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Civitas Outlook
Topic
Pursuit of Happiness
Published on
Mar 4, 2025
Contributors
Joel Kotkin

Jewish Geography

Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin
Senior Research Fellow
Joel Kotkin
Summary
The Jewish future has a southern accent.
Summary
The Jewish future has a southern accent.

You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”

The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II is said to have made this disparaging remark about Spain’s Catholic king upon the latter’s expulsion of Jews and Muslims in 1492. Knowing what an asset the Jewish community of al-Andalus had been to the Arab kingdoms there, the sultan was astonished at Ferdinand’s edict and welcomed the Jewish refugees from his Christian foe.

Jewish history has been defined in large part by expulsions, and the search for places that accept them. In the past this included Muslim rulers. In 1940, Mohammed V of Morocco famously refused to implement the antisemitic edicts of the French Vichy regime allied with Nazi Germany. Considering himself Amir al-Mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) like his namesake the prophet, Mohammed V saw the Jews not as the wandering people as portrayed in Christian legend, but as People of the Book deserving of protection. “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.”

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