The title of David Freidenreich's book is deliberately provocative: Jewish Muslims might lead the reader to wonder about previously unknown syncretic movements, or stir thoughts about unusual combinations of ethnicity and religion. However, the subtitle and the introduction of the book quickly redirect us from identity to representation: how and why did Christians conflate Jews and Muslims? This conflation is well known to medieval historians – it is difficult to avoid in Christian texts. But the association is often taken for granted, and Jewish Muslims explore how this association developed across eastern and western Christian traditions, beginning with letters of Paul and going into the seventeenth century, with an epilogue that discusses contemporary events.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, “Biblical Muslims,” uses Paul's letter to the Galatians to explore how Christians understood Muslims not through the lens of experience or contemporary information, but through the lens of well-established anti-Jewish tropes. Paul's interpretation of the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar was intended to warn his followers to avoid preachers who urged them to follow Jewish law in matters such as circumcision. Paul understands Hagar as the mother of those who misunderstand scripture and are enslaved to the Law, while the community that Paul has established descends from Sarah and are the “children of promise.” A century later, Paul's exegesis was understood to be about Christians (sons of Sarah) and Jews (sons of Hagar), as Freidenreich traces in chapter 1. With the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, this frame became useful as a way to make sense of Islamic domination (chapter 2). Arabs ascribed their origins to Ishmael and Hagar as did their neighbors; thus, the metaphorical genealogy of Jews overlapped with the claimed biological descent of Muslims from Ishmael and Hagar. When added to the very broad parallels between Jewish and Muslim practice from a Christian perspective (circumcision, avoidance of pork, and so on), Christians understood Muslims through Biblical tropes previously applied only to Jews. Freidenreich suggests that Paul's arguments were written from the perspective of a community facing persecution by a more powerful rival, a perspective that matched the feelings of Christian communities under Islamic rule. Chapter 3, “Drive Out the Slave Woman,” examines how the story of Hagar serves to legitimate acts of violence against Muslims, whether in war or against Muslim communities living under Christian rule. Chapter 4 examines the conflation of the Dome of the Rock with the Temple of Solomon.
The second part, “Judaizing Muslims,” moves away from the impact of Paul, and explores the many ways the conflation of Jews and Muslims was put to use. Chapter 5, for example, examines dialogues between Christians and Muslims among Syriac-speaking Christians in the seventh to ninth centuries (John and the Emir, Disputation between a Muslim and a Monk of Bet Halé), where the Muslim interlocutor serves to inculcate Christians with the appropriate Christian values. The Muslim makes a better opponent than a Jew, Freidenreich argues, because Muslims were perceived as intellectually and politically powerful, and therefore a more worthy opponent in debate. Chapter 6 examines stories of the origin of Islam, and the way Christians tied that origin to Jews and Judaism (Theophanes, Al-Kindi, Petrus Alfonsi). Chapter 7 turns to origin stories among Latin Christians (Otia de Machomete, Roman de Mahon). Muslims, like Jews, become useful “to think with,” as David Nirenberg has argued, and the real target was other Christians, whether heretics or lax Christians.
The third section, “Anti-Christian Muslims,” covers the most extreme forms of anti-Muslim arguments, from claims that the links between Jews and Muslims were so strong that Muslims could be blamed for the death of Christ (chapter 9), to conspiracy theories in the fourteenth century that linked Muslim rulers to Jewish communities in France seeking to destroy the realm through leprosy (chapter 10), to the elevation of Muhammad as the anti-Christ, both in terms of apocalyptic scenarios, but more importantly as the “idol” that all non-Christians adore, resulting in the claim that Pilate, for example, was a worshipper of Mahomet (chapter 11). The final chapter turns to the writings of Luther, and unsurprisingly, also returns to Paul and Galatians.
Freidenreich shows remarkable scope in discussing material from Syriac dialogues from the seventh century to Luther in the sixteenth, and his arguments certainly clarify medieval conflation of Jews and Muslims. I learned a great deal from the book; I was unaware of the long history of Paul's exegesis in Galatians, for example. But the scope of the book inevitably leads to a loss of specificity; the Armenian historian Sebeos is analyzed alongside Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem; while both can be connected as “seventh-century eastern Christians,” their intellectual, cultural, and religious worlds were utterly distinct. The reader might also wonder how the pattern that Freidenreich identifies fit in with broader scholarship on religious and ethnic polemic. The pattern of dividing the world in the categories of “us” and “not-us” is certainly not limited to medieval Christians.
The book is written in a very accessible style, with minimal endnotes, and would be quite useful in an undergraduate course. Freidenreich takes care to explain terms and historical context for a broad audience. The book also contains a number of images; the Press is to be commended for their inclusion while still keeping the price of the volume low.
