I admit I don't know very much about Jewish Law (Halaka), so I would like to ask my readers who do a question.
The Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayzah who lived in Medina was accused by Muhammad and the Muslims of treachery and breaking their treaty with the Muslims during the siege of Medina and the ensuing Battle of the Trench (so called because Medina was defended from the invading Meccan enemies of Muhammad by a large trench around the town). The Banu Qurayzah had supposedly intrigued with the Meccans and betrayed the Muslims, and so had to be punished. It must be admitted that the actual evidence for this betrayal, even in the Muslim sources, isn't very clear or consistent--it is said that they had made an alliance of some sort with the Meccans, leaving the eastern flank of the city exposed, but what this alliance actually consisted of is never made clear. Even if we do accept that Banu Qurayzah was involved in rather shady dealings with the Meccans, the sheer brutality of what happened next, especially considering Muhammad's treatment of the other Jewish tribes, who were merely exiled after their defeat, may lead one to suspect that perhaps Muhammad just wanted the Banu Qurayzah gone, since they were the last Jewish tribe left in Medina.
After the Meccans finally gave up the siege, Muhammad and his men went after the Banu Qurayzah, who locked themselves up in their houses a little to the east of Medina, and besieged them for 25 days. They finally surrendered, (supposedly) agreeing to abide by the decision of Sa'd ibn Mu'az, chief of one of the main tribes of Medina and selected by Muhammad, as to what would happen to them. It must be noted that Sa'd had already been mortally wounded in the fighting and would die soon after, and Muhammad must have known what he would decide.
Sa'd decided that the men of Banu Qurayzah would be slaughtered, the women and children sold into slavery, and the spoils divided among the Muslims. Muhammad's comment was, "You have given the judgement of Allah above the seven heavens," according to Ibn Ishaq's Sirat (life of Muhammad).
All 600-700 (the figure may have been as high as 900) men of the tribe were beheaded in the marketplace of Medina in a single day, their bodies dumped into a pit. Prepubescent boys were spared from death. The women and children were sold as slaves (no doubt of a sexual nature, so we can safely assume mass rape), and Muhammad chose for himself Rayhana, the wife of one of the slaughtered men, to be his concubine.
Before going any farther, I'd like to present to the reader these articles about the event:
Muhammad, the Qurayza Massacre, and PBS, by Andrew G. Bostom
A lengthy discussion of the Sirat of Ibn Ishaq's report of this event
Some hadiths from al-Bukhari's collection, considered the most trustworthy by Sunni Muslims
According to Yusuf Ali's notes to his translation of the Qur'an, (and I chose this because it reflects the view of quite a few Muslims):
Notes 3703, 3704 on Qur'an 33:26
Sa'd applied to them the Jewish Law of the Old Testament, not as strictly as the case warranted. In Deuteronomy 20:10-18, the treatment of a city "which is very far off from thee" is prescribed to be comparatively more lenient than the treatment of a city "of those people, which the Lord thy God does give thee for an inheritance," i.e., which is near enough to corrupt the religion of the Jewish people. The punishment for these is total annihilation: "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth" (Deuteronomy 20:16). The more lenient treatment for far-off cities is described in the next note. According to the Jewish standard, then, the Banu Quraiza deserved total extermination--of men, women, and children. They were in the territory of Madinah itself, and further they had broken their engagements and helped the enemy.
Sa'd adjudged them the milder treatment of the "far-off" cities which is thus described in the Jewish Law: "Thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: but the women and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself, and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee" (Deuteronomy 20:13-14). The men of the Quraiza were slain: the women were sold as captives of war; and their lands and properties were divided among the Muhajirs [those who had made the hijra, or flight, from Mecca with Muhammad--ed.].
Now, my question is, Is this correct? Did the Banu Qurayzah get what they deserved according to Jewish Law? Or is this just an excuse?
It must be noted that many Muslims today point to this story as proof that the Jews are treacherous and cannot be trusted, as well as being eternal enemies of Islam. It also may be seen as a prototypical pogrom, a massacre of the Jews, reflected in other such pogroms by both Christians and Muslims over the centuries, as well as an unnerving precursor to both the Holocaust and to current calls by far too many Muslims to eliminate both Israel and the Jews living therein. The story makes Muhammad look like a prototype of Hitler. For this reason...
Some Muslims (and others) uncomfortable with the story say that it never happened, pointing to articles like this one. This is similar to how some Muslims deal with Muhammad's wife Aisha being nine years old at the consummation of her marriage--they simply reject the hadiths, some narrated by Aisha herself (or at least said to be), that say she was. The problem is, though, that denying the Banu Qurayzah incident requires rejecting the Sira of Ibn Ishaq, the earliest extant biography of Muhammad (though only as preserved by many later writers), as well as seriously questioning the veracity of the hadiths. This is no problem if one is a critical Western scholar, but for a Muslim it raises insuperable difficulties. Hadith-rejecters are invariably considered to be heretics or apostates by orthodox Muslims, so needless to say you wouldn't get very far with this attitude at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Also, if Ibn Ishaq and al-Bukhari were telling a bunch of stories that weren't true about Muhammad, how can we know that anything they said about him was true? How then can we know anything about Muhammad's life or what he was like, if such forgeries and false stories so easily made their way into the Prophet's biography? How can you simultaneously extol Muhammad's generosity and good nature by telling a pleasant story from his life preserved in the Sirat of Ibn Ishaq, while rejecting the unpleasant parts dutifully recorded by the same writer? It is possible that nobody really knows what happened, but in that case, nobody really knows anything about Muhammad or the earliest Muslims either, or where the Qur'an came from, or what Islamic law consists of or even how to pray, as all these things are taken straight from the hadiths and biographies of Muhammad. True, Islamic law is supposed to be derived from both the Qur'an and Muhammad's Sunna (tradition) as recorded in hadiths, but in fact the legal content of the Qur'an is actually rather sparse and the wording frequently vague and open to question, needing some sort of explaination--you cannot build a whole legal system on the Qur'an alone. The vast majority of Islamic Law draws on the hadiths, including ones that explain the Qur'an's verses, both legal and otherwise.
Discussing the veracity of the Islamic sources is not what I meant to get into, but I guess it's inevitable. But it must be said that without them, there isn't much to discuss, as we have no independent account of Islam's origins and Muhammad's life. Anyway...
Was the treatment of Banu Qurayzah in accordance with Jewish Law? Especially as it was understood and applied by Jews in the 7th century CE/AD? It seems odd to apply Jewish Law applying to Jews fighting the Caananites in the 1200s BC/BCE to a situation in which Muslims are fighting the Jews in the 600s CE/AD. Also, I imagine that, considering the exacting standards of proof required for death sentences by rabbis in the Talmud, which said that a Sanhedrin that condemned someone to death once every 70 years was much too cruel, the "proof" offered in the Muslim sources wouldn't be considered anywhere close to convincing.
What do you think?
UPDATE:
Reader Tara sends along these thoughts, with the caveat that she isn't necessarily an expert on the subject, but I think it explains a lot about Jewish law and the many misunderstandings thereof:
I'm not an expert but I'll do my best with what I know!
You can't get Jewish law from the Torah. You just can't. You need the oral Torah, the Mishnah and the Talmud, to have Jewish law. Example - the Rebellious son whom the parents can take out and kill (according to the Bible). According to the Talmud: A son can be a rebellious son only between the time of the first spouting of pubic hairs and the filling out of the pubic hairs, or until thirteen, whichever time is shorter. In order to qualify as a rebellious son, he must eat a certain amound of meat in a certain way. If he is a rebellious son, his parents can only kill him if they are exactly the same size and speak with the same voice. etc etc. Basically, parents can never actually kill a rebellious son.
So, EVEN if this were Jewish law, the statement "Jewish Law of the Old Testament" is... meaningless, absurd, nonsense. You cannot rule halacha from the written Torah.
It also seems like Yusuf Ali is saying that it is the "law" for close cities that was applied. That makes no sense either because in the Torah it is specified that this applies only to certain nations "in the land that God has given you for an inheritance." The Hitti, the Emori, the Kena'ani, the Perizzi, the Hivvi, and the Yevusi. Also, this is to be done so that "they teach you not to do after all their abominations."
I see no way this can be applied to the Banu Qurayzah. They (obviously) do not beong to any of those peoples, they did not live in the land that 'God gave to the Jewish people as an inheritance,' and their crime had nothing to do with teaching abominations, and, as I understand Islam, could not, because Islam itself says that the Jewish religion does not practice abominations and that's why it should be tolerated.
This is a command that applies to a specific place at a specific time, it is not "Jewish Law," any more than God's telling the people to stay around the base of the mountain during the revelation at Sinai is "Jewish Law."
It should also be noted that if you take seriously the Biblical account of Israel's conquering the land, you don't see this actually being carried out.
In any case there is no way that the Bana Qurayza could have deserved this under any kind of Jewish thinking, since ultimately the loyalty of the Jewish people must lie not with either one of any other fighting factions, but with God.
Of course, if you believe that God was with the Muslims and that by betraying them, the Jews were betraying God, you could start to make a case that they deserved punishment. But by then you're already COMPLETELY out of the scope of Judaism.
Anyway, considering that it was considered appropriate for the Jews to launch an attack against the Romans in the first century, I have a difficult time believing that any rabbi would have believed that an attack and betrayal against the Muslims would have even been illegal, let alone deserving of slaughter. In any case,
Sometimes Judaism understands that God would allow another nation to defeat or oppress the Jews as a punishment for our sins, but that nation will also someday be punished by God for its mistreatment of us.
There is a concept in Jewish law that the law of the land is the law - at least as far as forbidding what is prohibited. Like, if the USA says you have to pay taxes, you have to pay taxes. If it says you can only marry one person, you can only marry one person, etc. But in that case you are being ruled according to the law of the land and definitely not according to Jewish law.
