent book, "chronicles Arab determination to subdue Europe as a cultural appendage to the Muslim world — and Europe's willingness to be so subjugated". This, as students of conspiracy theories will recognise, is the addition of the Sad Dupes thesis to the Enemy Within idea.^[42]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Ye'or

 

 

As for the term Dhimmi , Dhimmi means “protected person” and in no way, shape, or form means “guilty.”here’s what Lisan al-Arab (considered the most reliable Arabic dictionary in the classical age of Islam) says:

ورجل ذِمِّيٌّ: معناه رجل له عهد

(Dhimmi: A person with whom there exists a treaty)

والذِّمَّةُ العهد

(And ‘dhimmah’ means treaty)

قال الجوهري: الذِّمَّةُ أَهل العقد.

(Al-Jawhari says: Dhimmah refers to the people with whom there is a treaty)

وقال أَبو عبيدة الذِّمّةُ الأَمان

(Abu Ubaydah says: Dhimmah means protection/security)

وقوم ذِمَّةٌ: مُعاهدون أَي ذوو ذِمَّةٍ

(A Nation of Dhimmah: The people who sign a treaty, i.e. the people of ‘responsibility’)

 

Try giving Nissim Rejwan's - Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective a read for a balanced perspective.... Nissim Rejwan is a Research Fellow at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His book won the 1998 National Jewish Book Award for Israel Studies...

Here's what he writes about Jews in Muslim lands...

Under Ottoman Islam, which by the beginning of the sixteenth century dominated Syria [including Palestine] and Eygpt, the conditions under which the Jews were permitted to live contrasted so strikingly with those imposed on their coreligionists in various parts of Christendom that the fifteenth century witnessed a large influx of European Jews into the [Ottoman] Sultan’s dominions. During the first half of that century, persecutions had occurred in Bohemia, Austria, and Poland, and, at about this time, two German rabbis who sought and secured refuge in the Ottoman Empire wrote a letter to their community extolling the beauties and advantages of their new home.

But it was the measures taken against the Jews in Spain, culminating in their expulsion in 1492, that gave the greatest momentum to this migration. The Jews who chose to settle in various parts of the [Ottoman] empire found their surroundings rather congenial, and they, in turn contributed greatly to the flowering of Ottoman civilization…Marranos, who in Christian Spain had embraced Christianity to escape persecution and death, abandoned their disguise and returned to Judaism. Istanbul soon came to harbor the largest Jewish community in the whole of Europe, while Salonika became a predominantly Jewish city. The degree of the Jews’ integration into the life of Ottoman Islam was such, indeed, that two notable non-Jewish students of modern Islam found that there has been, in their words, “something sympathetic to the Jewish nature in the culture of Islam,” since “from the rise of the Caliphate till the abolition of the ghettos in Europe the most flourishing centers of Jewish life were to be found in Muslim countries: in Iraq during the Abbassid period, in Spain throughout the period of Moorish domination, and thereafter in the Ottoman Empire.”

…At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Jewish community in Jerusalem experienced a growth in numbers at an inordinate rate…According to a recent study by Tudor Parfitt, however, the startling increase in Jewish immigration to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century took place “not because the attraction of Jerusalem as the holy city grew, but because political and other factors made such immigration increasingly possible.”

…In nineteenth-century Palestine, he adds, such tolerance was “a consistent part of the relationship between the Ottoman authorities and the Jews.” He quotes European travelers as remarking on “the perfect religious freedom” that prevailed…One of these travelers, J. Wilson, is quoted as saying that “entire freedom of worship…is now accorded to [the Jews] and they are left to manage their own internal affairs without interference from any other quarter.” …

By way of conclusion, a word of caution is in order…It must be pointed out that the picture has not been uniformly so rosy and that instances of religious intolerance toward and discriminatory treatment of Jews under Islam are by no means difficult to find. This point is of special relevance at a time in which, following a reawakening of interest in the history of Arab-Jewish relations among Jewish writers and intellectuals, certain interested circles have been trying to…[question the] Judeo-Arabic tradition or symbiosis by digging up scattered pieces of evidence to show that Islam is essentially intolerant…and that Muslims’ contempt for Jews was even greater and more deep-seated than that manifested by Christians…

Such caricatures of the history of Jews under Islam continue to be disseminated by scholars as well as by interested publicists and ideologues. Indeed, all discussion of relations between Jews and Muslims…is beset by the most burning emotions and by highly charged sensitivities. In their eagerness to repudiate the generally accepted version of these relations (a version which, it is worthwhile pointing out, originates not in Muslim books of history but with Jewish historians and Orientalists in nineteenth-century Europe), certain partisan students of the Middle East conflict today seem to go out of their way to show that, far from being the record of harmonious coexistence it is often claimed to be, the story of Jewish-Muslim relations since the time of Muhammad was “a sorry array of conquest, massacre, subjection, spoilation in goods and women and children, contempt, expulsion–[and] even the yellow badge…”

Informed by a fervor seldom encountered in scholarly discourse, some of these latter-day historians have gone so far as to question even the motives of those European-Jewish scholars of the past century who virtually founded modern Oriental and Arabic studies and managed to unearth the impressive legacy of Judeo-Arabic culture, a culture that was undeniably an outcome of a long and symbiotic encounter between Muslims and Jews.

…[But] by the standards then prevailing–and they are plainly the only ones by which a historian is entitled to pass judgment–Spanish Islamic tolerance was no myth but a reality of which present-day Muslim Arabs are fully justified in reminding their contemporaries…Tolerance, then, is a highly relative concept, and the only sensible way of gauging the extent of tolerance in a given society or culture in a given age is to compare it with that prevailing in other societies and cultures in the same period…

Or you can read Prof.Mark R Cohen's Book -Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages to get an unbiased understanding if it interests you

God bless And Peace

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The claim to tolerance, now much heard from Muslim apologists and more especially from apologists for Islam, is also new and of alien origin. It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam have begun to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.^[2]

[edit] End of the Golden Age

With the death of Al-Hakam II Ibn Abd-ar-Rahman in 976, the Caliphate began to dissolve, and the position of the Jews became more precarious under the various smaller Kingdoms. The first major persecution was the 1066 Granada massacre, which occurred on December 30, when a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, crucified Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred most of the Jewish population of the city. "More than 1,500 Jewish families, numbering 4,000 persons, fell in one day."^[12] This was the first persecution of Jews on the Peninsula under Islamic rule.

 

 

Manuscript page by Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of Al Andalus, born in Córdoba. Arabic language in Hebrew letters

Beginning in 1090 the situation deteriorated further with the invasion of the Almoravids, a puritan Muslim sect from Morocco. Even under the Almoravids, some Jews prospered (although far more so under Ali III, than under his father Yusuf ibn Tashfin). Among those who held the title of "vizier" or "nasi" in Almoravid times were the poet and physician Abu Ayyub Solomon ibn al-Mu'allam, Abraham ibn Meïr ibn Kamnial, Abu Isaac ibn Muhajar, and Solomon ibn Farusal (although Solomon was murdered May 2, 1108). The Almoravids, were ousted from the peninsula in 1148; however, the peninsula was again invaded, by the even more puritanical Almohades. Under the reign of the Almohades, many Jews were forced to accept the Islamic faith; the conquerors confiscated their property and took their wives and children, many of whom were sold as slaves. The most famous Jewish educational institutions were closed, and synagogues everywhere destroyed.

During the reign of these Berber dynasties, many Jewish and even Muslim scholars left the Muslim-controlled portion of Iberia for the city of Toledo, which had been reconquered in 1085 by Christian forces.

Several Jewish scholars were involved in what became known as the School of Toledo, which produced some of the first translations into Latin of works from the Arab world, notably the works of Averroes and of the Jewish poet and philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol, known in Iberia as Avicebrón. Jews joined the armies of Alfonso VI of Castile and as many as 40,000 joined in the fight against the Almoravids, who also had large numbers of Jewish troops in their armies.

Even after Muslim rule had ended, the Iberian Jewish community remained the most important in the world (especially with the decline of the Academies of Babylonia). Scholars such as Maimonides, born in 1135, were major figures in Judaism, although Maimonides himself complained about the treatment of the Jews under Muslim rule. The major Jewish presence in Iberia continued until the Jews were forcibly expelled en masse pursuant to the edict of expulsion by Christian Spain in 1492 and a similar decree by Christian Portugal in 1497.