Common ground for Muslims and Jews

In the two years since President Bush left office, the proportion of Muslim Americans who consider themselves “thriving’’ has increased more than any other religious group. As a whole, they do not view themselves as outcasts - as many Islamic immigrant groups in Europe do - even though they’re well aware of the negative attention they’ve received since 9/11. This is tremendously good news for a nation whose policies could well have produced widespread alienation and suspicion among Muslim Americans.

Yet Muslims’ experience in America isn’t unique. The simultaneous polling of Jewish Americans, meanwhile, raises an intriguing possibility: Maybe Jews, a religious minority whose own loyalty was once considered suspect, are more sympathetic to their modern-day counterparts as a result.

It is not surprising that 93 percent of all Muslims believe that Muslim Americans are loyal to the United States; what is surprising is that Jewish Americans are much more likely than any other non-Muslim faith to see US Muslims as loyal. Eighty percent of Jewish Americans have trust in Muslim Americans as Americans. (Only 56 percent of Protestants and Mormons said the same.) Muslims and Jews are the most likely to believe that Muslim Americans have no sympathy for Al Qaeda. Indeed, it’s Protestants as a whole, representing more than half the US population, who have high levels of distrust and concern over Muslims in America.

In 1905, William Brandeis, whose American-ness was suspect because he was the first Jew named to the Supreme Court, wrote “What Loyalty Demands’’ - a powerful argument that adherence to his own religious values was the greatest form of fidelity to America. The obligation of loyalty, he argued, demands civic engagement and participation in government, which he saw as characteristics of his own faith.