From Medina To October 7: The Sanctification Of Violence Against Jews

Three years have passed since October 7, 2023, when Hamas poured out of Gaza and unleashed the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Entire families were butchered, women raped and paraded through the streets, others taken hostage and tortured beyond the border of Israel. Western journalists and politicians called it “unprecedented,” as if they were seeing something entirely new.

But for Jews, and for anyone who has studied Islamic history, it was not new at all. It was a repetition, a reenactment. It was the same jihad carried out against them for 14 centuries.

When Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, Medina was home not only to pagan Arab tribes but also to Jewish clans who had lived there for centuries, among them the Banu Qurayza. Muhammad and his followers later surrounded their strongholds for nearly a month. The Jews were cut off from food and water and subjected to constant psychological pressure. According to Islamic historian Ibn Ishaq, they sought terms of peace, hoping to be treated like the Banu Nadir, another Jewish tribe Muhammad had previously expelled from Medina.

The Jews of Banu Qurayza agreed to let Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, a companion of Muhammad, decide their fate. They thought Sa‘d would be merciful in his judgment, since his tribe had been allied with theirs before Muhammad’s arrival. But Muhammad made sure that Sa‘d’s judgment was brutal: all adult men were to be executed, the women and children enslaved, and the property divided as spoils.

One by one, the men of Banu Qurayza, estimated to number between 600 and 900, were brought out, bound and executed. Boys on the threshold of puberty were inspected to determine whether they had grown pubic hair. If they had, they were classified as men and beheaded. If not, they were spared, only to be sold into slavery.

The massacre of Banu Qurayza was not simply an episode in tribal warfare. Instead, it became enshrined in the very core of Islamic memory as a model of how to deal with Jews and other non-Muslims who resist Islamic supremacy. The violence and terror was the point, and approved by Allah himself, according to their prophet Muhammad, who told everyone the ruling wasn’t just his personal judgment but from above.

This elevated what would otherwise be a brutal act of vengeance into a timeless precedent, sanctifying violence and making it a religious template. From this moment onward, jihad against Jews and other non-Muslims became institutionalized.

After Banu Qurayza, Muhammad turned his sights on the Jewish oasis of Khaybar, north of Medina. Khaybar was fertile, wealthy, and strategically important. In 628 AD, Muhammad’s forces besieged the oasis. The Jews resisted but were eventually overwhelmed. Many were killed, their women taken as slaves. Muhammad personally took a woman named Safiyya bint Huyayy, whose father, husband, and male relatives had just been executed, as his concubine, and had sex with her the same day.

In an authentic saying, Muhammad declared: “I swear by Allah that I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.”

Later, when Muslims controlled the entire region of North Africa and the Middle East, Jews were tolerated under the humiliating conditions of dhimmi status: second-class subjects required to pay the jizya tax “with willing submission and feeling themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29). For centuries, Jews could live in Muslim lands so long as they accepted public humiliation: distinctive clothing, prohibitions on carrying weapons, restrictions on building synagogues, and constant reminders of their inferiority. Whenever Jews stepped outside those boundaries, they risked massacre.

In Granada in 1066, a Muslim mob killed the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred the city’s Jews; the traditional estimate puts the dead at roughly 4,000. In Morocco, Jews were forced into segregated quarters known as mellahs. In Mashhad in 1839, the Allahdad pogrom forced the Jewish community to convert to Islam, leaving many survivors to practice Judaism secretly, afraid of exposure. In Safed in 1834, the Jewish quarter endured thirty-three days of pillage and persecution. In Hebron in 1929, 67 Jews were butchered; that same year, another massacre struck Safed.

These Jews were not being attacked by people protesting an Israeli government that did not yet exist. Their suffering belongs to a history of persecution that cannot be explained away by invoking the occupation, settlements, Zionists, or Netanyahu. Anyone who claims that anti-Jewish violence began with Israel must first account for the Jews murdered, dispossessed, and forced to abandon their faith long before its establishment.

The historic violence of Islam has existed long before today’s progressives in the squad could try to pretend their hatred for a Jewish state is based solely on a distaste for “occupation.” Their narrative is incongruent with the truth.

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Danny Burmawi is an author, political commentator, and founder of the Ideological Defense Institute. His book, “ISLAM, ISRAEL AND THE WEST: A Former Muslim’s Analysis,” can be ordered here. Subscribe to his newsletter here.

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