9. Pomegranates

Stroumsa cites Goitein's description of the "symbiosis" characterizing the relationship the Jewish community had with its ruling Muslim culture (Stroumsa p. 5). However, symbiosis seems to be a misnomer when that relationship leads to the decline of one of the two parties. Goitein borrowed the biological meaning of the word symbiosis; biologically, the Oxford English Dictionary defines symbiosis as the "association of two different organisms (usually two plants, or an animal and a plant) which live attached to each other, or one as a tenant of the other, and contribute to each other's support." However, the OED also notes that the term has come to pertain to any intimate relationship, regardless of the beneficial or otherwise effects. If we accept a definition that ignores the quality of the relationship and merely acknowledges its existence, then the term is no longer useful. The Jewish community lived, worked, breathed with the Muslim community; this is a fact and is not arguable or interesting in and of itself. However, if we accept a definition of symbiosis as containing a value judgment, that is, that a symbiotic relationship is beneficial to both parties, then the claim becomes arguable.

Stroumsa extrapolates the decline of Arabophone Jewish culture from a letter Maimonides writes to a man desiring an Arabic translation of his Hebrew-language Mishneh Torah. Maimonides declines this man's request, Stroumsa believes, because the linguistic landscape of the Jewish community had shifted; Hebrew became privileged as the common Jewish language (p. 21). And, indeed, a further letter confirms the shift in the larger culture of the Arabophone Jewish world: Maimonides writes to a Jewish community in Southern France that "Most large communities are dead, the rest are moribund, and the remaining three or four places are ailing. ... You, brother, are our only [hope] for help" (Stroumsa p. 21-22). A symbiotic relationship would not result in one of the communities admitting large scale desolation. Clearly, the relationship overall was not beneficial for the minority community.

However, that is not to say that the relationship was awful, either. Maimonides clearly interacted with and participated in discussions of Islamic theology, as did other leading Jews in Muslim lands (Stroumsa p. 17). With regard to Christians, Griffith notes that "there was no general persecution of Christians as such in the Islamic world" (p. 148). Like Jews, it seems, "the history of Christians under Muslim rule is a history of continuous, if gradual, diminishment" (Griffith p. 14). Griffith explains that the political stance towards Peoples of the Book (he uses the term 'dhimmitude') is one wherein they experienced "legal disabilities that governed their lives [which] required subservience" (p. 16).

On the whole, though, I wonder if it is at all productive to discuss the relationship of minority religious groups within "Muslim culture and/or rule." As Stroumsa describes, Maimonides lived under four different types of Muslim rulership, and each of these had its own relationship to the dhimmi communities. The Muslim world and its leadership was not monolithic, and neither were its legal ideas of community relationships.