[Murat Yazici]

Professor Stanford Shaw, a Jewish-American historian with expertise on Osmanlı (Ottoman) history, writes:


"For the most part, then, Jews and Christians lived as prosperous
minorities in the classical Islamic empires of the Umayyads of Damascus
and Spain and the Abbasids of Baghdad, preserving their religions and
freedoms within their own religiously-based communities and paying
a special poll tax called haraç [kharach] or cizye [jizya] in return for the protection
of the Muslim rulers and exemption from military service while living
with great comfort and prosperity. There were limitations, there were
some marks of discrimination, so that one could say that Jews and
Christians were not as equal as Muslims, but compared to the active
persecution to which Jews were subjected in the Christian lands of
Europe, the world of Islam was paradise for them [31]."


[31] On the Jews in Islamic Spain in particular see Eliyahu Ashtor,
The Jews of Moslem Spain (Philadelphia, 1973).

This quote is from: S.J. Shaw, 'Christian Anti-Semitism within the Ottoman Empire,' Belleten (1991).