Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible deals with the way in which Judaism and its holy scriptures were viewed by nine medieval Muslim writers representing different genres of Arabic literature: Ibn Rabban al-ṭabarī, Ibn Qutayba, al-Ya‘qūbī, Abū Ja‘far al-ṭabarī, al-Mas‘ūdī, al-Maqdisī, al-Bāqillānī, al-Bīrūnī and Ibn ḥazm. After an introductory chapter on the reception of Biblical materials in early Islam and a presentation of the authors under review, the book focuses on their knowledge of Judaism and the text of the Hebrew Bible, and subsequently discusses issues frequently debated between Muslims and Jews, namely, the claim that the Torah contains references to Muḥammad, and the assertion that the Torah has been both abrogated and falsified. In the appendix, texts by Ibn Qutayba and al-Maqdisī are offered for the first time in an English translation.
This volume deals with the way in which the Jewish religion and its holy scriptures were viewed by nine medieval Muslim authors, representing different genres of Arabic literature: historical and chronological writing, polemical and apologetical literature, theology, and Koranic commentary.
The last century has seen the demise of age-old Jewish communal life in the Arab world, and there is now a struggle to overcome a mutual lack of understanding between the West and the Arab-Muslim world. Over the course of past centuries, there was a great sharing of creative and scientific knowledge across religious lines. Stories about biblical figures held to be prophets by both Judaism and Islam are one result of this relationship and reflect an environment where not only literary genre and modes of interpretation but particular motifs could be utilized by both religious traditions. This book details this historical interdependence that reveals much about much about common experiences and concerns of Jews and Muslims. The author's rich analysis focuses on the nineteenth-century Judeo-Arabic manuscript. The Story of Our Master Joseph--a Jewish text taking its form from an Islamic prototype (itself largely based on midrashic, Hellenistic, and Near Eastern material) extending back to the earliest human stories of parental favoritism, sibling rivalry, separatism from loved ones, sexual mores, and the struggles for a continued communal existence outside the homeland.
Jacques Waardenburg writes about relations between Muslims and adherents of other religions. After illuminating various aspects of Islam from an outside point of view in his volume "Islam" (published in 2002 by de Gruyter) his second volume changes the perspective: The author shows how Muslims perceived non-Muslims - particularly Christianity and "the West", but also Judaism and Asian religions - in many centuries of religious dialogue and tensions. The main focus is on Muslim minorities in Western countries and on religious dialogues of which he provides first-hand knowledge through his participation in several important dialogue meetings. After 50 years of research and personal involvement, Waardenburg aims at a mutual understanding and reconciliation of Islam and other religions, particularly Christianity, both on an international level as well as on a more local level where "old" and "new", Christian and Muslim Europeans live together.
Steven Wasserstrom undertakes a detailed analysis of the "creative symbiosis" that existed between Jewish and Muslim religious thought in the eighth through tenth centuries. Wasserstrom brings the disciplinary approaches of religious studies to bear on questions that have been examined previously by historians and by specialists in Judaism and Islam. His thematic approach provides an example of how difficult questions of influence might be opened up for broader examination. In Part I, "Trajectories," the author explores early Jewish-Muslim interactions, studying such areas as messianism, professions, authority, and class structure and showing how they were reshaped during the first centuries of Islam. Part II, "Constructions," looks at influences of Judaism on the development of the emerging Shi'ite community. This is tied to the wider issue of how early Muslims conceptualized "the Jew." In Part III, "Intimacies," the author tackles the complex "esoteric symbiosis" between Muslim and Jewish theologies. An investigation of the milieu in which Jews and Muslims interacted sheds new light on their shared religious imaginings. Throughout, Wasserstrom expands on the work of social and political historians to include symbolic and conceptual aspects of interreligious symbiosis. This book will interest scholars of Judaism and Islam, as well as those who are attracted by the larger issues exposed by its methodology. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This work, the first of its kind, describes all the aspects of the Bible revolution in Jewish history in the last two hundred years, as well as the emergence of the new biblical culture. It describes the circumstances and processes that turned Holy Scripture into the Book of Books and into the history of the biblical period and of the people – the Jewish people. It deals with the encounter of the Jews with modern biblical criticism and the archaeological research of the Ancient Near East and with contemporary archaeology. The middle section discusses the extensive involvement of educated Jews in the Bible-Babel polemic at the start of the twentieth century, which it treats as a typological event. The last section describes at length various aspects of the key status assigned to the Bible in the new Jewish culture in Europe, and particularly in modern Jewish Palestine, as a “guide to life” in education, culture and politics, as well as part of the attempt to create a new Jewish man, and as a source of inspiration for various creative arts.
The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered on the Bible. School children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centered culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."
Hebrew Texts in Jewish, Christian and Muslim Surroundings offers a new perspective on Judaism, Christianity and Islam as religions of the book. Their problematic relation seems to indicate that there is more that divides than unites these religions. The present volume will show that there is an intricate web of relations between the texts of these three religious traditions. On many levels readings and interpretations intermingle and influence each other. Studying the multifaceted history of the way Hebrew texts were read and interpreted in so many different contexts may contribute to a better understanding of the complicated relation between Jews, Christians and Muslims. These studies are dedicated to Dineke Houtman honouring her work as professor of Jewish-Christian relations.
