Jewish-Muslim Relations

This article is based on the enormous amount of documentation generated starting in 1935 by the notes and reports on the state of public opinion in Algeria issue by the Centres d'informations et d'études. My objective is to map out the nature of the evolution of Muslim-Jewish relations under the Vichy regime. I contend that, apart from several rare humanist community leaders, the majority of the Muslim population remained silent in the face of anti-Jewish legislation. Nonetheless, this legislation had only an opportunistic success : it was exploited when certain individuals found it advantageous to do so, in one way or the other. This kind of " utilitarian " behavior, however, was limited to legal claims, and did not spill over into violence.

Cette étude se fonde sur l'énorme documentation constituée notamment par les notes et rapports des Centres d'informations et d'études (CIE) dépendant du Gouvernement général de l'Algérie et conservés aux Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) à Aix-en-Provence. Cet important corpus a permis d'approcher au plus près - en dépit de ses biais évidents -, les relations judéo-musulmanes dans cette période particulière de vulnérabilité qui fut celle de l'Etat français. Quelle fut la part des musulmans dans ce climat délétère ? Si l'activité des trois grandes communautés - Européens, Musulmans et Juifs - est l'objet d'une observation attentive, celle des rapports intercommunautaires, particulièrement judéo-musulmans, constituent leur colonne vertébrale et, au fond, leur raison d'être. La crainte éventuelle de leur détérioration, susceptible de provoquer une explosion généralisée, pousse les autorités coloniales à " calmer le jeu " en quelque sorte, en prévenant le moindre incident.

American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over its Sahara and the normalisation of relations between Morocco and Israel could have lasting benefits for the cause of peace in North Africa and the Middle East.

For North Africa, the Sahara dispute between Morocco and the Algerian backed Polisario has dragged on for 45 years, making it one of the world’s oldest conflicts, perpetuating a status quo that undermines regional economic development and political cooperation between North African actors. During discussions of a potential referendum about the disputed territory’s status in 1991, neither Morocco nor Polisario could agree on who was entitled to vote, rendering a plebiscite almost impossible to implement. More recently, Polisario’s blockade of Guerguerat, the only border crossing between Morocco and Mauritania caused a Moroccan military intervention in order to maintain the security of trade and people. In response, Polisario declared the 29-year UN supervised ceasefire was over, and resumed its armed struggle.

At a time, when the international community is reflecting on creating a common cause for humanity to live in peace and fraternity and it is being argued that inter-religious harmony has to be created to promote possibilities of a better Jewish-Muslim relations that can help resolve the decades old conflict, it is painful to see such levels of hatred against Jews in the Indian Urdu press.

Despite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949-50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community's realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shariʿa norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.

In this presentation Samaw'al al-Maghribi's Ifham al-Yahud is considered as a contested space, apologetical and a frontier space. The Samaw’al charged against his fellow Jews as heretics, at the same time displayed as multiple narratives: narratives of Jewishness (e.g. diaspora) and an altered version of Jewish messianism, and Islamic civilization as the fulfilment of Jewish messianism

The introductory chapter to "Points of Contact: The Shared Intellectual History of Vocalisation in Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew", because who wants to download a whole book. You can also download the whole book here: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0271

The quranic Noah narratives provide a fascinating window into the making of Muhammad as an eschatological prophet. This book examines their form, content, and sources as a means of deciphering the scribal and intertextual nature of the Qur'an and the Jewish-Christian background of the messianic controversy out of which Islam emerged. The view that Muhammad was once tentatively though of as a new Messiah challenges our picture of Islam's origins.

In his Epistle to Yemen, Moses Maimonides answers an anonymous Jewish apostate's polemical claims about the truth of Islam. This apostate challenged the Yemenite Jews by presenting quotes from the Torah that Muslims considered proof of the future advent of Islam and Muḥammad (dalā'il). The identity of the apostate, however, has been disputed by researchers. This article proposes that the apostate Maimonides had in mind was Samaw'al al-Maghribī, the Jewish convert who authored Ifḥām al-Yahūd. The reasoning is based on unique characteristics of Samaw'al's tract that distinguish it from other polemical works. Samaw'al discussed the dalā'il with much greater sophistication than any earlier polemicist and used an advanced manner of presentation, in response to which Maimonides provided well-conceived refutations. This combination of Samaw'al's sophisticated polemical arguments and Maimonides's replies demonstrates that the two appear to be matched.

Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to one hundred thousand German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. Being German, Becoming Muslim explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today’s Europe.

Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment.

Being German, Becoming Muslim provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.

It is well accepted among scholars that the Mamluk period in Egypt and Greater Syria (al-Sham) is characterized by a serious deterioration in the position of Jews and Christians. The article demonstrates that the situation of the Jews was more complex, by contextualizing it in the social, cultural and judicial environment of the Mamluk Sultanate. In addition, the paper argues that the scholars’ view of the nadir in the situation of the Jews derives – to a large extent – from the problematic nature of the contemporary Muslim historiographical sources in respect to dhimmis. In order to achieve a more balanced perspective of the situation of the Jews, one should apply to other historical sources, that were less obliged to Islamic paradigms – or not at all.

My sincere thanks to Edgar Xavier (https://independent.academia.edu/EdgarXavier2) for kindly pointing out some errors of fact in this paper. On page 70, the Herald is incorrectly identified as an Indonesian Catholic newspaper. The newspaper is Malaysian. And, of course, Kuala Lumpur (as mentioned in footnote 49), is the capital city of Malaysia - not Indonesia. So the phrase in parenthesis at the end of the second paragraph on page 70 should read "(an Arabic loanword in Malay [Bahasa Melayu])".  Again, sincere thanks to Edgar for his close reading of the paper and his taking the trouble to point out these errors.

Jonathan

The Muslim scholar Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442 CE) devoted attention to Jewish festivals several times in his works, including once in al-Khabar ʿan al-Bashar fī Ansāb al-ʿArab wa-Nasab Sayyid al-Bashar. In this source, in which he describes seven (actually eight) Jewish festivals, it is clear that he relied on Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī (1272–1332 CE). Yet there are several significant differences between al-Maqrīzī’s account and al-Nuwayrī’s; this article will examine them.

המלומד המוסלמי תקי אלדין אחמד בן עלי אלמקריזי (1364–1442 לסה"נ) נדרש למועדי ישראל בעבודותיו כמה פעמים, ואחת מהן היא בחיבורו "אלכַ'בַּר עַן אלבַּשַר פִי אנְסַאבּ אלעַרַבּ וַנַסַבּ סַיִּד אלבַּשַר". בתיאור זה מופיעה סקירה של שבעה (כפי שנראה, למעשה שמונה) חגים יהודיים, ומדבריו ניכר כי הסתמך על אחמד בן עבד אלוהאב אלנוירי (1272–1332 לסה"נ). עם זאת, יש כמה הבדלים בין דברי אלמקריזי לדברי אלנוירי, ובמאמר זה אעמוד עליהם.

This paper develops a comparative perspective between two contemporary diaspora movements that claim being descendants from Jews and Muslims expelled from the Iberian Peninsula by the end of the Middle Ages. In particular, the research considers a group of Tunisian descendant of Moriscos and another of Israeli Sephardim. Instances of Moroccan Moriscos as well as of Tunisian Sephardim have occasionally been used to widen the picture. The article critically discusses the ways in which these groups look at the past, and how they articulate their diaspora invocations. By doing, so it perceives diaspora discourses as being crucially embedded in the social and political milieus that produces them. In that, the article is an illustrative account of modern perceptions of the ‘other’ within Muslim-Jewish relations today, vis-à-vis mythologized constructions of Spain and more generally of Western Europe. Overall, it attempt to scrutinize Morisco and Sephardim diaspora claims in light to their relationship to Spain, the past and to their religious others.

The Yemeni Jewish community which was in a midst of a period of instability, and which since 1861 witnessed three messianic eruptions showed that it was ready for changes. Yet, although it was receptive to enlightenment ideas that reached Yemen in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, it could not accept the passionate rejection of old traditions and usages promoted by some of its members. In 1912/1913-1914 in San'a, a dispute broke out over the study of Kabbala between the DorDèaDardàim and the Iqshim.Dardàim, is a mocking play on the name DorDèa (generation of knowledge), 1 a self described name of a group that represented the Yemeni Jewish enlightenment movement (Haskala) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their opponents, Iqshim (stubborn ones, who refused to accept DorDèa's ideas) who supported Kabbalist literature and customs (and who invented the name Dardàim) halted the spread of the DorDèa ideology. While the struggle between the two groups signified the inner debate between tradition and modern thought, DorDèa is the best known movement of modern Jewish Yemeni society whose history and aftermath touches other societal and cultural developments. It therefore may be used as a kind of emblematic term for modern Jewish Yemeni history. As a result of the Kabbala Dispute, the Jewish community of San'a and of central Yemen split into two rival groups. Yemeni Jewish immigrants in Palestine were also affected by this upheaval. The dispute 1 Shalom Ozeri, Galei or (Tel Aviv: privately published, 1974), 15. The nameDardàim was later appropriated by the members of DorDèa themselves.

One of the most frequent arguments in Islamic polemical writings is that allusions to Muḥammad exist in the Bible but were obliterated by the Jews in what Muslim polemicists call taḥrīf—falsification. One verse in particular, Deut. 33:2, is so commonly treated by these polemicists as to occur literally or in paraphrase in almost every anti-Jewish Islamic tract. The last of three place names that appear in this verse, Paran, Muslim polemicists claim, refers to Muḥammad and to Mecca and Islam. In this article, a review of the treatment of Deut. 33:2 in four Midrashic and two Targumic sources raises the possibility that the Paran–Muḥammad/Mecca/Islam nexus owes its origins to the Muslim polemicists’ appropriation of Jewish sources that either predate Islam or, perhaps, coincided with the dawn of Islam.

Jewish sources commonly refer to Muslims as “Ishmaelites” and to Islamdom as “the Kingdom of Ishmael” due to an alleged biblical genealogy that both Jews and Muslims accept. Other classic Jewish sources, however, associate pre-Islamic Arabs as well as Muslims with two other biblical nations, Ammon and Moab, even when, and even though, the “standard” appellations are at hand. The Ammon and Moab nexus is mentioned in academic literature but without much elaboration. This article investigates several Jewish mentions of the nexus – most of Hispano-Jewish provenance – and proposes five explanations for its use.

Résumé
Les sources juives qualifient généralement les musulmans d’Ismaélites et le domaine de l’Islam en tant que “royaume d’Ismaël”, et ce au nom de généalogies bibliques reconnues autant par les juifs que les musulmans. D’autres sources juives classiques, cependant, rattachent les Arabes préislamiques ainsi que les musulmans à deux autres nations mentionnées dans la Bible, Ammon et Moab, et ce indépendamment de leur traditionnelle appellation d’Ismaélites. Jusqu’à présent, le lien avec Ammon et Moab n’a été que sommairement évoqué dans la littérature scientifique. La présente étude examine plusieurs sources juives, pour la plupart d’origine hispanique, évoquant un pareil lien.

*Winner of the 2022 BIAJS Book Prize*

In the first few centuries of Islam, Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all faced the challenges of preserving their holy texts in the midst of a changing religious landscape. This situation led Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew scholars to develop new fields of linguistic science in order to better analyse the languages of the Bible and the Qurʾān. Part of this work dealt with the issue of vocalisation in Semitic scripts, which lacked the letters required to precisely record all the vowels in their languages. Semitic scribes thus developed systems of written vocalisation points to better record vowel sounds, first in Syriac, then soon after in Arabic and Hebrew. These new points opened a new field of linguistic analysis, enabling medieval grammarians to more easily examine vowel phonology and explore the relationships between phonetics and orthography. Many aspects of this new field of vocalisation crossed the boundaries between religious communities, first with the spread of ‘relative’ vocalisation systems prior to the eighth century, and later with the terminology created to name the discrete vowels of ‘absolute’ vocalisation systems. This book investigates the theories behind Semitic vocalisation and vowel phonology in the early medieval Middle East, tracing their evolution to identify points of intellectual contact between Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew linguists before the twelfth century.

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The term ‘Halal’ is becoming more visible: as an ingredient brand, a label and as a seal of approval. However, it is debatable whether current branding approaches encapsulate the full nature and spirit of what Halal is and means. The implications being that concepts of Halal will be changed and even eroded – affecting Muslims, brands and businesses.

The assassinations of the Prophet Muḥammad's antagonists were, according to the sīra, the harsh measures he took toward the consolidation of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. These incidents' narratives are often labeled in modern scholarship as "completely free of any tendentiousness." This contention seems, however, to be grounded in the lack of full cognizance of the sources' ulterior motives and of the extent of literary devices deployed in the traditional biography of the Prophet. The present study identifies the topoi appearing in the murder accounts of the Prophet's political opponents that shed light on the extent of these stories' dependence on each other and on the possibility of literary borrowing between them. This analysis shows that the use of literary tools in the sources are more widespread than what may appear at first sight. Our accounts exhibit striking resemblances with one another in both form and content, a point seriously undermining the trustworthiness of the sīra as a straightforward source for reconstructing the Prophet's life.