I do not normally write very short articles about small notices of jews in semi-anonymous chronicles here (often ascribed in this instance to Michael the Syrian), but I thought to make an exception in this case because it gives the reader a sense of the power of the jews in the lands of Islam during the early years of Islamic imperialism at the expense of non-jews and non-Muslims.
To wit the chronicle fragment relates that:
'And in the year, a thousand and eighty-three he deposed `Abbas [from G'zirtho] and in his place appointed Musa the son of Mus`ab, a Jew. Similarly [in Chalkis also] he appointed [a man] whom they call Musa the son of Sulaiman, both of them fierce and [unjust] men. [And he gathered all the money] of the world into the treasury, until no drachma or [denarius] was to be found [except with the merchants.]' (1)
The above likely means very little to my readers so let me explain a little.
The above is in relation to the appointment as governor of al-Jazirah, which consists of most of what is now Iraq and parts of Syria and Iran. The two warring parties are Ibrahim ibn Salih al-Abbas (an Arab) and Musa ibn Mus'ab al-Khath'ami (a jew).
Al-Abbas had been appointed to the governorship by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur (aka Abu Jafar) and was then deposed by Musa ibn Mus'ab who was then himself deposed the next year. Although we should note that Musa ibn Mus'ab was much in favour with the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur as he ended his days as the Caliph's governor of Egypt. (2)
The reason for Musa ibn Mus'ab's deposition is - made clear by the chronicle fragment in that this jew - who ruled Al-Jazirah in the name of Islam - was avaricious beyond belief and simply taxed his subjects to death leading to a revolt against him which threw off his yoke. It is also important to note that the jews - the chronicles reference to 'the merchants' - did not suffer or suffered proportionately less than the other people of al-Jazirah under the Judeo-Islamic yoke of Musa.
What this fragment from the chronicle makes very clear once again is that the jews were very powerful in the Islamic world as they were in the Christian world at about the same time for similar reasons in that they were disproportionately represented among the Middle Class (i.e. the merchants in medieval Christian and Islamic society) and as such held the purse strings which they could use to protect themselves from the religious and secular rulers of both societies.
It adds but another small piece of the puzzle in relating what I have come to the term the Islamo-jewish alliance against the West till the seventeenth/eighteenth century when the jews began to ally more with philosophic rationalists and Protestant Christian clerics in Europe in preference to the declining power of Islam and the burgeoning power of the West.
References
(1) E. Brooks, 1901, 'A Syriac fragment: Chronicle 754-813 AD', Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Vol. 54, p. 221
(2) Al-Tabari, Hugh Kennedy (Ed. And Trans.), 1990, 'Al-Mansur and al-Mahdi', 1st Edition, State University Press of New York: Albany, p. 71, n. 192