After the anti-Jewish riots in Germany, there is often talk of imported anti-Semitism. With good reason, as I know as a Muslim socialised in Algeria.
Anyone who remembers something by writing or telling a story wants their memories to be shared and recorded. At this point I would like to write about my own history with anti-Semitism. I want to put my experience in writing because I don’t want it to be forgotten.
I came to Germany in 1992 as an indoctrinated anti-Semite at the age of twenty-three. Today I can imagine that many Muslims living in Western countries were brought up no differently than I was. Our socialisation in our countries of origin wanted to put us in a state of undying hatred against the Jews. I hated Jews and the state of Israel, and I vehemently rejected everything that had to do with them.
Only one principle applied to me: the Jews are the perpetrators and the Muslims are the victims. The Jews, I thought, were to blame for the plight of Muslims all over the world. And thus the Jews become the epitome of the Other, the eternal enemy who threatens the Muslims. The Jews as perpetrators and we Muslims as victims: today, more than ever, this duality determines the thinking and actions of many Muslims, both in Muslim countries and in the West.
As early as 2003, political scientist Bassam Tibi drew attention to the “imported hatred” of Muslims living in Europe in an article in the newspaper “Die Zeit”. But such analyses, which are more topical today than ever, were often not taken seriously. Education in mosques, schools and universities is still geared towards raising children, or rather all people, to hate Jews and Israel.
This upbringing leaves no room to think differently. I myself was mentally paralysed. There was no possibility for criticism of such beliefs, because anyone who tried to do so would be condemned as an enemy of Islam and Muslims. For fear of sanctions, no one did so in public. Without question, I believed that the Jews bore full responsibility for the suffering of Muslim women and Muslims throughout the world. How exactly did this happen?
When I was four or five years old, I heard the word “Jew” (in Algerian: “yhudi”) for the first time in the Koranic school. My Koran teacher at the time told a boy: “You Jew, behave yourself” (“Ya l-yhudi traba”). I didn’t even know what the word meant. But for me it was important to behave well so I wouldn’t be called “Jew”. Also during my primary school years, I kept hearing during lessons that teachers made use of the word “Jew” to insult students.
As children, we played wildly in front of our houses. I remember to this day how my friend’s father caught us. He said to his son, “Didn’t I tell you not to play with the Jew’s son?” In the sixth grade, the religion teacher said to one of my classmates, “Are you Jewish or Muslim? Why won’t you give peace?”
When insulting or being insulted, the word “Jew” was part of everyday life. In quarrels between children, parents used to refer to them as Jewish “vindictive”. They also said, “You are like the Jews. You’re just looking for trouble.” If you behaved differently from the norms or thought differently, you got to hear the sentence: “Barka min tayhudiyat”, which means: “You behave like a Jew – stop it!”
The word “Jew” is still considered a swear word among Muslims today. Everything that is evil is associated with Jews. Already during my youth I internalised the equation of money-grubbing people with “the Jews”. The insult “money-grubbing Jews” is also familiar. When I was seventeen, our high school history teacher told us that the Jews ruled and controlled the world through their wealth.
In the Arab-Islamic world, if you want to insult someone as an egoist, you say, “He’s a Jew because he only thinks of his interests.” Every Friday, our Imam, who is my maternal uncle, would end his sermon in the pulpit of the mosque with the supplication, “May Allah destroy the infidel enemies of Islam and Muslims all together. May Allah humiliate and destroy the accursed Jews! May Allah support the Muslims in their fight against the Jews.”
To this day, this supplication is repeated on Fridays or during sermons during religious holidays in the mosques of Algeria and other Arab countries. The pulpit is thus misused to preach a culture of hatred. To this day, a deep aversion to the Jews dominates Muslims. Anti-Semitic stereotypes are virulent in Algerian society; they are to a large extent an integrative part of people’s cultural socialisation.
In December 2019, my brother and his family visited me. They live in Algeria. One evening we went for a walk in the Wiehre district of Freiburg. I explained to his children what the Stolpersteine on the German streets mean. His fourteen-year-old son suddenly told me: “When I was in the third grade in primary school, our French teacher told us: ‘I hate the Jews and bow down to Hitler because he executed the Jews.'” Such sentences leave their mark on Muslim children, and they are not easily forgotten.
In the first half of 1990, the Islamist party Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) paralysed several Algerian cities by calling for protests to disobey the state of the time. Their slogans at the demonstrations included the phrase: “Khaibar, Khaibar, oh you Jews! Mohammed’s army will soon return!” The slogan is an allusion to the subjugation campaign of Muhammad’s army in the spring of 628 against the oasis of Khaibar, then populated by Jews and located about 150 kilometres north of Medina in present-day Saudi Arabia.
This anti-Semitic phrase is repeatedly chanted by many Muslims at anti-Semitically charged protests against the state of Israel, most recently at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany. To this day, the Algerian media never speak of the state of Israel, but only of the “Zionist entity” or the “Zionist occupation”. The ostracism of the Jews serves as a projection screen for people’s problems and fears, so that their attention is diverted from real political-economic problems.
I am in Algeria once a year and I would not dare to say in public that I am a friend of Israel or the Jews. It took me years to learn that Jews are not the enemies of Muslims and that they are no different from other people. This did not take place in Algeria or any other Muslim country, but only in Germany.
Today it seems to me that Islamic culture cannot survive without enemy images. They must be preserved and maintained to prevent it from having to deal with its own home-made problems. Its crisis of meaning, which has been going on for centuries, with its political-economic dimensions, needs Israel, the Jews and the West as enemies. For only in this way can the eternal victim role of the Muslims be cultivated, and only in this way do they believe they can guarantee internal peace in the Muslim countries and the Muslim communities in the West.
The alleged guilt of the Jews and the West overrides their own acceptance of responsibility. Israel and the Jews as the enemy not only intensify the victim status of Muslims, they also make the conspiracy theories more acceptable, which have been an integral part of Muslim socialisation for decades. Thus, Muslims are put in a constant panic about the Jews by making them believe that the Jews are secretly acting as conspirators with only one plan: to fight Islam and Muslims.
Abdel-Hakim Ourghi is an Islamic scholar and advocates a liberal, enlightened Islam. His new book, “The Jews in the Koran. A historical tragedy with fatal consequences”.