I just finished reading a history book about the founding of Islam......

[JohnT]

God, Will Durant is just lost on you people.

[Ned]

Originally posted by JohnT
God, Will Durant is just lost on you people.

What is your point, John? Here is the passage you quoted from Durant. I orignially raised the issue of the Arabs "sacking" Rome in 846 to illustrate the point that the Arab efforts to conquer Western Europe did not end in 732.

"In regards to the Moslem "sack" of Rome, here's what Will Durant says:

"Fortified by mastery of the Mediterranean, the Saracens now looked appreciatively on the cities of Southern Italy. As piracy was quite within the bounds of honored custom at this time, and Christians and Moslems raided Moslem or Christian shores to capture infidels for sale as slaves, Saracen fleets, mostly from Tunisia or Sicily, began in the ninth century to attack Italian ports. In 841 the Moslems took Bari, the main Byzantine base in SE Italy. A year later, invited by the Lombard Duke of Benevento to help him against Salerno, they swept across Italy and back, despoiling fields and monasteries as they went. In 846, eleven hundred Moslems landed at Ostia, marched up to the walls of Rome, freely plundered the suburbs and the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, and leisurely returned to their ships. Seeing that no civil authority could organize Italian defense, Pope Leo IV took charge, bound Amalfi, Naples, Gaeta, and Rome in alliance, and had a chain stretched across the Tiber to halt any enemy. In 849 the Saracens made another attempt to seize the citadel of Western Christianity. The united Italian fleet, blessed by the Pope, gave them battle, and routed them - a scene pictured by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican. In 866 the Emperor Louis II came down from Germany and drove the marauding Moslems of south Italy back upon Bari and Taranto. By 884 they were expelled from the peninsula.

... Italy, perhaps Christianity, had had a narrow escape; had Rome fallen, the Saracens would have advanced upon Venice, and Venice taken, Constantinople would have been wedged in between two concentrations of Moslem power. On such chances of battle hung the theology of billions of men."

Source: The Story of Civilization, vol 4: The Age of Faith, Will Durant (1950). Page 290."

[Sirotnikov]

Except for the the conquest of Canaan (which was territorial rather than religious - while jews believed it was promised to them by god - no one was forced to change his religion), when were the jews ever violent?

Only when resisting occupation (greeks, romans) or fighting to ensure their freedom (babelon, assyria).