The Muslim conquest and the status of the dhimmi

In 638 the caliph Umar accepted the surrender of Jerusalem. The ban of Heraclius fell, and Jewish sources preserve the tally: the caliph allowed seventy families from Tiberias to settle in the city. For the first time in five hundred years Jews lived in Jerusalem again and prayed by the walls of the Temple Mount, which the Byzantines had kept as a rubbish tip.

The status they were given was dhimma, protection. The People of the Book kept their faith, their courts, their property and their lives; for this they paid the poll tax jizya and the land tax kharaj, and lived under conditions later gathered into the so-called Pact of Umar: to build no new houses of prayer and repair no old one higher than before, to bear no arms, not to ride in a saddle, to give way in the street, not to pray aloud.

The comparison to be made is not with equality, which existed nowhere, but with Visigothic Spain and Byzantium. There Judaism was outlawed; here it was a contract with a price. There children were taken; here the community kept its own courts. That is why Jewry moved: by about 940 nine Jews in ten lived under Muslim rule, and the whole age of the Geonim, the Spanish flowering and Maimonides himself come from there.

The conditions were kept unevenly, caliph by caliph: under al-Hakim in Egypt synagogues were pulled down, while under the Fatimids and in Córdoba Jews held the highest offices.