Entitled "Jews of the East, a multi-thousand-year history" (from November 24 to March 13, 2022), this project is the third part of a trilogy devoted by the IMA to monotheistic religions, after "Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca" in 2014 and "Christians of the East, 2000 years of history" in 2017.

At the opening of the exhibition on Monday, Emmanuel Macron praised a "great lesson" in "coexistence", "mutual enrichment" and "exchanges between monotheisms".

"Identity" is "always more complex than one thinks and rubs against other identities to feed off it", underlined the Head of State by denouncing the "obscurantisms" of today as yesterday.

"Jews of the East ..." wants to show that "this so long history is not reduced to a single cause and a single conflict (Israeli-Palestinian), but settled in an extraordinary duration", says to the 'AFP Benjamin Stora, historian and commissioner general.

It is not a question of reconciling those who think that the cohabitation between Jews and Muslims "should be described only as an example of harmony and conviviality" and those "who describe it only as a series of terrible conflicts, especially after the 'appearance of Islamic civilization,' writes Benjamin Stora in an editorial dedicated to the exhibition.

But "to give benchmarks" without which "the world could not be viable".

Emmanuel Macron, historian Benjamin Stora and president of the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) and former Minister of Culture Jack Lang, during the inauguration of the exhibition "Jews of the East, a multi-thousand-year history", at IMA in Paris, November 22, 2021 Yoan VALAT POOL / AFP

"When we question the old Muslims, they all say + we were in the same story. + Jews and Arabs thus spoke Arabic together, wrote Arabic in the public and political space, and that lasted ten centuries", emphasizes he does.

Archaeological remains, ancient manuscripts, paintings, jewelry, costumes, ritual objects, photographs, music and audiovisual installations: 280 works from major international and French museums, evoke the life of the Jewish populations from Morocco to Iraq, from Tunisia to Syria.

The "time of exiles"

The exhibition takes visitors from Antiquity to the present day: from the first links between the Jewish tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and the Prophet Mohammed to the rise of Jewish urban centers in the Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire; from the emergence of the main figures of Jewish thought in Baghdad, Fez, Cairo, Cordoba and Safed to the exile of Jews from the Arab world. With, as a common thread, the attachment to a very old faith.

The route begins before the Christian era, when for more than a millennium the Hebrews lived in the Land of Canaan.

With the Roman repressions until the middle of the second century, the Jewish diaspora intensified and the populations left Jerusalem, taking with them the Torah scrolls.

Galileo, Babylonia, Syria and Egypt, of great vitality and cultural diversity, are then their four main centers.

From the 7th to the 15th century, the majority of Jewish populations lived in the Muslim world.

They adopt the Arabic language there, in the multiplicity of its dialects, which transcribed in Hebrew becomes "Judeo-Arabic".

With the Muslim conquest, Jews and Christians lived under the status of "dhimmi", which gave them a position of inferiority and vulnerability while ensuring them legal protection as well as relative administrative, fiscal and religious autonomy.

But this statute is interpreted differently according to the periods and the sovereigns.

The Jews suffered violent attacks, especially in the Middle Ages under the Almohad dynasty in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Jewish intellectuals and scholars, heads of their communities, nevertheless occupy key places at the court of the caliphs.

The exhibition concludes with the "time of exiles" and the role of Europe in the deterioration of relations between Jews and Muslims, the Holocaust and then the creation of Israel in 1948 and the start of wars between this new state and Arab countries.

From a million people at the start of the 20th century, the Jewish population in Arab-Muslim countries today stands at some 30,000, mainly in Turkey, Morocco and Iran.

© 2021 AFP