Chapter Two
ARGUABLY, religious conflict played a formative—if not pivotal—role in Christian-Jewish and Islamic-Jewish relations during the Middle Ages. Hence, I open with an inquiry into the religious factor, specifically with a description and comparison of the early encounters of Christianity and Islam with Judaism and the Jews. I wish to determine whether the differences help explain the contrasting fates of European and Near Eastern Jewries in the Middle Ages. We shall see that this comparative approach can tell us much about the long-term relationship between each of the two new religions and its Jewish precursor. In Chapter 9, we consider interreligious polemics, an important feature of Christian-Jewish and Islamic-Jewish relations that grew out of the first interreligious encounters and changed as the Middle Ages progressed.
Christianity arose as a radical, messianic movement within Judaism. It was one of several varieties of Judaism that coexisted before the destruction of the second temple by Rome paved the way for the ascendancy of noncultic rabbinic Judaism. This messianic group—inspired by a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, believed to be the divinely sent savior of mankind—posed a great threat to the modus vivendi between the Jewish leadership (the Pharisees and Sadducees of the New Testament) and the Roman government. Christianity’s innovative, socially subversive interpretations of some of Judaism’s most fundamental tenets were particularly threatening to Jewish leaders whose authority had already been limited by the Romans. Not surprisingly, some Jews opposed, first, Jesus and his disciples, and then, the adherents of the nascent church, many of whom were Jews. The abuse heaped on the neophytes by skeptical Jews, and the collaboration of individual Jews with Roman authorities—to eliminate Jesus as a threat and to harass his followers, recounted in the tendentious Gospels but hardly worth doubting, given the state of affairs at the time—bespeak the tension in the Jewish-Christian conflict at its earliest stage.
This tension mounted during the succeeding centuries—the period of the apostles and the church fathers—as Christianity fought to survive and then grow in the face of hostile Jews and a suspicious, often belligerent, pagan Roman administration. Marcel Simon has examined this phase of the Jewish-Christian conflict.1 Paul, the Jew cum Christian apostle, widened the doctrinal gap between Judaism and Christianity in order to attract non-Jews. His chief innovation seems to have been assertions of the worthlessness of Jewish law, at least for gentile converts.2 Little in the corpus of sayings attributed to Jesus indicates that he himself advocated abandonment of Jewish law.3 Early Christian thinkers, however, adamantly expounded the doctrine that Jewish law had outlived its usefulness. They inculcated the idea of the dichotomy between letter (the Law, bound up with sin) and spirit (faith, Christ, the redeemer from sin). The Law came to be viewed as “good in principle but unfortunate in its practical effects.”4 Christianity subsequently replaced Jewish law with a new nomism, that of Christ. In this schema, Mosaic law appeared as a mere step on the way to the final, spiritual, messianic perfection of the incarnation.
In the second major departure from Judaism, Christianity challenged the Jews’ claim to divine election. Early Christianity failed in its attempt to attract masses of Jews, most of whom had reservations about the legitimacy of the Christian innovatio. Rome, for its part, viewed Christianity as an illegal association while continuing to hold to the centuries-old legal recognition of Judaism. To counter Jewish and Roman charges of revolutionary innovation, thinkers of the early church taught that there was nothing new about Christianity, that it was merely the fulfillment of Judaism. Christian theologians interpreted everything in the Old Testament as referring to Christ and the church. Thus, by means of allegorical (or “spiritual”) exegesis, any passage in the Jewish Bible could be construed as a prefiguration of something Christian.5 The wood borne by Isaac to the site where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son (Genesis 22:6) alludes to the cross; Simeon and Levi’s hamstringing of a bull (Genesis 49:6) prefigured the nailing of Jesus’ feet to the cross by the scribes and Pharisees.6 The church’s claim to represent the New (and True) Israel, fulfilling God’s word in the Old Testament through a New Testament, introduced a bold credo that would eventually undermine Judaism’s place in the historical scheme of things.
Success for the church did not come at once, nor was it achieved without adversity. Nearly three centuries were to pass before the Christian community would emerge from its marginal status and rise to the rank of official state religion. It would be incorrect, however, to view the road to legitimacy as one of unrelenting Roman persecution. At first, when the boundaries between Christian and Jew were not yet clearly drawn even by many Christians, Roman authorities could not easily impose widespread, continuous repression. At the end of the third century, Emperor Diocletian cracked down on the Christians with a ferocity that spawned a new breed of martyr. Some church writings accuse the Jews of wreaking their own violence against the Christians.7 Marcel Simon argues that Jews, especially in Palestine while they still retained a semblance of power, probably did persecute Christians and also provided Roman authorities with information to aid them in their own repression. As time went on, and the Roman government assumed the leading role in persecution, Jewish participation dwindled to individual or local acts.8
Regardless, an indelible memory of Jewish persecution of Christians became embedded in Christian consciousness. This memory, consistent with paradigmatic Old Testament accounts of Israelite animosity toward Moses and the prophets and also New Testament stories of Jewish persecution of Jesus and his disciples, would much later nourish fantasies about Jewish violence toward Christians, in turn invoked to justify militant Christian response, both verbal and physical, to Judaism and the Jews.
If Roman persecution and Jewish hostility threatened the future of the Christian community, Judaism’s continuing appeal to pagans presented another kind of challenge. Major military defeats at the hands of Roman legions in 70 C.E. and again in 135 did not weaken Jewish receptivity to converts from among the pagans. Every gain for Judaism was a loss for Christianity. For instance, Tertullian, a church father, in the second and third centuries, berates pagans attracted to Jewish rites:
By resorting to these customs, you deliberately deviate from your religious rites to those of strangers. For the Jewish fasts are the Sabbath and the meal of purity, and Jewish also are the ceremonies of the lamps, and the feast of unleavened bread, and the open-air prayer, all of which are, of course, foreign to your gods.9
Jewish proselytization seems to have continued in some places into the fourth century (although this, too, is debated), when the newly Christian emperors, alert to the threat, began to legislate severely against it.10 Jewish encouragement of pagan attraction to Judaism had stiffened Christian hostility and intensified the motivation to curb the Jews when the chance finally came.
Judaizing—the assumption by Christians of Jewish practices—was itself a major cause of hostility toward the Jews. Indeed, many specialists in early Christianity consider Judaizing among Christians and pagans to be more important than theological opposition to Judaism as a cause of anti-Judaism.11 During the early centuries of Christianity, many believers observed such festivals as the Sabbath and Easter on Jewish dates and in a Jewish manner. Indeed, some church ideologues defended these practices. The majority opposed them, however, with many treatises taking a staunch anti-Judaizing—hence, anti-Jewish—stance. Pseudo-Cyprian, writing probably in the first half of the third century, combined uncompromising opposition to Judaizing with caustic words for the Jews: “It should never be possible for Christians to stray from the way of truth and to trail like ignorant people after the blind and stupid Jews as to the correct day for Easter.”12 In the years 386 and 387, John Chrysostom, presbyter at Antioch, railed against the Jews. More than one scholar has asserted that Chrysostom’s verbal violence toward the Jews demonstrates a link between the horror of Judaizing Christians and ecclesiastical disdain for the Jews. Though directed at Christians and intended primarily to deter them from associating with Jews and observing their holidays, Chrysostom’s sermons bristled with denunciation of the Jews:
[The synagogue] is not simply a gathering place for thieves and hucksters, but also of demons; indeed, not only the synagogue, but the souls of the Jews are also the dwelling places of demons. . . .
How can you gather together in a place with men possessed by demons, whose spirits are so impure, and who are nurtured on slaughters and murders—how can you do this and not shudder? Instead of exchanging greetings with them and addressing one word to them, ought one not rather avoid them as a pestilence and disease spread throughout the whole world? Haven’t they been the cause of all kind of evil?13
In the words of Simon, Chrysostom, “the master of anti-Jewish invective . . . turns the Jews into an eternal figure, a type; and it is a monstrous, villainous figure, calculated to inspire in all who look at it a proper horror.”14 And while this churchman “represents, in respect of his anti-Semitism, an extreme case in the early Church ... a specifically Antiochene phenomenon,” he had substantial influence on both contemporaries and successors. “Every time the subject of the Jews crops up in the Christian writings of the period Chrysostom’s attitude and methods reappear.”15 His influence continued posthumously, as his sermons continued to be widely circulated. One scholar who has made a careful study of John Chrysostom’s writings holds that “the homilies on the Judaizers served to support and encourage the anti-Jewish attitudes that had become characteristic of the Christian tradition and to foster hatred, hostility, and persecution.”16
The anti-Judaism of Chrysostom, so influential for later Christian thought, might have led to early elimination of Judaism had it not been for the countervailing influence of Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa. In his writings, Augustine articulated the doctrine of “witness,” which, over the centuries, served to justify the preservation of the Jews within Christendom. In a post-Christmas sermon on the theme of the rejection of Jesus by “unfaithful Jews,” Augustine invokes the psalmist as prooftext:
For this reason, the Jews were expelled from their own kingdom and scattered throughout the earth so that, in all places, they might be forced to become witnesses to the faith which they hated. In fact, even after losing their temple, their sacrifice, their priesthood, and their kingdom, they hold on to their name and race in a few ancient rites, lest, mixed indiscriminately with the Gentiles, they perish and lose the testimony of the truth. Like Cain, who in envy and pride killed his just brother, they have been marked with a sign so that no one may kill them. Indeed, this fact can be quite definitely noted in Psalm 58 [59:11-22 in the Masoretic text]; where Christ, speaking as man, says: “My God has made revelation to me concerning my enemies: do not kill them lest they forget thy law.” Strangely enough, by means of this people, enemies of the Christian faith, proof has been furnished to the Gentiles as to how Christ was foretold, lest, perhaps, when the Gentiles had seen how manifestly the prophecies were fulfilled, they should think that the Scriptures were made up by the Christians, since things which they perceived as accomplished facts were read aloud as foretold by Christ. Therefore the sacred books are handed down by the Jews and thus God, in regard to our enemies, makes clear to us that He did not kill them, that is, He did not annihilate them from the face of the earth so that they might not forget His law, for by reading it and observing, though only outwardly, they keep it in mind and thus bring judgment upon themselves and furnish testimony to us.17
The Augustinian doctrine of witness, with its pragmatic rationale for accepting Judaism within Christendom, may have restrained Christian intolerance; but it could not efface a fundamental and potentially dangerous ambivalence in early Christianity regarding the other. In a thought-provoking paper on the scriptural roots of intolerance in early Christianity, G. Stroumsa applies insights from sociologists Troeltsch and Weber and from Freud, pointing to the ambiguous coexistence in the New Testament and other early Christian writings of “irenic” (peaceful) and “eristic” (violent) trends. Alongside the commandment to “love thine enemy” existed sentiments of hatred and hostility toward those who denied the message of salvation. The accommodation of Christianity to the imperfect, unredeemed world of the Roman Empire in the fourth century neutralized the irenic strain, while the encounter between the universal (“totalitarian”) command to love and the perceived perverse refusal of the Jews to accept the Christian dispensation spelled tension. Faced daily with a refractory Jewish presence that was legitimized by Roman law—and, we may add, restrained by the Augustinian doctrine of witness—Christianity resolved the tension by turning to religious intolerance.18
One need not concur fully with Rosemary Ruether, a Catholic theologian, that the vehement “adversus judaeos” tradition of the church fathers reflected a characteristic flaw in earliest Christianity, that it owed little to the influence of pagan anti-Judaism19 to agree with her contention that conflict with Judaism took on the character of an essential ideological ingredient in Christian self-definition.20 To be Christian was (1) to refute Judaism on the basis of Jewish Scripture; (2) to believe that the promises of the Old Testament no longer applied to the people of Israel; (3) to emphasize that the stubborn defiance of contemporary Jews stemmed from a congenital rebelliousness manifested already in the Children of Israel’s backsliding into idolatry and their scoffing at their own prophets; and (4) to scorn and vigorously combat Christians who elevated Judaism by observing its commandments and customs. Thus, in this earliest encounter between Judaism and Christianity, we have religions in conflict, as the precedent is set for more friction and discord in times to come.
Can a comparison between the early Christian-Jewish conflict and the first encounter between Islam and Judaism illumine the larger question of why Islamic-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages were marked by so much less violence than were Christian-Jewish relations? Superficially, one can draw a rough parallel between the rise of Islam and the rise of Christianity. The first encounter between Islam and the Jews represents a case of religions in conflict. Though not born and educated a Jew, as Jesus was, Muhammad, nonetheless, had contact with Judaism, whose teachings and reverence for a written, divine revelation made a profound impression on him. Precisely how a pagan merchant from the Arab tribe that dominated the commercial town of Mecca (home of the Ka'ba, northern Arabia’s most important pagan shrine) learned so much about Judaism remains a mystery to this day.21 True, much Christian influence can be felt in the Qur’an, and the indigenous impulse toward monotheism among some Arabs in pre-Islamic Arabia cannot be discounted. Yet even a casual reader of the Qur’an is struck by how much it rings with echoes of the Bible and, equally important, of the midrash or post-biblical homiletic commentary. There is little mystery about Muhammad’s intentions: he expected his Israelite stories and the Jewish customs he adopted to endear him to the Jewish tribes of Medina; he also hoped they would join the umma (community) of Islam while retaining their faith. In the “Constitution of Medina,” his compact with the Arab and Jewish tribes of the oasis, Muhammad stipulated that “the Jews have their religion, and the Muslims have theirs.”22 Jesus, too, expected his message to resonate in Jewish ears and win adherents among his fellow Jews.
Thus there are similarities between Muhammad’s mission in Medina and the early meeting between Christianity and Judaism. There are, also, important and revealing differences, some of which suggest a more confrontational atmosphere than existed between Christians and Jews and others of which suggest a more harmonious state of affairs. Consider the Jewish reaction to Muhammad and the Prophet’s response. An Arab rather than a Jew, and a prophet appearing centuries after the cessation of biblical prophecy, Muhammad could only have appeared to the Jewish tribes of Medina as an impostor whose teachings in the name of God bore but a skewed resemblance to biblical and rabbinic Judaism. Moreover, the Prophet couched his message in a verbiage foreign to Judaism both in its format and its rhetoric. Thus, Jewish distaste for Muhammad was in some ways more pronounced than Jewish antagonism toward Jesus, who did not claim to have founded a new religion and who was and remained a Jew.
Only a tiny number of the Jews of Medina converted to Islam. Jewish enmity toward Muhammad pervaded the Jewish tribal settlements there. Little wonder that Muhammad lost his patience and turned to violence, expelling two of the main Jewish tribes (one fled to the oasis of Khaybar where Muhammad later finished them off) and massacring nearly all the male members of the third. Later Islamic tradition harped on the theme of the treachery of the Jews of Medina against Muhammad and Islam, a motif reminiscent of one of the more salient themes in the Christian-Jewish conflict.23
For proponents of the countermyth, Muhammad’s violence against the Jewish tribes of Medina exemplifies a fundamental, even congenital, Islamic persecutory posture toward the Jews. Mindful of the suffering inflicted on the Jews of Christendom in the name of avenging Jewish persecution of Christ, some champions of the countermyth, by implication and by comparison, represent Islam as inherently more anti-Jewish at its origins than even Christianity. Subsequent history, however, exhibits a much less grizzly interfaith relationship. Why?
The circumstances of the birth of Islam in relationship to Judaism, though marked by conflict, differ fundamentally from those of Christianity’s origins. Jesus, the messiah (and, to some, the son of God) was crucified. His crucifixion, blamed by Christians on the Jews, seemed at the time tantamount to nullification of the divine plan. Despite the positive redemptive interpretation assigned by Christ’s disciples to his death in the concept of the vicarious atonement, the act of killing Jesus continued to be considered an unforgivable act, to be remembered in perpetuity. An early exegetical elaboration of the Gospel account of the crucifixion identified the Jew as the last tormentor of Christ. This tradition, later fleshed out in a long-lived medieval iconographic tradition and in passion plays, was symbolized in crucifixion scenes by a repulsive, evil-looking figure at the foot of the cross offering the thirsty, dying Jesus a bitter drink of vinegar and gall via a sponge affixed to the end of a pole.24 In the twelfth century, the old charge of deicide gave birth to stories of ritual child murders, by which Jews allegedly commemorated and reenacted that first act of God-murder.
By contrast, the founder of Islam claimed neither messiahship nor divinity. While Jews ridiculed him during his lifetime, Muhammad died a natural death. Thus, unlike Christians, Muslims had no grounds for holding the Jews responsible for the demise of their progenitor. Nevertheless, biographical accounts of the Prophet and Muslim traditions (ḥadīths) depict Jewish attempts on the Prophet’s life.25 These stories surfaced whenever Muslims looked for reasons to mistrust contemporary Jews.26 Without a “propheticide,” however, and lacking an iconographic tradition—iconography being forbidden in Islam—that might have provided the illiterate Muslim masses with a graphic depiction of Jewish enmity toward Muhammad in Medina, the Islamic-Jewish conflict could not generate the tension and hatred that so inflamed the conflict between Christianity and the Jews.
Stroumsa’s insight into the ambiguous nature of Christian attitudes toward Judaism and the Jews suggests another important contrast in the early relationship of Muslims and Jews. The comparison with Islam reciprocally reinforces Stroumsa’s point about Christianity. Unlike Christianity, with its love-hate ambivalence toward the enemy—Judaism—Islam evinces no ambiguity about the infidel—Jew and Christian. The Jihad mentality, fed by scriptural injunctions, required Muslims to combat (not love) the enemy, something Islam did in the extreme during its early years. The battle lines against Christians and Zoroastrians living in the “Domain of War” were clearly drawn. As the Conquest spread, those People of the Book among them who submitted to Arab rule were guaranteed residential rights and protection inside the Domain of Islam in return for obedience and tribute. Thereafter, Muslims treated Jews with contempt, but minus the love-hate tension that so complicated Christianity’s relationship with its Jewish infidels. Relieved of this ambiguity, and spared Christianity’s eschatological disappointment once it had gained power, Islam was less inclined than Christendom to persecute the Jews and could more readily abide a vital Jewish presence in its midst. Indeed, to the contrary, Jews were allowed to prosper, and even participate, in the political and intellectual life of the majority society.
Another contrast between the circumstances surrounding the rise of the two new religions concerns locale. Unlike Christianity, Islam arose in an area peripheral to Judaism. The Jewish tribes of northern Arabia had dwelt there for centuries, far from the centers of rabbinic Judaism in Palestine and Babylonia. Moreover, they lacked the demographic strength and communal and institutional solidarity of the Jews living in Jesus’ immediate milieu. There was little the Jews of Arabia could do to resist the progress of the new religious faith and community. Islam’s easy triumph over Arabian Judaism was assured; this, in turn, obviated much of the impulse for the kind of continuous interfaith conflict that characterized the centuries of struggle by early Christianity to humble a demographically large and institutionally powerful Judaism. Even in the Fertile Crescent, the heartland of Judaism, Islam’s demographic challenge came from the huge indigenous Christian and Zoroastrian populations, not from the numerically smaller communities of Jews.
Early Islam, in contrast to early Christianity, did not have to struggle for recognition against a hostile and powerful enemy like Rome. After Medina, Islam carried the day as the established religion of Arabia. Tensions such as those experienced by early Christians with Jews, pagans, and Roman authorities alike dissipated rapidly with the triumphs over the polytheists, the suppression of the brief “apostasy” (ridda) movement among some Arab tribes immediately after the Prophet’s death in 632, and the subjugation of powerful Christian settlements in the south (especially the community of Najran).
This situation contrasts sharply with the stiff opposition Christianity’s founders met from Roman authorities, even as the hostile competitor, Judaism, continued to benefit from Roman toleration. Under these circumstances, early Christian thinkers inevitably came to emphasize the superiority of Christianity over Judaism in their writings and sermons. At the same time, Roman persecution strengthened Christian resolve to weaken its religious rival. Once Christianity had achieved official toleration and then recognition under Emperor Constantine, culminating in its establishment as the Roman state religion in 391,27 it began to implement its hitherto restrained anti-Jewish intentions.28
Early Christianity faced a related problem, one not experienced by early Islam. Having failed to convince all Jews that Christianity fulfilled God’s messianic promises to Israel in the Bible, nascent Christianity appropriated Israel’s identity—at Jewish expense. As early as Paul, the church had shifted its attention to the pagan Romans, preaching that they were the new Israel. Chosen by God to replace the old Israel, the gentiles were, in Paul’s famous metaphor (Letter to the Romans 11), the wild olive grafted to the olive tree to replace those branches (faithless, rejected Judaism) temporarily lopped off; the New Covenant offered to the gentiles fulfilled the divine promises of the Old. It took generations of preaching to win this point, however. Until it prevailed, the young Christian church had to endure the skepticism of the Jews and the reluctance of many Christians to sever their relationship with the Israel of the Old Testament.
Islam never portrayed itself as “New Israel.” Genealogically, Arabs traced their descent from Ishmael, Abraham’s firstborn son, the brother of Isaac. Chronologically, Arab peoplehood paralleled the peoplehood of Israel: Arabs and Jews had the same ancestor. The Ishmaelite branch simply had been dispersed for centuries, awaiting its revival and the fulfillment of its claim to centrality in history. This came with the advent of the Prophet Muhammad. Unlike Christianity, Islam felt no need to establish its identity at the expense of the Jews.
The important distinction between Islam and Christianity with regard to the Jews had other facets, which further elucidate Islam’s fundamentally different and less confrontational posture toward the Jews. Theologically, Islam did not represent itself as the divine fulfillment of Judaism. The Qur’an harks back to Abraham—the original, pure monotheist—as its progenitor and spiritual ancestor. Abraham was the first “Muslim” by virtue of his complete, unquestioning “surrender” (islām, in Arabic) to God’s will. In the words of the Qur’an:
O People of the Scripture [Jews and Christians]! Why will ye argue about Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed till after him? . . . Abraham was not a Jew, nor yet a Christian; but he was an upright man who had surrendered [muslim; i.e., to God], and he was not of the idolaters. Lo! Those of mankind who have the best claim to Abraham are those who followed him, and this Prophet and those who believe [with him].29
In the thought of the Qur’an and of Islam, then, Abraham, who boldly rejected the polytheism dominant in his world, was the forerunner of Muhammad. Religion as it developed after Abraham, first into Judaism then into Christianity, deviated from Abraham’s pristine belief in one God. In the person of Muhammad and in the form of his revealed message, Islam had arisen to revive the forgotten, pure monotheism of that ancestor, the father of Ishmael, forebear of the Arabs. In the words of one scholar: “Islam, which means ‘surrender’ [to the will of God], was seen not as a new covenant but as an urgently needed restoration of the old. The Koran was thought to have been sent down to re-establish a ‘pure’ religion that had been defiled.”30
Because the Abraham story established the priority of Islam over both Judaism and Christianity, 31 Islam’s relationship to Judaism and to Jewish Scripture differed significantly from that of Christianity. It is true that Paul had proclaimed Abraham before his circumcision the first “Christian.” Abraham was bound by monotheism and by the moral law, to the exclusion of the ritual that came later on, at the time of Moses.32 For all practical (and ideological) purposes, however, Christianity accepted its chronological posteriority vis-à-vis Judaism at face value, claiming that Christ represented the next and final stage in the fulfillment of God’s message to the Jews. That meant Christians accepted the Jewish Bible as their own—the “Old Testament” had prefigured the “New”—and those Christians, like Marcion in the second century, who rejected the Hebrew Bible were branded by the church as heretics. Shared claim to Scripture laid the foundation for continual tension over the interpretation of the message of Jewish holy writ.33
Islam, in contrast, dismissed the existing texts of the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians as a corruption of their original, divinely inspired teaching. This approach took Islam in a different direction from that of Christianity. As we shall see, this difference in approach to the Book of the Jews—between the Islamic doctrine of taḥrīf (falsification) and the Christian principle of prefiguration—goes a long way toward explaining the lower level of interfaith conflict in the Islamic environment.
Another, related contrast between Christianity and Islam in relation to Judaism bears on the issue of imitation of Jewish practices. Judaizing posed a serious obstacle to the church’s efforts to differentiate the rejected forerunner from the newly chosen beneficiary of God’s salvation. Church fathers fought Judaizing for generations precisely because many Christians still took seriously the original Christian proposition that Christianity is an extension of Judaism. Islam approached Judaism differently. Muhammad himself originally adopted the fast of the tenth day (called 'āshūrā') of the first Muslim month.34 In keeping with yet another Jewish custom, Muhammad taught his followers to face Jerusalem during prayer. Soon, however, he forsook these “Judaizing” observances, not because they posed a threat to the identity of the Muslim community but because, in Medina, he encountered fierce opposition from the Jews.
A similar pattern of initial acceptance, followed by repudiation, characterizes the attitude of early Islam toward the narrative traditions of the Jews. Initially, permission was granted to quote sayings and reports about the Banū Isrā’īl (Children of Israel), edifying and miraculous tales called “Isrā’īliyyāt.” This approval reflected a common belief that the Holy Books of the Jews include information about the life and acts of prophets before Islam and about the Prophet himself, in particular, in the form of predictions of his advent. At the same time, Muslims were adjured not to imitate the custom of the children of Israel. Eventually, permission to transmit traditions about the children of Israel was also revoked, and Muslims were banned from learning or copying Jewish Scripture altogether.35
Paradoxically, because the boundaries between Islam and Judaism were clearly delineated early on, much that was basic in Judaism could ultimately take root in developed Islam. Religious law (sharī'a), the most fundamental feature of Islam, corresponds directly to—and, in fact, has the same meaning (the way) as—Jewish halakha. The dietary laws of Islam, including not only the conspicuous prohibition of pork but also a system of ritual animal slaughter, closely resemble Jewish practice.36
Judaism is, in fact, often referred to in Muslim sources as sharī'at al-yahūd. This contrasts with such common pejorative Latin locutions for Judaism as “the Law of the Jews” and more disparaging commonplace epithets such as “superstition of the Jews” and “perfidy of the Jews.” Whereas the Christian vocabulary for the Jews and Judaism reflects animosity and hostility, Islamic parlance betrays recognition of mutually held religious concepts and values.
If Islam did not share Christianity’s concern about the taint of Judaism, that is because Islam’s “church”37 originated further away psychologically from Judaism than had Christianity and because Islam was not threatened by a substantial “Judaizing phenomenon.” The lure of Judaism (and Christianity) was expressed among some of the Muslim masses in a certain popular syncretism, not, as in Christianity, in loyal attachment to Jewish observances considered superior to Islam because of their priority.
Islamic opposition to imitating Judaism (as well as Christianity) had a special doctrinal expression—the principle of khālifūhum (be different from them). Interestingly, this opposition parallels the biblical admonition to eschew the customs of the gentiles.38 The concept “be different from them” originated in the ḥadīth.39 A major book featuring this theme was written by the theologian and jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). He wrote:
Differing from them is the cause of the victory of Islam, the purpose of sending prophets is that the divine faith should emerge triumphant. Thus the very act of differing from them constitutes one of the greatest prophetic offices.40
And:
Granted that the Scriptuaries are permitted to practice their innovated and abrogated religions on condition that they shall not make a show of it, a Muslim cannot be permitted to practice an innovated and abrogated religion, either secretly or openly.41
Ibn Taymiyya fretted over Muslim saint worship, the cult of tombs, and certain unordained festivals ascribed by him to the influence of Judaism and, especially, Christianity. Although this concern seems akin to the problem of Judaizing that so vexed the church fathers, there is a revealing difference.42 At stake for Ibn Taymiyya, writing centuries after the rise of Islam, is not differentiating Islam as a religion from Judaism or Christianity, but rather preserving the unadulterated purity and superiority of the Islamic faith. The great Hanbalite theologian worried that if Muslims failed to distinguish themselves from dhimmīs, the hierarchical supremacy of Islam would be diminished and the prestige of Jews and Christians enhanced. Ibn Taymiyya’s rhetoric is less hateful than John Chrysostom’s, for the two perceived the danger differently. The presbyter of Antioch lived at a time when Christianity, despite its recognition as the official religion of the Roman Empire, still felt insecure. He worried that Judaizing practices might weaken Christianity’s exclusive claim to truth and undermine its recent and still fragile triumph over paganism. His Muslim counterpart, Ibn Taymiyya, saw imitation of non-Muslim saint worship both as religious innovation (bid'a) and as detracting from the superiority of an already triumphal Islam. He did not, however, express concern that Judaizing Muslims might mistake Christianity or Judaism for a more genuine Islam.