There are two broadly different ways of understanding anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. One holds it as longstanding, that it is a permanent part of the religion. The second sees it as an importation from Christianity, from Europe.
The first view I associate with Ronald Nettler, a writer on the subject. He argues that the Muslim doctrine on Jews has been and is very negative. Go back to the Qur'an and other sources of Islamic religious inspiration, and finds that the majority of references to Jews are negative in the extreme. He also notes that these comments are more negative than the actual treatment of Jews, that there was a tension between the more tolerable circumstances of Jewish life and the less tolerant words in the religious doctrine.
This goes back right to the very beginning of the religion. There are some parallels between the Christian difficulty with Jews and the Muslim difficulty with Jews. Mohammed, the Prophet, clashed with Jews in his lifetime and this led to a sense of Jews being the great enemy of Islam. But in contrast to Christianity, Islam had no obsession with Jews; there is no time in the last millennium when Jews had a role nearly so great as they had in Christianity. It was not an obsession but a cool and casual disdain. Jews were seen as vestiges of an earlier religion, of an imperfect religion, as people without strength, without potential, as people of no great interest. Jews were tolerated in general if they accepted their inferior place within the Muslim world. However, if Jews had pretensions to power, then this was found to be outrageous and unacceptable.
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