In 1885, the British diplomat and adventurer Richard Francis Burton published his translation of One Thousand and One Nights, the famed collection of Arabic tales. Benjamin Ivry examines Burton’s attitude toward Jews:
Historians have suggested that Burton, an explorer and ethnologist, resented the Jews for thwarting his diplomatic career when he was stationed in Syria in the aftermath of the Damascus blood libel [of 1840, where local Jews were falsely accused of murdering a Capuchin monk]. Yet Burton’s attitude to Jews was complex and sometimes contradictory. When he died in 1890, the [London] Jewish Chronicle termed his references to Jews “usually, if not invariably, marked by the tolerance and respect of a scholar.” In an 1869 account of his work as a consul in Brazil, Burton wrote, “Had I a choice of race, there is none to which I would belong more willingly than the Jewish.”
But he also authored The Jew, the Gypsy, and El Islam, a book never published in full during his lifetime. Much of it consisted of a translation of an anti-Semitic French account of the Damascus blood libel. Although [this book] lauds Jews for their intelligence and the longevity [of their religion], it also observes that “their immorality is proverbial,” they are prone to “lying and cowardice,” and the Talmud is “vindictive.”
But then there are the Jews, and Jewish connections, found in One Thousand and One Nights itself:
Orientalists have suggested that the storytelling framework of Scheherazade itself was inspired by the biblical book of Esther. According to Persian tradition, Scheherazade was the mother-in-law of King Ahasuerus, Esther’s husband, who also enjoyed having stories told to him at night. The researcher Victor Bochman asserts that Jews contributed stories to The Arabian Nights, resulting in many Jewish characters in the narratives, and some of the most devoted readers of the book have been Jews as well. Among the former are accounts of pious Jews, appearing to echo talmudic and midrashic legends.
Read more on Forward: https://forward.com/culture/467089/just-how-jewish-were-the-arabian-nights-sindbad-ali-baba-scheherazade/