Judaism—West Asia
Until the mid-twentieth century, there were Jewish communities in all the countries of the Muslim Middle East. Jews belonged to all social classes, from very poor (the vast majority) to very rich, from sophisticated professionals to illiterates and beggars, and, along another spectrum, from deeply pious and learned to secular agnostic and leftist. Although Islam encouraged converts, it did not require, let alone force, conversion. Those who wished to retain their own religion could do so, as long as they paid the jizya, a capitation fee for non-Muslims, which was levied on various Christian and Jewish communities.
Jews in West Asia Before the Nineteenth Century
The situation of the Jews under medieval Islam compared favorably to that of the Jews in medieval Europe. Jews in the Islamic world were not outsiders; they had lived in the area long before the Muslim conquests and for the most part spoke the languages of those around them, initially Greek or Aramaic, and later Arabic, Persian, or (though to a lesser extent) Ottoman Turkish, both among themselves and with their non-Jewish neighbors. Hebrew was used only in the liturgy, and spoken or modern Hebrew is of recent origin, created by Zionist immigrants to Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century.
