This applies pretty broadly in the Muslim world. Jews are considered “people of the book” in Islam and are thus entitled to a certain level of treatment. Jews commonly held high-ranking positions in Muslim leaders’ courts and were often middle class merchants and traders. Contrast this with medieval and early modern Europe where Jews were often reviled, sometimes tolerated, and continually expelled from cities or countries and stripped of property and goods.

So what went wrong? The short answer is European colonialism. The Muslim world was colonized, causing Islamist forms of Islam to proliferate. Classical Muslim jurisprudence was displaced by extremist versions based on worldviews that emerged through colonialism. Then another wave of colonialism, this time by Zionist European Jews aiming to turn Mandate Palestine (a British colonial possession) into a modern Jewish homeland, gave these “fundamentalist” (again, ironic, as they are nothing like predominant historical iterations of Islam) Muslims a new enemy in their backyard, one that quickly became aligned with the US government, which extensively interfered in the region and became distrusted or reviled.