Muḥammad ibn Maslama's Role in the Assassination of Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf

Muḥammad ibn Maslama was a prominent companion of the Prophet Muḥammad who belonged to the Ḥāritha clan of the Medinan tribe of Aws. He played a key role in the events leading to the defeat of the three Jewish tribes of Medina and participated in the assassination of the Jewish leader Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf. Muḥammad ibn Maslama was connected to the Jews in various ways, as is evident, for example, from accounts claiming that he was Kaʿb's maternal nephew, and that his clan, the Banū Ḥāritha, lived in the predominantly Jewish oasis of Khaybar for nearly a year in the pre-Islamic period. Muḥammad ibn Maslama's role in Kaʿb's assassination has recently been argued to be of dubious historicity. This article offers a reassessment of this conclusion by placing the accounts of Muḥammad ibn Maslama's ties with the Jews, on the one hand, and those that depict him as their enemy, on the other, in the broader context of the change in the attitudes of some of the Anṣār towards the Jews during the Prophet's Medinan period. It argues that this change of attitudes is an attested historical pattern and, accordingly, that the fact of Muḥammad ibn Maslama's participation in the assassination of Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf can be deemed reliable.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rabbinate, particularly the chief rabbis, in the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire. There is a widely held conception that, throughout history, the rabbi was the ultimate Jewish leader and, in the absence of counterbalancing community institutions, had the final word in all matters. For Jews within the Ottoman Empire, the right to appoint their rabbis was part of the autonomy they enjoyed, an aspect of the community's life with which the imperial authorities were not involved. However, the creation in 1835 by the Ottoman authorities of the institution of ḥakham bashi transformed the chief rabbi from the senior religious figure within Jewish society into its senior government official. With this change, the long arm of the government began to reach into Jewish communal affairs, and as a result Jewish autonomy gradually weakened. From this point on, the chief rabbi's relationship with the rulers became the most important aspect of his position. This tendency was strengthened throughout the period of the Ottoman reforms (1839–76), during which security, protection, and equality before the law were promised to members of all religions.

Introduction

Josephus, cultural critic and chronicler of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73/4 CE), is one of the most polemical and compelling writers of the Roman Empire. He writes in Greek, as a Jewish leader of a revolt against Rome, who came over to the Romans. His extraordinary prose combines an extended self-justification, an explanation of Jewish culture to the Romans, through the medium of a culturally privileged Greek, and the riveting story of a failed rebellion against the dominant Empire of the Mediterranean, written now as an awkward insider of the corridors of power, recalling his own opposition to that power. Josephus, that is, writes on and through the boundaries of culture; if all history is written by victors, he writes as a defeated leader now with the triumphant new emperor: he crosses the boundary between victor and victim, insider and outsider. For the scholar interested in post-colonial writing, in cultural identity, in the rhetoric of self-fashioning, Josephus is a remarkable gift. What is more, the history he tells has powerful resonances today in the Middle East: it is he who gives us the authoritative account of Masada, the rocky desert fortress destroyed by the Romans and now a central icon of the state of Israel. The destruction of the Temple is a founding moment in the Jewish imagination, still rehearsed in ritual and political rhetoric. What more could one want from an ancient source? In 2003, Mary Beard invited us to imagine the euphoric reception classicists would give his work were it to be newly discovered today:This is the kind of text that ancient historians and literary critics would die for. It is the kind of text that makes the study of Greco-Roman antiquity so much richer than that of almost any other ancient society. The kind of text we just can't get enough of.