A People Between Empires: What Three Thousand Years of Jewish History Teach Us About Rebuilding Trust Between Israel, Muslims, and Christians

From Assyria to the Abraham Accords, the story of the Jewish people has always been shaped by larger powers around them. Understanding that history — honestly, without flattening it into either perpetual victimhood or uniform blame — is also the starting point for repairing what remains broken today, from Rawalpindi to Rome.

Khurram Ali Raza Faith & Freedom News  ·  September 6, 2026  ·  14 min read

Few peoples have had their story shaped so persistently by the ambitions of larger powers around them. Jewish history is not one long, unbroken chain of suffering, nor is it a simple morality tale of villains and victims. It is a three-thousand-year account of a small nation that outlasted the rise and fall of one empire after another — Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Christian, Islamic, and modern — while holding onto a shared religion, language, and sense of peoplehood through all of it.

Telling that story honestly means resisting two temptations at once: flattening it into perpetual victimhood, and flattening it into a story of uniform hostility from any single tradition. The reality, as with most of history, is messier, more specific to time and place, and considerably more interesting than either shortcut allows.

Where it begins: ancient Israel

The story starts in the Levant, the strip of land covering modern Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. The Hebrew Bible traces it to Abraham in the second millennium BCE, through the Exodus, the settlement of Canaan, and the united monarchy of Saul, David, and Solomon around 1000 BCE, before the kingdom split into Israel and Judah. Archaeology cannot confirm every detail of that narrative, but it does confirm the broader picture: a distinct people organized around the worship of Yahweh existed in the Iron Age Levant, moving toward the strict monotheism that would come to define Judaism. The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription from around 1209 BCE, is the earliest reference to “Israel” outside the Bible itself.

What followed set a pattern that would repeat for millennia: Assyria’s conquest of the northern kingdom in 722 BCE, scattering its population; Babylon’s destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and the exile that produced the first true Jewish diaspora; the Persian-era return and rebuilding of the Second Temple; and finally two catastrophic revolts against Rome, culminating in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the crushed Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE.

The loss of the Temple in 70 CE is the hinge point of the whole story. With sacrifice no longer possible, Judaism reinvented itself around the synagogue, Torah study, and portable religious law — rabbinic Judaism, built to survive without a homeland. That reinvention is what let Jewish identity persist across the Roman Empire, Persia, and Arabia, almost always as a minority living under someone else’s rule.

Christian Europe: when theology becomes policy

Christianity grew out of Second Temple Judaism, and its earliest tensions with Judaism were, in a real sense, a family argument. Everything changed once Christianity became Rome’s official religion in the fourth century. Two doctrines did enormous damage in the centuries that followed: supersessionism, the belief that the Church had replaced Israel as God’s chosen people, and the deicide charge, the claim that Jews collectively and eternally bore guilt for the death of Jesus. Once theology like that is backed by state power, it stops being an abstract dispute and becomes law, policy, and eventually violence.

The record across medieval and early modern Europe came in waves rather than as one continuous event: blood libels beginning in twelfth-century England and France; host-desecration and well-poisoning myths that exploded during the Black Death of 1348–1351; expulsions from England in 1290, repeatedly from France, and most famously from Spain in 1492; and pogroms across the Russian Empire from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, which drove mass emigration to Western Europe and the United States.

The Holocaust was driven by a modern, pseudo-scientific racial ideology, not medieval theology — but it did not emerge from nowhere.

Then came the Holocaust: the murder of roughly six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. It is important to be precise about what it was and was not. The Nazis pursued extermination on racial grounds — a category that did not exist in earlier Christian anti-Judaism, which at least in theory left open the possibility of conversion. But the Holocaust drew on and exploited centuries of embedded Christian antisemitic tropes: the “Christ-killer” stereotype, usury stereotypes, the image of the Jew as eternal outsider. Many church institutions failed to meaningfully oppose the Holocaust, and some individuals collaborated, even as other clergy and laypeople risked their lives to hide and rescue Jews. Calling it a “Christian genocide” in the doctrinal sense would be inaccurate — but so would pretending Christian antisemitism played no role in preparing the ground.

It is worth remembering this was not the only story of Jewish life under Christian rule. Parts of medieval Spain before 1492, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the emancipation that followed the French Revolution across much of Western Europe were periods of real, if often fragile, tolerance.

After the Holocaust: a genuine theological reckoning

What happened in Christian thought after 1945 is one of the more significant reversals in the history of religion — not a slow drift, but a deliberate, institutional repudiation.

The Catholic Church issued Nostra Aetate at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, formally rejecting collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion, condemning antisemitism outright, and affirming that God’s covenant with the Jewish people was never revoked. Every pope since has visited synagogues and spoken of Jews as “elder brothers” in faith, and the Vatican established formal diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993. Protestant denominations, mainline and evangelical alike, issued their own statements of repentance in the decades after the war. Evangelical Christianity in particular became one of the strongest pro-Israel constituencies in the world — partly through dispensationalist theology that assigns Israel a central role in end-times prophecy, partly through shared democratic and strategic interests. That is the root of modern Christian Zionism.

None of this means the problem is solved. Older traditionalist attitudes still linger in pockets, and some criticism of Israeli government policy from progressive Christian circles occasionally slides into language that echoes older tropes. But the trajectory since 1945 in Western Christianity has clearly bent toward repudiation, not reinforcement.

Jews under Islam: a more variable history

The relationship between Jews and Muslims does not fit a single narrative of harmony or hostility — it is genuinely more variable across time and place than the Christian-European story. Early Islamic history includes the Constitution of Medina, which recognized Jewish tribes as part of the political community, alongside later violent conflicts between Muhammad and specific Jewish tribes in Arabia. As Islamic rule expanded, Jews generally lived under the dhimmi system: protected but explicitly subordinate status, involving a special tax and restrictions on dress and public religious practice — second-class, but usually stable, with defined rights that were often honored.

In practice, this frequently meant Jewish communities fared better under medieval Muslim rule than under medieval Christian rule in the same centuries. The “Golden Age” of Jewish life in Islamic Spain produced towering achievements, most famously the philosopher-physician Maimonides. After the Spanish expulsion of 1492, the Ottoman Empire actively welcomed the exiled Jewish population. This was not a story free of violence — the 1066 Granada massacre and forced conversions under the Almohad dynasty are real chapters — but large-scale, recurring blood libels and mass expulsions, the defining pattern of medieval Christian Europe, were comparatively rare in the Islamic world until the modern era.

The modern turn: how the twentieth century changed everything

The sharp rise in antisemitism across much of the Muslim-majority world over the last century has several distinct causes, worth separating rather than treating as one timeless thing.

Religious text and interpretation. The Quran and hadith contain a genuine mix of material — some relatively respectful references to Jews as earlier recipients of scripture, and some harshly critical passages. Which passages get emphasized has always depended on the interpreter and the political moment; modern Islamist movements have often foregrounded the harsher material.

Colonialism, nationalism, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. The rise of Zionism, the British Mandate, the 1948 war — Israel’s War of Independence to Israelis, the Nakba to Palestinians — and the wars of 1967 and 1973 turned a religious and cultural relationship into a live, unresolved national conflict over the same land.

Imported ideologies. This part is often left out, but it matters. Nazi propaganda reached the Middle East directly through Axis radio broadcasts during World War II. Soviet-era anti-Zionism shaped leftist Arab regimes through the Cold War. And the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian antisemitic forgery from the early 1900s, has circulated widely across the Arab and broader Muslim world, often presented as historical fact.

One consequence of all this: the Jewish communities that had existed continuously across the Arab world for centuries — in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere — largely emptied out after 1948, through a mix of expulsion, violent pressure, and flight. Most of their descendants now live in Israel, the United States, or Europe.

Where things stand today

Non-acceptance of Jews and Israel today shows up across several distinct spheres, each with its own logic. Most Muslim-majority states still formally withhold recognition of Israel, with the exceptions of Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), and the Abraham Accords countries — the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, all in 2020. Iran’s government stands out for openly eliminationist rhetoric toward Israel. Hamas and allied factions have at times denied Jewish historical connection to the land altogether. Parts of the Western political left, academia, and activist movements sometimes cross from legitimate criticism of Israeli policy into antisemitism proper, and the far right carries its own, separate strand of hostility.

Pakistan: a case apart

Pakistan deserves its own mention, since it does not fit the usual Middle East framing. It is a South Asian, non-Arab, nuclear-armed state of roughly 240 million people, founded in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, and it has never recognized Israel or established diplomatic relations with it — one of the largest holdouts in the world. The reasons are less about theology than about founding identity and geopolitics: Pakistan’s first prime minister opposed the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine; Pakistani politics has long drawn an explicit parallel between Palestine and Kashmir, treating recognition of Israel as something that would undercut Pakistan’s own moral case on Kashmir; domestic religious parties treat non-recognition as close to a fixed article of national identity; and as a leading member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and a recipient of Gulf Arab support, Pakistan has generally moved in step with mainstream Arab-state positions.

That has not meant zero contact. A 2005 meeting between Pakistani and Israeli foreign ministers under President Musharraf, and recurring unconfirmed reports of back-channel talks during Imran Khan’s 2018–2022 government, both floated the idea without producing a change in formal policy. Jewish life in the region is essentially gone: a small Bene Israel community once existed in Karachi, centered on the Magain Shalome Synagogue, before emigrating in the decades after 1947–48; the synagogue itself was demolished in 1988.

Building a better image: what it would take to shift perceptions of Israel among Muslims, in Pakistan, and within Christianity

Given that history, the practical question facing policymakers, religious leaders, and civil society is what — if anything — could shift entrenched perceptions in a durable way, rather than a purely cosmetic one. Diplomats, interfaith organizers, and scholars who work on this have converged on a handful of approaches, summarized below. These are proposals under active debate, not settled outcomes, and they carry real critics — a point worth returning to at the end of this section.

It is worth being direct about the limits of this list. Critics — including many Palestinian and Kashmiri voices, along with parts of the Western and Pakistani left — argue that normalization efforts that bypass Palestinian statehood or Kashmiri self-determination address symptoms rather than the underlying political grievance, and that “image-building” framed this way can look like asking one side to change its narrative while the territorial and rights disputes remain unresolved. Others counter that waiting for a comprehensive settlement before any relationship-building happens has, in practice, meant decades of stalemate. Both positions have serious adherents, and this piece does not attempt to adjudicate between them.

The role of the global Abrahamic movement

Much of the recent momentum described above sits under a loose, still-forming banner often called the “Abrahamic” movement — not a single organization with a headquarters and a membership roll, but a network of diplomatic initiatives, interfaith institutions, and civil-society groups that frame Jews, Christians, and Muslims as three branches of one Abrahamic family rather than as permanently opposed camps.

Its most visible diplomatic expression is the Abraham Accords themselves, alongside institution-building like the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi — a shared complex housing a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, opened as a physical symbol of the same idea the Accords expressed diplomatically. Longer-running interfaith bodies such as the Council of Christians and Jews and various Abrahamic dialogue initiatives on university campuses and in civil society do the slower, less visible work: joint study, youth exchange, and clergy-to-clergy relationships that outlast any single government’s term in office.

The movement’s role, as its proponents describe it, is threefold: to provide diplomatic cover for states willing to normalize relations before every underlying dispute is resolved; to give religious leaders — evangelical, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish alike — a shared vocabulary and forum that sits above any one country’s politics; and to seed the kind of person-to-person familiarity that, over a generation, is harder to reverse than a signed accord. Its limits are equally real: it has had far more traction among Gulf states with limited Palestinian populations of their own than in states like Pakistan, where the Kashmir linkage runs deeper than religious framing alone, or among Palestinians directly living under occupation or blockade, for whom “Abrahamic” language can read as a way of discussing everything except the conflict most immediate to their lives.

Readers should treat “the global Abrahamic movement” as a descriptive label for this loose network rather than a formal, unified body — its shape and membership continue to shift, and the most current picture is worth checking directly rather than assuming it is fixed.

The throughline

If there is one thread connecting three thousand years of this history, it is the recurring vulnerability of a small, distinct people living within — and dependent on the tolerance of — much larger powers. That vulnerability has been shaped again and again by theological competition, economic scapegoating, and, in the last century, by the collision between Jewish national revival and competing Arab and Muslim national claims to the same land.

What has changed dramatically is that Christian societies underwent a genuine, documented, institutional reckoning with antisemitism after the Holocaust — a shift traceable through specific documents, papal visits, and diplomatic relations. Muslim-majority societies have not, on the whole, gone through a comparable collective reckoning, largely because the Israeli–Palestinian conflict remains unresolved and politically live in a way European antisemitism, by the late twentieth century, was not. Whether that changes will depend on politics, education, leadership — and, more than anything else, on whether the zero-sum framing of the conflict itself begins to give way.

Further reading

• The Oxford History of the Biblical World; archaeological work by Amihai Mazar; the Merneptah Stele as primary evidence.
• Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism; the Vatican’s Nostra Aetate (1965).
• Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam and Semites and Anti-Semites; Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross; Bat Ye’or on “dhimmitude” (more polemical — worth reading critically).
• Benny Morris, Righteous Victims and 1948; work by Asher Susser and Efraim Karsh on Arab politics; primary texts including the Hamas Covenant and successive versions of the Palestinian National Covenant.
• ADL Global 100 survey; Pew Research Center surveys on religion and antisemitism; Arab Barometer polling data.

Khurram Ali Raza

Khurram Ali Raza writes on faith, geopolitics, and interfaith relations for Faith & Freedom News. This analysis draws on historical, religious, and survey scholarship cited above and should be read alongside primary sources on any point the reader intends to rely on.