Convivencia?

Have, historically, Jews and Muslims got along better than Jews and Christians?  Marc Cohen argues for the "yes" side:

The idea that modern Arab antisemitism comes from a medieval, irrational hatred
of the Jews, similar to the antisemitism of Christianity, with its medieval origins, cannot be sustained. Understood as a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and
stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, infused in its
modern, secular form with racism and belief in a Jewish conspiracy against mankind--
antisemitism is not an indigenous or inherent phenomenon in Islam.11 It was first
encountered by Muslims at the time of the Ottoman expansion into Europe, which
resulted in the absorption of large numbers of Greek Orthodox Christians.12 This
Christian antisemitism became more firmly implanted in the Muslim Middle East in the
nineteenth century as part of the discourse of nationalism. Seeking greater acceptance in
a fledgling pan-Arab nation constituted by a majority of Muslims, Christians in the Arab
world, aided, among other things, by European Christian missionaries, began to use
western-style antisemitism to focus Arab/Muslim enmity away from themselves and onto
a new and, to them, familiar enemy. This Christian antisemitism has since become
absorbed into the fabric of Islam as if it were there from the start, when it was never there
from the start at all. The widely read Arabic translations of the late-nineteenth century
Russian-Christian forgery, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," seems to many
Muslims almost an Islamic text, echoing old themes in the Qur'ān and elsewhere of
Jewish treachery toward Muhammad and his biblical prophetic predecessors. The
"Protocols" seem all the more credible in the light of the political, economic and military
success of Israel. Sadly, the pluralism and largely non-violent attitude towards the Jews
that existed in early and classical Islam seems to have lost its public face. Equally sad,
age-old Jewish empathy with Islamic society among Jews from Muslim lands, and
memory of decent relations with Muslim neighbors in Muslim lands in relatively recent
times, have similarly receded. Comparative study of Jewish-gentile relations in
Christendom and in Islam explains the difference between the two societies, though it
does not make present-day Arab antisemitism any less unfortunate than its Christian
roots. One can only hope for a time when a just and peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli
conflict will allow a correct memory of the past to play a role in attitudes of the present.

Thanks to Medievalists.net and Al-Biruni.

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