#Jerusalem as the 'legitimate' center of Jewish life in Antiquity and how Egyptian Jews kept throwing a wrench in that by establishing

[bijoumikhawal]

I was reading your tags on that reblogging and good lord the complex discussion of Dhimmi (or related statuses) in the Islamic world gets so simplified on this site for god knows what reason—in that post I was writing about the Jews of Ibb I was going to mention how it was common place particularly in North Yemen for specific tribes to adopt pacts with the local Jews as “neighbors” and hence intimate members of the community who were protected by the local tribal law and consequently why Jews and Muslims had virtually the same dialects of Arabic in any given area; but that’s a complex matter I don’t think people would readily engage with because most of what’s said about Jews in Yemen is particular to urban Jewish communities who were directly in contact with as you mentioned, the ebb and flow of both anti-Semitic and pluralistic leaders at any given time. Like in specific the Zaydi Imamate always went back and forth on the matter within Sa‘dah, despite their control of neighboring tribal areas being hardly tangible at best and those local tribes (such as in Razih for instance) being rather tolerant of the local Jewish communities prior to the introduction of Saudi Wahhabism in the late 20th century.

It’s such a complex topic, and it’s so necessary to engage with. I just wanted to thank you for mentioning that really.

!! Yeah, there's a tendency to flatten it into one extreme or the other (and to act like the experiences of one group given Dhimmi status are the same as another group). Like, dhimmitude itself is a complex political concept because it's protected status, but it's nature as (to an extent, which at times was greater or lesser as you point out) a segregated status can lead into very harmful policies, which gets into Copts and cultural genocide (dhimmitude on its own, from my understanding, didn't have that impact, but when combined with other laws and cultural/religious/political forces, it can be very hard to read about policies that fell under Dhimmi related laws and not think about the broader impact had on our language and culture, and how conversion is used as a weapon against Coptic women in particular even today).

But situations were it doesn't, in fact, separate the community, tend to be ignored if not outright considered false. In some rural communities in Egypt there would be a very limited distinction between Copts and Muslims- in part, often because everyone there knew for a fact that the Muslim fellahin had been Coptic fellahin until a few generations back (a situation that gets generalized to all of Egypt and used as a rhetorical cudgel in really stupid ways against Copts on the assumption that genetics is the main or only factor in who is or is not Indigenous). This is also true in Judaism, for its own different can of worms about the way (in my experience) a certain type of white Jewish man will have anxiety regarding race mixing and project it onto the past and in situations where that makes no sense, and for political reasons to cast the diaspora as a unique site of misery.