But the Jews would not content themselves with standing aloof; they must needs act on the offensive. They began by asking Moḥammad hard questions out of their law, and his answers they easily refuted from their books. They denied all knowledge of the Jewish stories in the Ḳur-án—though they knew that they came from their own Haggadah, which was ever in their mouths in their own quarter,—and they showed him their Bible, where, of course, the Haggadistic legends were not to be found. Moḥammad had but one course open to him—to say they had suppressed or changed their books; and he denounced them accordingly, and said that his was the true account of the patriarchs and prophets, revealed from heaven. Not satisfied with tormenting Moḥammad with questions on that Tórah which they were always wrangling about themselves, they took hold of the every day formulas of Islám, the daily prayers and ejaculations, and, ‘twisting their tongues,’ mispronounced them so that they meant something absurd or blasphemous. When asked which they preferred, Islám or idolatry, they frankly avowed that they preferred idolatry. To lie about their own religion and to ridicule another religion that was doing a great and good work around them was not enough for these Jews; they must set their poets to work to lampoon the women of the believers in obscene verse, and such outrages upon common decency, not to say upon the code of Arab honour and chivalry, became a favourite occupation among the poets of the Jewish clans.
These were offences against the religion and the persons of the Muslims. They also conspired against the state. Moḥammad was not only the preacher of Islám, he was also the king of Medina, and was responsible for the safety and peace of the city. As a prophet, he could afford to ignore the jibes of the Jews, though they maddened him to fury; but as the chief of the city, the general in a time of almost continual warfare, when Medina was kept in a state of military defence and under a sort of military discipline, he could not overlook treachery. He was bound by his duty to his subjects to suppress a party that might (and nearly did) lead to the sack of the city by investing armies. The measures he took for this object have furnished his European biographers with a handle for attack. It is, I believe, solely on the ground of his treatment of the Jews that Moḥammad has been called ‘a bloodthirsty tyrant:’ it would certainly be difficult to support the epithet on other grounds.