ABSTRACT
Relations between Islam and Judaism in the twentieth century have been profoundly disrupted and changed from their traditional forms. This occurred with the general phenomenon of institutions broken and shattered by the effects of European influence in the Middle Eastern countries. 1 The dismantling of the institution of dhimmah, for example, in the new nation-states of the Middle East, effected a "liberation" of the dhimmī populations where all would now be "citizens" in the same way. For the Jews, this situation took a special turn, first as a result of the strengthening of the Zionist movement in Palestine, and then with the subsequent creation of the state of Israel. The new sorts of institutions in the Middle Eastern countries where the Jews lived could hardly emerge for the testing in Jewish relations with the Muslim majority before the reverberations of Palestinian tensions were felt. These tensions rose to new heights in the immediate post-1948 period, resulting in a near total exodus of Jews from these countries. During the period from 1948 to the late 1960s the vast majority of Jews left areas where their communal history stretched back many centuries, often to pre-Islamic times. This was the removal of a whole civilization and its subsequent virtual disappearance, notwithstanding its piece-meal "transplantation" elsewhere. 2 The magnitude of this change in the modern situation of Middle Eastern Jewry was quite in keeping with the overall scale of changes in the Middle East wrought by colonisation and decolonisation.
