Johann von Leers (1902–1965) was one of the most important of the National Socialist ideologues. He joined the NSDAP in 1929, although he was at first associated with the Strasserist wing of the party. However, in 1933, he was hired by Goebbels to work in the Ministry of Propaganda. At the end of the war, Leers fled Germany and, in 1950, he migrated to Argentina. He was later persuaded by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, to move to Egypt, where he converted to Islam. In Egypt, he served as political advisor in the Information Department under Nasser.
Leers’ numerous works written between 1933 and 1945 include Adolf Hitler (1933), Entwicklung des Nationalsozialismus von seinem Anfang bis zur Gegenwart (The development of National Socialism from its beginning to the present,1936), Judentum und Gaunertum (Jewry and the Underworld, 1940), Juden hinter Stalin (Jews behind Stalin, 1941), Die Verbrechernatur der Juden (The criminal nature of the Jews,1944), etc. One of his most interesting works is his refutation of Spengler’s Jahre der Entscheidung (The Decisive Years, 1933) called Spenglers weltpolitisches System und der Nationalsozialismus (1934), which detailed the differences between Spengler’s globalist politics and National Socialism. The present article, ‘Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze’, sheds interesting light on the early history of Islam in Arabia, which Leers considers as having escaped Judaisation solely through the staunch faith and military efforts of Mohammed.
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It is not uninteresting to read Jewish historians sometimes — not because one might find the truth in them but in order to get a glimpse into the psychology of the Jews. Now, here one thing is extraordinarily unique — wherever the Jews come to represent Mohammed and Islam they become expressly hostile, indeed hate-filled. Thus, Simon Dubnow describing Mohammed in his Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes does not fail to remark that he was illiterate and then writes the following:
In this way there matures in the soul of this half-Bedouin the idea of monotheism, which becomes in him a glowing passion that incites him to a ‘holy war’ for which any means seems good enough. The knowledge of God is not coupled in Mohammed’s mind in any way with that noble moral consciousness that allows the ethical monotheism of the Biblical prophets, and even the one-sided Evangelical doctrine, to appear so attractive. The life-story of Mohammed shows us no magical personality, no embodiment of that high moral principle that can captivate the believing mind more than revealed abstract ideas. The life story of the ‘messenger of Allah’, as well as that of the Koran itself, is full of examples precisely of how a religious founder should not speak and act. Behind the mask of a prophet there stares at us too often the glance of a semi-savage: the illumination of the seer is obscured by the raw passion of the Bedouin who murders ruthlessly in war and does not refrain from dragging the wife or the daughter of the murdered man into his harem. All these character traits of Mohammed are expressed in his conduct towards the Jews of Arabia.
That is not historiography but, in fact, incitement and slander. First, Mohammed was not a Bedouin or a half-Bedouin but a member of the old urban, noble Quraish family in Mecca; then the Jewish Dubnow has clearly not read the Koran if he represents it in such a false way. But this passage betrays one thing definitely — the deadly hatred of the Jews even after 1400 years towards the man who created the youngest and, in many respects, most successful world religion.
The dispute between Mohammed and the Jews is not well-known but really very interesting. Already before the destruction of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus (A.D. 70) there were a few Jews in Arabia; after the destruction of Jerusalem large groups wandered in, settled in Arabian cities and conducted there a lively agitation for Judaism. In Arabia there dwelt particularly the three tribes, Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza in the city of Yathrib; from there the Jewish agitation radiated; there the three above-mentioned Jewish tribes began their opposition to the two large Arabian tribes Aws and Khazraj, incited one against the other and in this way acquired for themselves the mastery of the city. It was an economic, settler- and trade penetration by the Jews, but especially an intellectual one. Of course, Christian influences also flowed alongside, from Byzantium and Abyssinia, but of all the foreign religious doctrines Judaism was the most widespread, most active and most successful.
The Jews have later tried to demonstrate how much Islam has borrowed from Judaism. It is part of the Jewish vanity to consider themselves always as the origin of all innovations. In reality many superficial things in which Islam and Judaism agree are not borrowed from Judaism but from ancient oriental folk customs. The prohibition of pork is an ancient hygienic practice in the orient because, in the climate there, this fatty meat is unhealthy, and besides there is the danger of trichinosis. If the Koran refers here and there to Jewish things, the reason for that is not that Mohammed learned from the Jews but rather that, through the active Jewish mission, a number of Jewish legends and ideas had entered among the Arabian folk. With the undisturbed continuation of this Jewish penetration there was the possibility that large parts of the Arabian people would be Judaised — just as they later accepted Islam. Jewry would then have been able to unleash for their own benefit all those native military and political powers of the Arabian people with which the first caliphs established their powerful empire. The cavalry troops that later, under Omar, conquered Egypt and Persia and which later pushed towards Spain and India would have been drawn into battle for the Talmud. The catastrophe for all of humanity would have been frightful.
The Arab people of the pre-Islamic period had little to fight the Jewish period with. The belief in their old city gods and nature gods was disintegrated and dissolved and no longer corresponded to the sober, clear intellectual thought of the people. We hear of men of that time who tried out many religions, of ‘hanifs’, thinkers in search of religious clarity, of a healthy, clear lifestyle, of the will of God. The people were in a religious crisis and sought a way out.
Mohammed ibn Abdallah is supposed even as a boy to have encountered a Christian monk who recognized in him the future bearer of religious knowledge and urged his companions to protect him from the Jews, who would stalk him throughout his life. It is possible that the boy Mohammed already expressed something about the Jews at that time that revealed his perspicuity to the monk, who was perhaps well trained psychologically. But only as a man in his forties, after a highly successful life as a trader, did Mohammed become gripped and shaken by the religious question. Illumination came to him in the solitude of the mountain caves around Mecca. The German scholar Müller rightly says — and this statement of a professional German clearly differs from the bursts of hatred of a Dubnow:
The mockers maligned him in all possible ways, that he was crazy, a fantasist, a swindler – but the logical certainty of his conduct, the uniformity of his entire life was never criticized and appears to us even today clearly from the Koran. … His total honesty in the Mecca period can even less be brought into doubt. The conditions of desperate anxiety that preceded the decisive vision, the truly admirable endurance with which the in-no-way stouthearted man had maintained his preaching for over a decade amidst the harshest persecutions, and finally under imminent danger to his life, without the least prospect of an eventual success, are clear proofs of the tremendous power of the idea, at first uncanny even to him, that had gripped him and that brought him, independently of his will, to the firm conviction that the inspirations that forced themselves onto his thought were revealed by God himself. Therewith we have the image of a genuine prophet.
For years he tried in Mecca to get through with his sermon that there is only one God, the only one, the merciful, the king at the Day of Judgement. To the Trinity of the Christians, he opposed the singleness of God, discarded the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation and gave, rather, to every believer as a guiding principle the complete fulfilment of the commandments of the Good, given by a merciful and just God before whom every man must account for his deeds. As a consequence of the close relationship between the ruling strata in Mecca and the former idolatrous worship, he did not succeed in finding believers in his doctrine outside a small following in his own family. Then he came into contact with men from Yathrib, Arabs who had also heard of the Messiah prophecy of the Jews. These he united and converted to Islam. He succeeded through very clever dealings in reconciling to one another the two hostile Arab tribes of the Aws and the Khasraj in such a way that he had formed a political basis for himself when he left Mecca on 20 September 622 and moved to Medina.
Here he came, for the first time, in contact with the Jewish problem. He believed in the triumphant power of the Good in the world, he was of the firm conviction that the religion of the one God, with its easy, practical and reasonable principles for human life, was nothing but the original religion. He wished to lead men from all the confusion of the times, to the original clear vision of God and, since he had to deal with men who were influenced by Christianity as well as by Judaism, he said that this was the religion that Abraham (Ibrahim) had already had, that Christ and Moses had announced, except that men had every time disfigured it. This had been revealed to him anew by God. He wanted to make the path easier for the Christians as well as for the Jews; so he let the orientation of the prayers be directed right from the beginning to Jerusalem. He repeatedly stressed that he only wished to purify the existing religions and perpetuate the reestablished, the newly revealed, original religion.
At the same time he was a clever statesman. With the unification of the two Arab tribes the Jews became a minority in Medina. Mohammed guaranteed for them a sort of protectorate contract; they could maintain their administration and their religion, help the believers in the defence of the city, not ally themselves with enemies of Mohammed and pay taxes for the wars of the believers. The Jews could have been contented with this. But they began a general incitement against Islam, which announced a pure concept of God and does not want to know anything about the world-rule promised to the Jews by Yahweh. The Jews took pleasure in driving Mohammed into a corner with scorn and devious questions and to pull apart his revelation with the indecent and cunning methods of Talmudic dialectics. They raged against him openly and secretly. This destroyed Mohammed’s patience and he complained:
The Peoples of the Book are pleased with what we have revealed but many of them have also joined together to dispute with one part of them. (Koran, Sura 13,36)
He now changed the direction of prayers to Mecca, he annulled the feasts on the days of atonement that coincided with the similarly named Jewish festival and introduced instead the fasting during Ramadan; he set up the call to prayer of the muezzin against the shofar, the horn of the Jewish synagogue. When the Meccans attacked him and in the victorious Battle of Badr Springs — in which for the first time the triumphant call of victory ‘There is no God but God’ sounded — and were defeated by the believers, the Jews showed their deep hatred and enmity against Islam. The Jew Ibn al Ashraf composed an elegiac poem for the fallen Meccans and declared that he preferred the old idols of the Arabs to the religion of Mohammed. The Jew Abu ’Afak asks the Arabs of Medina, in an infamous satirical poem, to drive Mohammed out. It had become fully clear that the Jews combated the unification of the Arab peoples through Islam. Now the prophet struck back:
See the worst animals before God are those that do not believe, for they do not come to the faith — those with whom you have partly undertaken a contract, but they will shamelessly break your contract at every opportunity. Therefore, when you encounter them in war, make an example of them for those who stand behind them so that they may be warned, and if you fear betrayal from people throw, down their contract before them; God does not like betrayers. (Koran, Sura 8,57)
When the Jewish Banu Qaynuqa molested an Islamic woman, he had their quarter besieged and forced them to arms. Only the intercession of the influential Abdallah ibn Ubayy saved them so that they could walk out, but even on his deathbed he said to Abdallah: ‘O Abdallah, did I not dissuade you from your love for the Jews? But you have not listened to me.’
But the other Jewish tribes were no better. A Jewish composer of satirical verses, Kaab ibn al Ashraf, was killed by a Muslim because he publicly criticized Mohammed. The Banu Nadir with whom a new contract was undertaken used a defeat of the Muslims in the Battle of Uhud to immediately become hostile again. Of this period His Eminence the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, provides the following authenticated record:
While Mohammed was in a friendly relation with one part of the Jews, another section prepared an attack on his life. They persuaded a man to throw down a heavy block of stone on Mohammed’s head. An inner voice warned him to leave the square, and in this way the traitorous Jews could not carry out their plan. Mohammed sent one of his prosecutors to the Jews and had them say that they had to leave the city within ten days. They had broken the contract that they had undertaken with him since they sought his life. Every Jew who might be found in the city after ten days would be punished with death.
As soon as he had put down the attack of the Meccans, Mohammed proceeded against them and expelled them. In spite of their strong fortifications, the Jews had to leave. Mohammed has recorded his memory of this in Sura 59:
Whatever is in heaven and earth praises God and He is the powerful, the wise. It is He who drove the unbelievers among the Peoples of the Book from their homes and into the first exodus. You did not think that they would leave, and they thought their fortifications would protect them from God. But God came to them when they least expected and sowed fear in their hearts, they destroyed their houses with their own hands and the hands of the believers. … They were like those who had lived recently before them; they tasted the evil of their affairs and they received a painful punishment.
But even the last Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza, violated trust and contract. They joined with the chieftain of the exiled Banu Nadir, the Jew Huyayy ibn Akhtab, and, when a great army of enemies of Mohammed was raised, offered to deliver the city to them. But Mohammed succeeded in forcing the retreat of the besiegers using a very skillful ploy — a big pit that he had dug out prevented the attacks of the hostile cavalry. Now he proceeded against the Banu Qurayza, closed down their quarter of the city and forced them to surrender. The Jews perhaps thought that they would get away with mere expulsion but Mohammed handed over the decision on their destiny to the sheikh of the Aws tribe, Saad ibn Muadh, whom they had wounded, and he demanded the execution of the Jews. In this way the 600 men of the tribe were killed. It was the only mass execution that the gentle Mohammed ever allowed to take place and it was, according to martial law, fully permissible since the Jews had conducted treason as armed allies. The Banu Qurayza were thereby exterminated but the remnants of them fled to Khaybar. Mohammed besieged this city. In 628 he forced them to surrender. An old Islamic legend recounts that the Jewess Zaynab invited Mohammed to a meal after the conclusion of the totally mild contract of capitulation. Here she offered a spicy roast meat. Mohammed’s armour-bearer, Bashir ibn al Baraa, hastily ate a piece of it but Mohammed did not swallow the first piece, which seemed remarkably evil tasting to him and stated immediately that the roast meat was poisoned. The armour-bearer died as a result of the poisoning. But Mohammed is supposed to have suffered poor health since then.
It is not well-known that the Jews contemptuously praise themselves even today that they poisoned Mohammed. Dubnow writes with unconcealed joy:`
So even today the Jews rejoice in this crime! Even in Medina they sought once again to divide the Arab tribes there and to turn them away from Islam. They recited once again the old war- and battle-songs from the battles against one another and Mohammed himself had to ride to Medina and set things in order there. In his final years Mohammed combated the Jews systematically, drove them out of Tayma and Wadi al Qura, or at most permitted them to remain in certain places against the payment of a fee. The Koran is full of warnings regarding the Jews, who are called simply ‘Satans’. Mohammed also observed how many people are repeatedly corrupted by the Jews:When they meet the believers they say ‘We believe’; but if they are alone with their Satans they say: ‘See, we stand with you and are just joking.’ God will mock them and let them go, blinded, farther astray in their rebellion. (Koran II, Sura 12,13)
Abu Hurayra records the following statement of the great man of God: ‘The Day of Judgement will come only when the Muslims have defeated the Jews by exterminating them, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden himself says to the believers: ‘Behind me stands a Jew, kill him’. Even on his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said: ‘There should not be two religions in Arabia.’ Among his successors Caliph Omar drove the Jews decisively from Arabia. They were placed under very restrictive and oppressive conditions that hindered Jewish activity completely. All the writers of that time, when the Islamic countries obeyed their own laws, agree that the Jews were especially mistrusted. On the other hand, the Jews hated Islam from the depths of their soul. One may remark here that even the Crusades were launched not in the smallest part by Jewish agitation, for the ‘Refutation’ of Islam written by the baptized Jew Petrus Alfonsi was literally the only polemical literary source for the First Crusade from 1096 to 1099. The malicious distortion of the doctrines and the criticism of the personality of Mohammed that this Jew had concocted then passed into the literature of the Church against Islam and are found among the monks Petrus Reverendus, Gualterus de Sens, Guibert de Nogent Sous-Coucy, Bishop Hildebert of Le Mans and others, mostly French writers, who, through deliberate distortion of Islam –—but always based on the poisonous work of Petrus Alfonsi — unleashed the crusading fever in Europe.
Mohammed’s hostility to the Jews undoubtedly had one effect — eastern Jewry was fully paralysed by Islam. Its backbone was broken. The Jews of the east have had as little as no part in the powerful rise of Jewry to power in the last two centuries. Despised, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellahs, lived under a special law that did not allow them, as Europe did, usury or dealing in stolen goods but held them under pressure and fear. If the remaining world had undertaken a similar procedure, we would not have had any Jewish Question today. To which one must add however that there were also Islamic rulers — among them the Spanish caliphs from the House of Muawiya — who did not subscribe to the traditional Islamic hatred of the Jews — to their own detriment. But as a religion Islam has the immortal merit of having prevented the threatening conquest of Arabia by the Jews and having conquered the nightmarish doctrine of Yahweh through a pure religion that has opened the path for numerous peoples to a higher culture and given to its followers an education and human development such that even today a Muslim who is serious in his faith is one of the most admirable phenomena in this world of chaos.
Notes
Published in Die Judenfrage, VII, pp. 275-278, 15 December 1942.
Berlin, Vol. III, pp. 282ff.
[The Jewish tribes seem to have moved from Judaea to the western coast of Arabia particularly after the Jewish-Roman wars of 66–135.] [All notes in box-brackets are by the translator.]
[The old name of Medina]
[These tribes had arrived in Arabia from Yemen. Mohammed’s great-grandmother belonged to the Khazraj.]
[Omar ibn al Khattab (ca.583–644) was, after Abu Bakr, the second caliph and father-in-law of Mohammed.]
[Hanifs are pre-Islamic Arabs who were Abrahamic monotheists though they were neither Jewish nor Christian.]
August Müller, Der Islam im Morgen- und Abendlande, Vol.1, 57.
[In the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’ dated around 622.]
[The Battle of Badr was fought in 624 near the present-day city of Badr in Saudi Arabia. It was won by Mohammed against the Meccan tribe of Qureshi led by Amr ibn Hisham. The Hashim clan to which Mohammed belonged was also part of the Qureshi, who were polytheists.]
[Ka’ab ibn al Ashraf (d.ca.624) was a Jewish contemporary of Mohammed.]
[Abu Afak (d. ca.624) was a Jewish poet who was killed on Mohammed’s orders.]
[Abdallah ibn Ubayy (d.631) was a Khazraj chieftain in Medina.]
[Kaab ibn al Ashraf (d.ca.624) was a Jewish leader and poet.]
[The Battle of Uhud was fought after the Battle of Badr, where the Quraysh were defeated. At Uhud the latter succeeded in encircling the Muslims and stopping their advance.]
[Amin al Husseini (1897-1974) was the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948. He also composed a tract in 1943 called Islam i Židovstvo (Islam and Judaism) for the SS Handschar, which was constituted mainly of Bosnian Muslims.]
In the excellent work of Mohammed Sabry, Islam, Judentum und Bolschewismus [Berlin, 1938].
[Saad ibn Muadh (ca.590-627) was a companion of Mohammed.]
[Khaybar is an oasis near Medina that had been inhabited by Jewish tribes until the Battle of Khaybar in 628.]
[Zaynab bint al Harith (d.629) was a Jewish woman who attempted to assassinate Mohammed after the Battle of Khaybar.]
Op.cit., Vol.III, p.403.
[An oasis in northwestern Arabia.]
[A river bed north of Medina.]
[Abu Hurayra was a companion of Mohammed who authored several hadiths, or narrations relating to the life of Mohammed.]
[Petrus Alfonsi (d. ca.1116) was a converted Jew whose Dialogi contra Judaeos (1110) included refutations of Islam.]
[Guibert de Nogent (ca.1055-1124) was a Benedictine historian and theologian who wrote a history of the First Crusade called Dei gesta per Francos (God’s deeds through the Franks, 1108).]
[Hildebert de Lavardin (ca.1055-1133) was Bishop of Le Mans and, from 1125, Archbishop of Tours.]
[A mellah is a fortified Jewish quarter in mediaeval Morocco.]
[Muawiya (ca.500-680) was the first caliph of the Syrian Umayyad dynasty. An offshoot of the Umayyad dynasty ruled the Caliphate of Cordoba in Al Andalus.]
