The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent in any way the editorial position of Euronews.
Last week in Brussels, I sat at a table with the chief rabbi of Iran, rabbis serving communities from Morocco to Kazakhstan to Nigeria, three European commissioners, and the ambassadors of Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan. Some of those rabbis lead tens of thousands; some serve a few families. That three Muslim-majority governments sent envoys to sit with rabbis is itself part of my argument.
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I had come to convene the board of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States, which we founded in 2019. The EU appoints envoys, funds civil society and negotiates agreements across the Muslim world; it debates migration, security, radicalisation and trade. What it almost never does is talk to the Jews who have lived in those societies for centuries. For many Europeans, Jewish life there belongs in a museum, when it should be part of the conversation.
The rabbis in that room carry something no report can supply: experience. For generations, Jews in Muslim-majority societies have learned to remain visible minorities while keeping working relationships with governments, clerics and neighbours. Iran’s chief rabbi, Yehuda Gerami, told the commissioners his community has lived there for more than 2,500 years, numbers close to 20,000, and asks not for politics but for understanding and practical support. We are loyal citizens, deeply rooted in the countries we call home — and that is what Europe should understand.
It would be dishonest to romanticise this world. Across the region, ancient communities were devastated in the twentieth century; the 1941 Farhud pogrom foreshadowed the collapse of Iraqi Jewry, and hundreds of thousands left amid expulsion, persecution and seizure of property. Their descendants form a large part of Jewish life in France today.
But collapse is not the whole story. Morocco has woven Jewish heritage into its national story more than any other Muslim-majority state; in Brussels this week, a rabbi from Casablanca recited a prayer for its king. Azerbaijan, one of Israel’s closest partners in the Muslim world, honours a fallen Jewish soldier as a national hero. In the Gulf, new communities have taken root since the 2020 Abraham Accords. Jewish life in the Muslim world is neither a tale of unbroken continuity nor of complete disappearance; it is loss, resilience and renewal at once.
That renewal is now under strain. Since October 2023, public Jewish life has grown more discreet. In the UAE it retreated after the murder of Chabad’s Rabbi Zvi Kogan in late 2024; in Dagestan, a mob stormed Makhachkala airport hunting for arriving Jews; in Tunisia, a guardsman opened fire near the Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, killing five. And yet Djerba’s community — one of the last strongholds of indigenous Jewish life in the Arab world — keeps building, and we have just rebuilt a mikvah in Tunis. None of these communities had any hand in the events that now endanger them.
Endurance is unglamorous work: kosher supervision, marriages, burials and schooling in places with almost no Jews left. In 2021 it meant getting Zebulon Simentov, long called the last openly practising Jew in Afghanistan, safely out. It has meant welcoming more than a hundred Muslim theology students into an Istanbul synagogue and answering every question honestly. They did not all leave agreeing with us — that was never the point. They left having met Jews, rather than ideas about Jews. And it means answering the phone when governments stop speaking. Trust cannot be improvised once a crisis begins; it has to exist already.
Europe can help sustain that trust with tools it already has, and the requests we brought are modest: recognise synagogue registrations, grant visas so rabbis can reach communities too small to have their own, protect cemeteries, let religious articles cross borders safely. None of it requires new machinery. The EU already runs interfaith work in Syria and trains scholars in Egypt to counter extremism. Extend that same effort to the Jews of the Muslim world.
Then go further. Europe rightly teaches the Holocaust and funds the fight against antisemitism; it should also introduce young Europeans — including young Muslims — to the living Jewish communities of the Muslim world. Invite the rabbis of Istanbul, Casablanca, Baku, Almaty, Abuja — and yes, Tehran — into its universities and public forums. No syllabus can replace a conversation with someone who has spent decades as a Jewish minority in a Muslim-majority state.
There is a shared interest here, too. Jewish and Muslim communities increasingly defend the same freedoms: when kosher slaughter is challenged, halal is rarely far behind, and when circumcision is questioned, both families face the same doubt. Rabbis and imams need not agree on theology, or on the Middle East, to stand together for basic rights — not as ceremonial interfaith dialogue but as practical democratic cooperation.
Europe reaches for medieval al-Andalus because it is a flattering precedent: proof that pluralism has European roots, and a golden age safely enough in the past to be admired without obliging anyone to act now. There is something real to admire — the Córdoba of the translators produced a genuine flourishing of philosophy, science and poetry that Muslims, Christians and Jews built together, much of it passing to the rest of Europe.
But it was never quite the paradise the nostalgia describes — and Arab writers are often the first to say so. The longing for al-Andalus has always run deepest in the Arab world itself, yet its coexistence rested on hierarchy and was broken more than once by persecution. Maimonides himself, born in Córdoba, fled as a boy when the Almohads told the Jews of the city to convert, leave or die. Even the Moroccan researcher Abdelkhak Najmi reads its warring kingdoms less as a golden age than as a warning for the divided Arab world of today.
The living examples ask more of us; that is the point of them. Coexistence admired in a museum costs nothing; the kind still practised in Djerba, Baku and Istanbul — imperfect, often tested — asks Europe to take part. If I had stopped believing it was possible, I would have resigned years ago. Instead, every week I witness quiet acts of friendship that never make the headlines.
When I looked around that table in Brussels, I did not see representatives of forgotten communities. I saw living connections between Europe and the Muslim world. That Europe so rarely uses them is a loss — and not only for the Jews.
Rabbi Mendy Chitrik is Chairman and Founder of the Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States; he himself serves as a rabbi in Istanbul, Turkey. The organisation includes rabbis active in Albania, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Turkey, Tunisia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.
