Call in what you like but muslims have always targeted/subjugated Jews over the centuries!
In some Islamic lands, most pervasively in those under Shi'a rule, the abasement reflected the perception of the Jew as "both ritually polluted and polluting." A Jew who entered a Muslim's house had to "sit on a separate rug." Any object the Jew touched had been contaminated, and could no longer be used by a Muslim. Expressing their dominance and contempt, Muslims would enter a Jew's house at will, "seize any household object to their liking"—and the Jewish owner dared not protest.Nor would he complain to a court, where "a Jew could never win a case ... against a Muslim." Indeed, even the murder of a Jew—if "witnesses could be found"—was generally punished by a fine, or "at worst, a beating."[34] Determined to sustain the myth of Islamic tolerance, some commentators alleged that the Muslims only attacked the Jews when they perceived they had "overstepped their limits."[35] This, in effect, blames the Jews for any ensuant massacres. For the most part, however, Jews "trod a very cautious path," and cleaved to the stipulations that defined the dhimmi role. As required, Jews took care that the heights of their houses were lower than those of Muslims, that they stepped off a path or yielded the center of the road when a Muslim passed by, that they never mounted a horse, prohibited because it was seen to have "martial qualities," and never bore arms. In order to convey their inferiority to Muslims, Jews in Yemen "dressed like beggars" and made sure their houses appeared "not just modest ... but decrepit." As compelled, they wore the yellow Jew badge of shame or a red cloth on their chest, telegraphing their identity.[36]In the early twentieth century, Jews had to agree to their humiliation, when they were "made to jump and dance, thus provoking the mirth of the Muslims and satisfying their scorn for the Jews." Elsewhere in the same years, Muslims animalized the Jews, chasing them "like a herd of beasts across fields" and "making us eat the dust."[37]
Contemporary accounts of pogroms targeting mellahs all across Morocco in the decade before the establishment of the French Protectorate are harrowing, providing vivid descriptions of "the robbing, looting, raping, killing and burning," and the "cunning" attackers who "closed any escape route." In the Casablanca ghetto, "not a house, not a family, not a person was spared ... only five to six Jewish houses ... remained intact." All furniture was smashed or stolen; all clothing taken; Jews were left naked, even nightshirts gone. Thirty Jews were murdered; sixty wounded, "more than two hundred fifty young women, girls, children abducted." "All the young girls were raped." The mellah of Settat, sacked in 1903, was rebuilt by the Jews only to be attacked again four years later, three hundred to four hundred families once more "without shelter and without food," the men looking "like ghosts," the women, emaciated and almost "nude."[41] In numberless Jewish quarters in these years—and over the centuries in which Jews lived under Muslim rule—synagogues were "pillaged and sacked," sacred objects "profaned," Torah scrolls "lacerated" and thrown into the street.[42] At other times synagogues were torched or turned into mosques—the oft-repeated claim that Islam protected the "right [of People of the Book] to practice their own religions" proven hollow again and again.[43] And because the pogromists were drawn from all ranks of Muslims and included political officials and religious leaders, few attackers were ever punished.[44]
