Having been a practitioner of both religions at different times, before realizing that religion is a tool used to control people and that there is no god, I can tell you that the true history of what happened in regards to the battles between Mohammed and the Jews isn't really known.
Conditions change over time. The Ottoman Empire has been called the high-water mark of the Diaspora era. Jews under Ottoman rule were genuine second-class citizens with legally enforced rights.
[This assertion ignores an important footnote in Jewish history: the Jewish community in China. They were so well-received there (they paid their taxes, obeyed the law, bathed, taught their children to read, and understood sound business practices, every medieval Chinese elder's dream) that after a few generations they vanished through assimilation. Jewish leaders in modern America, with its compulsive tolerance and its constitutionally enforced freedom of religion, point to this "disturbing" event, and then to high-profile Jewish people in the USA such as Jon Stewart with his Americanized name and his Christian wife, and fear that the same could happen here.]
The holocaust however, which was a very public atrocity, known the whole world over, with survivors existing right up until very recently . . . .
Wikipedia lists at least one hundred living Holocaust survivors who have some claim to fame. There are surely many more who are not so famous. After all, the world is chock-full of people in their 80s, who were born between June 1922 and May 1932. Plenty of European Jewish children were born in that decade. Many died in the Holocaust, but a percentage survived, and a percentage of those survivors are still alive.
This is why it's so important for their stories to be collected and published ASAP, by any medium. First-person accounts are always more effective than hearsay.
Muslims are a type of Christian and Christianity was derived from proselytizing Jews who plagiarized the Canaanites' beliefs, if I recall correctly.
The way it was explained to me is that the Abrahamic creation myth, which begins the Torah/Old Testament, was cribbed liberally from the Babylonian creation myth. For a long time, the Babylonian empire was the political, economic and cultural center of Mesopotamia.
Considering the relationships among the Canaanite subgroup of the Semitic group of the Afroasiatic language family, I would say it's likely that the Jews are descended from the Canaanites.
The Canaanites were not Babylonians. Canaan was roughly the area now consisting of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and parts of Syria and Jordan.
And during the early Middle Ages, the Islamic world never slumped into as dark a "dark age" as most of Europe did.
Au contraire, Arab scholars painstakingly conserved and translated the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Progress in mathematics was made in that part of the world, building on the work of Hindu civilization.
It's ironic that what Muslims typically think of as Islamic "modernism", is what we in the West label "Islamic fundamentalism". It's something like a belated Protestant Reformation, an attempt to sweep aside centuries of what many Muslims perceive as corrupt and decadent (and secular) traditions, so as to return to what they piously but probably unhistorically imagine to be the moral purity of the earliest Muslim community, loyal and obedient to God. And to that rightly-guided community's divinely-ordained worldly success.
A couple of years ago I read a persuasive op-ed on this subject. The writer pointed out that Islam was founded roughly 600 years later than Christianity, and it produced the same main junctures in its evolution as Christianity did, which occurred more-or-less 600 years after their occurrence in Christian Europe. Calculating forward, he pointed out that if that eerie calendar echo continues, during this century Islam will enter its Reformation and Renaissance.
That may sound like a swell idea, until we recall how many decades of turmoil took place in Europe until the ideas of the Reformation and Renaissance became dominant.
I believe this reaction is historically disfunctional. It steers the new and more religiously militant Islam onto a head-on collision course with secular Global Modernity, both in the original Western version and the newer Confucian-inspired Asian version.
The writer I refer to regarded "the new and more religiously militant Islam" as an echo of the conservative Catholic Church, digging in its heels against Galileo and the other heretics. We know how that ultimately turned out. Today's Catholic universities teach the heliocentric version of astronomy.
The moderate Muslims of the USA and other countries far outside the religion's homeland may be the instigators of the Islamic Reformation.
