5.813 5..375 1.043.Judaism Judaism
islamislam
and
The Convergence of
Religious, Scientific, and
Cultural Dimensions
Edited by Michael M. Laskier and Yaacov Lev
Laskier
and Levupf
The Convergence of Judaism and i
slam
ISBN 978-0-8130-3649-
university Press of Florida
http://www.upf.com
HISTORY/RELIGION
“Scholars working on the history, culture, literature, and thought of Middle Eastern Jewry,
or Jews in Islamic lands, will find this book to be essential.”—Daniel Frank, Ohio State
University
“Represents a careful study of a contentious topic—the meeting of Judaism and Islam in the
medieval and pre-modern periods. The modern, largely polemical debate over how golden
was the ‘Golden Age’ of Muslim-Jewish relations has clouded and distorted the fascinating
and complex relationship between these two religions and their communities of believers.
Neither symbiosis, dependency, mutual borrowing, nor oppression can express the complex
nature of the relationship, and it is this truth that becomes so evident from reading this
excellent collection. This work is a sober celebration of an agelong past, but one from which
we have yet much to learn.”—Reuven Firestone, co-director for the Center for Muslim-
Jewish Engagement, University of Southern California
The Convergence of Judaism and Islam offers a fresh examination of Muslim and Jewish
cultural interactions during the medieval and early modern periods. The fifteen interdisci-
plinary studies assembled by editors Michael Laskier and Yaacov Lev investigate the com-
plex relationships between these two monotheistic religions and reveal that, with respect
to cultural diversity and professional cooperation, Jews and Muslims coexisted relatively
peacefully for centuries.
As demonstrated in the editors’ companion volume, The Divergence of Judaism and Islam,
these relationships would quickly deteriorate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
That fact often colors our view of early religious, scientific, and cultural interactions between
Jews and Muslims. These essays remind us that this period of free exchange of information
fostered important advancements in math, medicine, and the law. Fascinating chapters on
early Islam and the shaping of Jewish-Muslim relationships in the Middle Ages shed light on
the legal battles over the status of synagogues in twentieth-century Yemen or the execution
of a fourteen-year-old girl in nineteenth-century Morocco.
In an essay that sets the tone for the volume, Norman Stillman proposes we use the term
“commensality”—the promotion of mutual advantage while living in a shared environ-
ment—to best describe the nature of the relationship. Avoiding a chronological approach
and giving equal weight to both cultures, The Convergence of Judaism and Islam is sure to
provoke controversy and discussion as it seeks to enrich our understanding of the multifac-
eted relationship between Judaism and Islam.
Michael M. Laskier, professor of Middle Eastern studies and director of the Menachem Begin
Center and Endowed Chair for the Study of Resistance Movements at Bar-Ilan University, is the au-
thor or editor of numerous books, including North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century, winner of
the U.S. National Jewish Book Award. Yaacov Lev, professor of Islamic medieval history and chair
of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University, is the author of Charity, Endow-
ments, and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam.