Hagar, Ishmael, Josephus,
and the Origins of Islam
*In memory of Menahem Stern
To me, it is impossible to look back on the life and work of Menahem Stern
without seeing him along with two other great scholars: Elias Bickerman
and Arnaldo Momigliano. In one way this is a false, or at least a foreshort-
ened, perspective. For these latter two, born in and respectively,
were both children of the relatively secure period before the First World
War. By the time that Stern was born, only a couple of decades later, in ,
the world had already been transformed. But all three were able to inherit
the finest traditions of the European classical scholarship of the nineteenth
century; all three, in different ways, combined that formal classical educa-
tion with the Jewish learning which was native to them; all three were forced
by the pressure of circumstances into emigration; and all three came by the
end of their lives to produce much of their work in English. In retrospect, I
wonder if the wholesale transplantation of European scholarship and science
into English-speaking environments in the middle of the twentieth century
will not seem a revolution comparable to the Renaissance itself.
That a man born in Bialystok should have written his major work, on the
treatment of Jews and Judaism in Greek and Latin authors, in English, was
thus a reflection of an immense, world-wide transformation. That he should
have done so as a professor in a university founded in Jerusalem in the year
of his birth, and that he should have taught, and also written, in Hebrew,
was a reflection of another change, whose importance can now hardly be
exaggerated: the power of national, or ethnic, historical and cultural tradi-
tions, whether truly preserved in written texts and communal observances,
*First published inJournalofJewishStudies (): –.