Synopses & Reviews
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In
Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today.
There have been countless scripture-based studies of the three religions of the book,” but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each otherall in the name of Godin periods and places both long ago and far away. Nirenberg argues that the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the others over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three neighbors” defineand continue to definethemselves and their place in terms of one another. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage; to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination; to strategies for bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetry, Nirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to produce the futuretogether.
Review
“Written in clear language and with immense erudition by a serious scholar, Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam is a unique and thoroughly unconventional work that will certainly stimulate a great deal of critical discussion.” Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Review
“Providing an attractive perspective on the marketplace of ideas and beliefs that united and divided Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean world, this is a remarkable book. Clear, thoughtful, the harvest of fifty years of labor in fields largely verdant and occasionally stony, Professor Lassner’s book describes and explains the formation of the great monotheistic communities—and also provides a history of the development of the scholarly discussions that have enlivened, illuminated, and occasionally tarnished mutual understandings. A century ago, the great scholar of the spread of Islamic civilization and the mutual exchanges with the Jewish and Christian communities was Ignaz Goldziher, who astonished the teachers of Cairo with the depth of his knowledge and his empathic attitude. Lassner embraces Goldziher’s textually oriented critical outlook while retaining as well the great orientalist’s empathy for Islamic civilization.” Ross Brann, Cornell University
Review
“Jacob Lassner’s new study of the interaction among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in both history and historiography is a learned, energetic romp through Islamic history, Western scholarship on Islam, and Muslim views of Western Islamic scholarship. It is an unexpectedly personal book, bespeaking unflagging, even infectious, enthusiasm for the study of Islam on the part of an erudite senior academic authority on Islamic history. Demolishing the late-twentieth-century attacks on orientalism, it conveys the author’s pride in being an heir to the great orientalist tradition that began in nineteenth-century Germany and continues in our own time to illuminate Islam using the tools of philology and history. Written in a conversational voice, without footnotes or technical digressions, the book will be an eye-opener to anyone who is interested in Western and Islamic interaction.” Daniel J. Lasker, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev - Medieval Review
Review
“[T]his book is a very substantial undertaking, tightly packed with both detail and analysis.” Norman A. Stillman
Review
“The study is written in clear language with immense erudition and will certainly stimulate a great deal of critical discussion. . . . . We owe Lassner a debt of gratitude for gathering together so much material and presenting a well-documented account of an important phase of Islamic history. The volume is to be highly recommended to students of Islamic civilization.”
Review
"Highly recommended."
Jewish Review of Books
Review
“Jacob Lassner [is] one of the greatest authorities on medieval Islam. . . . [These] essays, with their mass of fascinating information and their challenging and often provocative suggestions, are immensely stimulating.”
Review
"Highly recommended."
Ismail K. Poonawala - Comitatus
Review
“[T]his book is a very substantial undertaking, tightly packed with both detail and analysis.” T. M. May - Choice
Review
“The success of this book is a function of Jacob Lassners ability to write clearly and concisely with a tone of authority about the Abode of Islam, a subject which he has closely studied for years, using the best scholarly tools the western world has to offer. . . . This book can be read profitably by both western non-Muslims and eastern Muslims, by experts and the general public, namely by anyone who has an interest in understanding todays religious controversies in the context of a much wider historical perspective.” Norman A. Stillman - Jewish Review of Books
Review
“Neighboring Faiths provides a cogent and powerful intervention into one of the most debated topics and thorniest issues in the history of the late medieval West: How did Christians, Muslims, and Jews live with each other and think about one another? The book will be of extraordinary importance not only for specialists in the field but also for general readers and anyone interested in the relations among the three religions and in the enduring discussion on ‘the clash of civilizations, an argument Nirenberg demolishes in an elegant but forceful manner. There are no books presently in print that even approach Nirenbergs in terms of its themes, thoroughness, or interpretive thrust.”
Review
“Using medieval Iberia—the ‘land of three religions—as his principal point of departure, Nirenberg highlights the dynamic, often ambivalent and fractious, yet interdependent relationship among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Whether focused on matters of scripture or sexuality, philosophy or poetry, conversion or conflict, he offers a brilliant and provocative demonstration of medieval conceptions of both race and religion. Neighboring Faiths is scholarship at its very best, successfully challenging current notions about the so-called clash of civilizations and even Benedict XVI on the supposed incompatibility of Christianity and Islam.”
Review
“Neighboring Faiths maneuvers masterfully between readings of the tense and sometimes violent multicultural Iberian past and bold assessments of their lessons for our tense and sometimes violent multicultural present. Nirenberg has an uncanny knack for dwelling on—and in—interstices, and for asking the difficult questions that ‘being between often prompts. This is a keenly intelligent, cautionary collection—one that makes eloquent connections across the centuries.”
Review
“Nirenberg succeeds in cultivating a sensibility that allows us to discover in the past a stimulus to critical awareness about the workings of our own assumptions about the relations among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and habits of thought. Among those habits is the conviction that our religious traditions are independent of one another, that they are stable, and that one contains truth and tolerance while the others do not. Conversely, this book proposes the interdependence of these religions, a process in which they are constantly transforming themselves by thinking about one another in a fundamentally ambivalent form of neighborliness.”
Review
"Parables of Coercion is a fascinating and important work, participating in some of the most crucial conversations now taking place within Jewish and Islamic studies, as well as at the crossroads of Iberian and New World studies. While Kimmel’s book will be read eagerly by specialists in these fields, its impact will stretch far beyond, attracting a readership interested in how we became the kind of people we are today, in terms of religion, secularism, and modernity itself."
Review
"It's no surprise that Nirenberg's new book, Neighboring Faiths, isn't a feel-good story about how we can all get along. The identities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, he argues, are fundamentally enmeshed; how one group thinks about itself cannot be separated from how it thinks about the others. . . . If Nirenberg is right that ideas matter, especially once they have hardened into what he calls 'habits of thought,' our concern about the future relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims should make us study the ideas they had about themselves and one another in the past."
Review
"This thoughtfully argued and innovative book deals with religious coercion and scholarly innovation. Abandoning the well-trodden path that erroneously renders Spanish forms and narratives of religious discipline only comprehensible as religious intolerance, Kimmel explores the relationship between debates about religion on the one hand and the conditions of knowledge production on the other. He focuses on the debates over the relationship between form and content, heresy of the heart and public orthodoxy of the tongue to show that it was not simply a theological or political issue. As Kimmel shows, the breach between public ritual and private faith corresponded to a second and more troubling chasm between word and meaning."
Review
"Kimmel has written a fascinating study of the learned cultures built out of a century of Spanish Christian intolerance toward Islam, beginning with the coerced conversion of Spain's Muslims to Christianity in the early sixteenth century, to the expulsion of the Moriscos (as the converts and their descendants were called) in the early seventeenth. He shows us how the evolving 'Morisco question' animated the emergence of disciplines such as philology, history, theology, political theory, and economics. In the process, he provides us with an alternate and disquieting history of our own scholarly, political, and religious practices."
Review
"Nirenberg unpacks five hundred years of Western fantasies about Islam, ranging from barbarous invaders to utopian tolerance, a phenomenon he labels the 'inseparability of exclusion and inclusion.' . . . The essays in this book are learned, provocative, and consistently thought-provoking."
Synopsis
In Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages definedand continues to define todaythe political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to throw new light on the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth century. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly discovered medieval sources that describe life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, he considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and, not the least, for the highly contentious global environment of today.
Synopsis
Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that in the Middle Ages definedand continues to define todaythe political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Looking closely at the social and political status among medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Islamic lands from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal documents with other, newly discovered sourcesincluding private letters and thousands of other textsthat described life as it was actually lived among the three Mediterranean communities. In Lassners account, these documents bear dramatic witness to the relations, borrowings, transfer, absorption, and circulation of cultural artifacts among the three faiths. He paints a very different picture of the interaction among the three religions than much of the scholarship since the eighteenth century has described. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out in the real world of medieval Christian and Jewish communities under Muslim rule.
Synopsis
This book represents the culmination of David Nirenbergs ongoing project; namely, how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other in the Middle Ages, and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. There have been scripture based studies of the three religions of the book” that claim descent from Abraham, but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each otherall in the name of Godin periods and places both long ago and far away. Whether Christian Crusaders and settlers in Islamic-ruled lands, or Jewish-Muslim relations in Christian-controlled Iberia, for Nirenberg, the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the other over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three neighbors” define (and continue to define) themselves and their place in the here-and-nowand the here-afterin terms of one another. Arguing against exemplary histories, static models of tolerance versus prosecution, or so-called Golden Ages and Black Legends, Nirenberg offers here instead a story that is more dynamic and interdependent, one where Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities have re-imagined themselves, not only as abstractions of categories in each others theologies and ideologies, but by living with each other every day as neighbors jostling each other on the street. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage, to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination, to strategies of bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetryNirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to coproduce the future.
Synopsis
Seth Kimmel challenges the conventional cultural and intellectual history of early modern Spain by arguing that religious intolerance, rather than consolidating the fields of canon law, philology, and history, instead created the conditions for a radical transformation in religious reform and disciplinary innovation in the Age of Inquisition. After the fall of Granada, Kimmel shows, competing scholarly communities in Castile and Aragon were forced to come to terms with the eradication of the traces of Judaism and Islam from the peninsula, obliging the legal scholars, linguistic experts, and historians of the time to go beyond their immediate fields of expertise in order to establish their political relevance and defend their interpretive methods to a wider audience. For Kimmel, it was the disagreements among the expertsinquisitors, university professors, Arabic and Hebrew scholars and translators, royal chroniclers, and even the Moriscos themselveson the issues raised by conversion, inquisition, biblical exegesis, and historical discourse that drove reform and innovation. It was the need for what we today call interdisciplinarity” that caused the disciplines, and the scholars in them, to reinvent themselves, with New and Old Christians working together to redefine the meaning of religious conversion and to redraw the limits of their particular fields. As Kimmel notes, we need to rethink our understanding of early modern Spanish scholarship and revisit documents with fresh eyes, because the methods we have used to gauge religious tolerance and intolerance are too limitingthey fail to recognize that peninsular and transatlantic debates of the period about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over those interpretive methods and pedagogical practices that demarcated one discipline from another.
Synopsis
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however,
Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly innovation.
In its careful examination of how Spanish authors transformed the history of scholarship through debate about forced religious conversion, Parables of Coercion makes us rethink what we mean by tolerance and intolerance, and shows that debates about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over the methods and practices that demarcated one scholarly discipline from another.
About the Author
Jacob Lassner is the Phillip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor Emeritus of Jewish Civilization and professor of history and religion at Northwestern University. His numerous works include The Middle East Remembered, Jews and Muslims in the Arab World, and Islam in the Middle Ages.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Neighboring Faiths
1 Christendom and Islam
2 Love between Muslim and Jew
3 Deviant Politics and Jewish Love: Alfonso VIII and the Jewess of Toledo
4 Massacre or Miracle? Valencia, 1391
5 Conversion, Sex, and Segregation
6 Figures of Thought and Figures of Flesh
7 Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities
8 Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of Jewish” Blood in Late Medieval Spain
9 Islam and the West: Two Dialectical Fantasies
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index