Muslim and Jew: Origins, Growth, Resentment seeks to show how and why Islam and Judaism have been involved in political and theological self-definitions using the other since the seventh century. This short volume provides a historical and comparative survey of how each religion has thought about the other and, in so doing, about itself. It confines itself to those points at which Judaism and Islam intersect and cross-pollinate, and explores how this delicate process continues into the present with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Muslim and Jew thus seeks to move beyond the intersection of a monolithic Judaism and a monolithic Islam and instead examines and organizes the messiness of the encounter as both religions sought to define themselves within, from, and against the other.
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Word on Transliteration
Introduction: The Anatomy of a Relationship
Chapter One: Origins
Chapter Two: Growth
Chapter Three: Resentment
Conclusions: Disengagement
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Aaron W. Hughes is the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His numerous books include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (2012), Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (2013), and Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017).
"In Muslim and Jew, Aaron Hughes transcends traditional historiography about Jewish-Muslim relations and tired paradigms of cultural borrowing to provide us with a more interesting and complicated picture of the relationship between these two communities from the foundations of Islam to the present."
Philip Ackerman-Lieberman, Vanderbilt University, USA
