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Some years ago, as part of a special issue of this journal on “Anti-Semitism in Muslim Cultures”, I published a commentary on the lead paper which was entitled “Mass Hatred in the Muslim and Arab World: The Neglected Problem of Anti-Semitism” (Kressel, 2007: 197-215).1
In the commentary, I argued that “Muslims, as a religious community as a whole, have traditionally extended to the People of the Book (Jews and Christians and others) far more tolerance in their attitudes and in the actual .. protection of the Jews than the Christians” (Ramzy, 2007: 193). In the process of attempting to illustrate this, I committed an error of fact, mistakenly stating that
“…… Moses Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher and theologian, … fled from Christian intolerance in Inquisition riddled Spain, to Muslim Norwest Africa…” (p. 193).
Within a nano-second of this mistake being brought to my attention, I knew that I had committed a parapraxis, because, I had, in fact, fully researched the question of when and why Moses Maimonides fled from Spain eventually settling in and living out his long life in what is now known as Cairo, in Egypt;2 and, I knew, in fact, that Maimonides had fled from Cordoba in 1159, because a fanatical Muslim sect, the Almohads, was forcibly converting and murdering Jews (Carroll, 2001: 235). I knew, furthermore, that the Inquistion didn't even start until right around 1233, 74 years after Maimonides left Spain! So, the question to myself immediately became—why on earth blame the Christians for Maimonides' decision to flee Spain, when I had been consciously knowledgeable regarding the responsibility of the Muslim Almohads?
Through psychoanalytic self- reflection, it became rapidly apparent that the parapraxis, (a term defined by Salman Akhtar as “a consciously unintended faulty action that replaces or compounds the intended behavior. Slips of the tongue, slips of the pen….and other momentary lapses of memory are all examples…” (Akhtar, 2009: 204)), was embedded in