In his long and prolific career, the great scholar of the Islamic world Bernard Lewis wrote two books on Jewish subjects: The Jews of Islam, on the history of Jews in Muslim lands, and Semites and Anti-Semites, on Arab anti-Semitism. Martin Kramer identifies Lewis’s own encounters with Arab anti-Semitism as the inspiration for both. To Lewis, Muslims for most of their history generally found Jews “contemptible,” but no worse than that, while their Christian contemporaries ascribed to Jews the “quality of cosmic evil.” All that changed with the rise of Zionism, when Arabs found Jews not to be the cowardly creatures of stereotype but brave and formidable. (Video, 40 minutes.)
Read more on Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8PnDUbyPw