...................................................................................
...................................................................................
That Jews, Christians, and Muslims should unite in some way under the banner of their common ancestor Abraham is essentially a modern idea. After all, in the past, those belonging to these religions mostly lived under the rule of one another (usually Jews under Christianity or Jews and Christians under Islam) and there was no pretence to the fact that the three communities and their religions bear comparison, unification, or inclusiveness. Political Correctness is a modern predicament and, with few exceptions, triumphalism dictated relations between the three religions and their adherents. Thus, it would be unreasonable to expect that anything resembling a modern ‘Abrahamic’ initiative was proposed in pre-modern times. With this in mind, in what follows I will merely seek to demonstrate that the two principles on which such initiatives are based sprung up from time to time. The two principles are: (1) A focus on Abraham as a unifier of distinct (even rival) religious communities; and (2) a recognition that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are comparable to each other while different from other religions; their adherents should therefore afford each other preferential treatment of sorts. It will thus be argued that, in a sense, modern Abrahamic initiatives are new recipes using old ingredients.
Already the Hebrew Bible tells us that Abraham would be seen as an ancestor for more than one nation. In Gen. 12: 3 God tells Abram (as he was still known): ‘And I will bless them that bless you, and he who curses you I shall curse; and in you shall be blessed all the families of the earth’, suggesting that Abraham will come to have some sort of universal relevance. In a later passage we hear, moreover, that God changed Abram’s name to ‘Abraham’ to reflect his future association with many peoples. Gen. 17: 3–6 reads: ‘Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying: “As for me, behold my covenant is with you and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. And your name shall no longer be called ‘Abram’ but your name shall be ‘Abraham’, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. And I will make you exceedingly fruitful and I will make of you nations.”’
That Abraham would be important to numerous nations is thus one of the things that God promises him and in a curious way the modern recognition that Abraham is a forefather of sorts for all three religions serves both a social and also a theological purpose as it is proof that this aspect of the promise has been fulfilled. What Jews, Christians, and Muslims have debated over the millennia is thus not whether Abraham’s legacy is important—for to this they all signed up—but rather which religious community is the real heir to his legacy. Though it goes against the grain of modern Abrahamic initiatives to put things this way, Abraham unifies the adherents of these religions not in agreement but in debate.
It is precisely this competition over the claim to Abraham’s legacy that often led Jews, Christians, and Muslims to sharpen and highlight their unique stance on Abraham’s importance to them, meaning that in periods of interfaith debate Abraham would feature heavily in these exchanges, or even—more subtly—in one religion’s descriptions of itself. For while Jews usually refer to themselves as the children of ‘Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ (and to their God as the God of all three), at times the phrase is collapsed into the single name of ‘Abraham’, as in the central prayer in the Jewish prayerbook, the Eighteen Benedictions, where the first benedictions, which focuses on the ‘Patriarchs’ (avot), reads:
Blessed are you, God, our God and the God of our forefathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, the great, heroic, awesome God, the supreme God, who bestows kindnesses and creates all, who remembers the kindnesses of the Patriarchs and brings a Redeemer to their descendants, with love, for the sake of His Name. O King, Helper, Saviour and Shield. Blessed are you, God, the Shield of Abraham. [Emphasis mine.]
In other cases, the usual ‘Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ as forefathers is simply replaced by ‘Abraham’, as in the following passage from the Babylonian Talmud: ‘R. Yochanan b. Zakkai said of his student, R. Elazar b. Arach: “Blessed is the Lord, God of Israel, who has given a son to our Forefather Abraham, who knows how to comprehend, research, and expound upon the issue of Maaseh Merkavah…How fortunate are you, our Forefather Abraham, that Elazar b. Arach emerged from your loins!”’ (Ḥagiga 14b).
Similarly, although the Quran refers to ‘Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ (Q. 29: 26) and Muslim Tradition places great theological focus on Abraham’s other line through Ishmael, it appears that the early Muslim community focused specifically on Abraham himself. This is attested to not only by the repeated reference to ‘the religion of Abraham’ throughout the Quran but also by the dozens of religious inscriptions from Arabia and the Negev in the pre- and early Islamic period that focus on Abraham alone and on a religion centred on him (Pines 1984: passim; Nevo and Koren 2003: 186–90, 195). This focus on Abraham persisted well into the Islamic period and there is a Muslim inscription from as late as 735 ce that refers to ‘the Lord of Muhammad and Abraham’ (Donner 2010: 255), demonstrating that this focus on Abraham was not meant in an ecumenical vain (as the reference to Muhammad in this inscription proves) but rather it uses Abraham as an identifier of Islam almost on a par with Muhammad himself. That Muslims were claiming Abraham for themselves, rather than attempting to use his broad appeal to include others, is hardly surprising as the Quran itself is clear on this:
O People of the Book! Why do you argue about Abraham, when the Torah and the Gospel were not revealed until after him? Have you no sense? You are those who argue about that of which you have some knowledge but why then do you argue about that of which you have no knowledge? God knows. You do not know. Abraham was not a Jew, nor yet a Christian; but he was a ḥanīf muslim, and he was not of the idolaters. (Q. 3: 65–8)
While Jews and Muslims in late antiquity were consciously associating themselves with Abraham, it does not appear to be the case that Christians did so to a comparable extent. The New Testament opens with a genealogy of Jesus that takes him back to Abraham (but not further; Matt. 1: 1–17), and Romans 4 is a clear statement of Christianity’s exclusive claim to Abraham, while the church fathers also stressed the centrality of Abraham and his legacy to Christian theology (Siker 1991). And yet, there was a surprising willingness on the part of some Christians to assign Abrahamic credentials to non-Christians. In one case, a Christian author refers indifferently to the Jewish convert to Islam, Kaʿab al-Aḥbār as ‘a scribe from the seed of Abraham’ (Lassner 2000: 374). Moreover, the ‘religion of Abraham’ (millat Ibrāhīm) that the Quran cites so approvingly was something that for Christians smacked of obsolescence. Consider, for instance, the following exchange between an early Muslim and a Christian, which dates from the first half of the eighth century: ‘The Arab: “Why do you not believe in Abraham and his commandments, when he is the father of prophets and kings, and scripture testifies to his righteousness?” The Monk: “What sort of belief in Abraham do you expect from us, and what are these commandments which you want us to observe?” The Arab: “Circumcision and sacrifice, because he received them from God.”’ (Crone and Cook 1977: 12–13; Hoyland 1997: 470–1.)1 Whatever reverence the Christian interlocutor in this exchange reserved for the Patriarch Abraham, it is clear that the latter was not deemed to be a role-model for him in any practical way. The reason for this is illuminated by the numerous Christian texts from the early Islamic period that associated ‘Abrahamic’ religion with a primitive form of monotheism that had yet to benefit from the updates introduced by Jesus’ career (Hoyland 1997: 535–41). For Muslims, by contrast, Abraham was the architect (with Ishmael) of God’s House in Mecca, thereby setting the groundwork and precedent for the all-important ḥajj, while combining biographical details that in the Judaeo-Christian tradition are split between the biblical Abraham and the Temple-building Solomon.
Interesting though the foregoing points may be, they appear to depict Abraham as a divisive character in interfaith relations. We shall now see that Abraham could also play the role of a unifier.
First, as Jews and Christians continued to read and interpret the Bible, the idea that Abraham would be the father of many (even competing) nations was one that would be revisited. Already in a later passage from the Hebrew Bible (Ps. 47) we hear of an enthronement ceremony that will involve all nations of the world recognizing God, including a specific reference to ‘the people of the God of Abraham’. Whom the phrase ‘people of the God of Abraham’ referred to was, as everything else in the Bible, open to interpretation and Christians and Jews debated the issue.2
In late antiquity, when rabbinic activity was arguably at its height, the idea of Abraham as a unifier was expressed in rabbinical exegesis not on Gen. 15–17 or on Ps. 47, but on the Song of Songs, where 8: 8–9 begins ‘We have a little sister…’ A tantalizing reading of this verse, recorded in the midrashic collections of Tanḥuma (ad loc.) and Genesis Rabba (39.3), focuses on the identity of this ‘sister’ (aḥot) and rather boldly states that she is none other than Abraham, since he ‘united (iḥā) all of humankind before God, just as one who tears a garment apart and then sews it together. Hence, he was called ‘sister’ (= unifier).’ This is hardly the most obvious reading of the word ‘sister’ in this context and, had they wanted to, the authors of this interpretation could easily have done away with it. And yet, Abraham’s bridge-building qualities were (seemingly) forcibly read into the verse.
It may well be the case that Jews living under Christian rule, where Abraham’s relevance to more than one nation was manifest, better appreciated Abraham’s role as a unifier of peoples. In the Mishna (Bikkurim 1: 4), we are told that when delivering the first fruits to the Temple a convert to Judaism may not use the liturgical phrase ‘God of our forefathers’ that Jews would use in this context since the convert was not, strictly speaking, a descendant of the Israelite forefathers. While the Babylonian Talmud agrees with this verdict, the Jerusalem Talmud (y. Bikkurim 64a (1: 4)) offers a different perspective, according to which even a convert adduces the forefathers since ‘God made Abraham the forefather of a multitude of nations so that Abraham becomes the father of everyone in the world who enters under the wings of the Divine Presence.’
Second, it would appear that Jews from different regions and periods actually sought to build bridges with rival nations by appealing to their common descent from Abraham. Already in the Second Temple period, the Jews and the people of Sparta are described as seeking common purpose by referring to their respective Abrahamic credentials. The First Book of Maccabees (12: 20–3) provides us with the following text of a letter from the Spartans to the Jews: ‘Arius, king of the Spartans, sends greetings to Onias, the chief priest. It has been found in a writing concerning the Spartans and Jews, that they are kinsmen, and that they are descended from Abraham. Now since we have learned this, please write us about your welfare. We for our part write you that your cattle and property are ours and ours are yours. So we command them to report to you to this effect.’ Josephus is also aware of this letter, including the notion that the Spartans (‘Lacedaemonians’) and Jews are both descended from Abraham (Jewish Antiquities 12.4.10). Although the initiative in uniting the two peoples with reference to Abraham appears in this case to have been that of the Spartans, the mere fact that it is a biblical unifier who is appealed to here suggests that the idea originated with the Jews themselves.3
This is supported by the fact that Jews are known to have made use of this diplomatic ruse on other occasions, two of which involve the inhabitants of Arabia, albeit in very different periods. In the first instance, a mid-fifth-century Christian author tells us the following about the ‘Saracens’:
This is the tribe which took its origin and had its name from Ishmael, the son of Abraham; and the ancients called them Ishmaelites after their progenitor. As their mother Hagar was a slave, they afterwards, to conceal the opprobrium of their origin, assumed the name of Saracens, as if they were descended from Sara, the wife of Abraham. Such being their origin, they practise circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs. If, indeed, they deviate in any respect from the observances of that nation, it must be ascribed to the lapse of time, and to their intercourse with the neighbouring nations. Moses, who lived many centuries after Abraham, only legislated for those whom he led out of Egypt. The inhabitants of the neighbouring countries, being strongly addicted to superstition, probably soon corrupted the laws imposed upon them by their forefather Ishmael. The ancient Hebrews had their community life under this law only, using therefore unwritten customs, before the Mosaic legislation. These people certainly served the same gods as the neighbouring nations, honouring and naming them similarly, so that by this likeness with their forefathers in religion, there is evidenced their departure from the laws of their forefathers. As is usual, in the lapse of time, their ancient customs fell into oblivion, and other practices gradually got the precedence among them. Some of their tribe afterwards, happening to come in contact with the Jews, gathered from them the facts of their true origin, returned to their kinsmen, and inclined to the Hebrew customs and laws. From that time on, until now, many of them regulate their lives according to the Jewish precepts. (Sozomen ch. 38, emphasis mine.)
In this passage, it seems that the Jews who reminded the fifth-century Arabians of their common, Abrahamic heritage did so not necessarily for diplomatic purposes but perhaps in the interests of proselytizing them. For a more explicit case of ‘Abrahamic diplomacy’ we turn to our second text from Arabia, which was written some two centuries later, referring to events from the eve of Islam:
Twelve peoples [representing] all the tribes of the Jews assembled at the city of Edessa. When they saw that the Iranian troops had departed and left the city in peace, they closed the gates and fortified themselves…They departed, taking the road through the desert…to the sons of Ishmael. [The Jews] called [the Arabs] to their aid and familiarized them with the relationship they had through the books of the [Old] Testament. Although [the Arabs] were convinced of their close relationship, they were unable to get a consensus from their multitude, for they were divided from each other by religion. In that period a certain one of them, a man of the sons of Ishmael named Muhammad, a merchant, became prominent. A sermon about the Way of Truth, supposedly at God’s command, was revealed to them, and [Muhammad] taught them to recognize the God of Abraham, especially since he was informed and knowledgeable about Mosaic history. Because the command had come from On High, he ordered them all to assemble together and to unite in faith. Abandoning the reverence of vain things, they turned toward the living God, who had appeared to their father—Abraham. Muhammad legislated that they were not to eat carrion, not to drink wine, not to speak falsehoods, and not to commit adultery. He said: ‘God promised that country to Abraham and to his son after him, for eternity. And what had been promised was fulfilled during that time when [God] loved Israel. Now, however, you are the sons of Abraham, and God shall fulfil the promise made to Abraham and his son on you. Only love the God of Abraham, and go and take the country which God gave to your father, Abraham. No one can successfully resist you in war, since God is with you’…All the remnants of the sons of Israel then assembled and united, becoming a large force. After this they dispatched a message to the Byzantine emperor, saying: ‘God gave that country as the inherited property of Abraham and of his sons after him. We are the sons of Abraham. It is too much that you hold our country. Leave in peace, and we shall demand from you what you have seized, plus interest.’ The emperor rejected this. He did not provide a fitting response to the message but rather said: ‘The country is mine. Your inheritance is the desert. So go in peace to your country.’ (Sebeos, ch. 30; emphasis mine.)
By the Middle Ages, Abraham’s shared legacy was recognized by some of the leading scholars of the relevant religions. In some cases this was grudgingly so: the great Maimonides (d. 1204)—who experienced violent persecution at the hands of his co-Abrahamists—states that Abraham’s activity ‘has resulted, as we see today, in the consensus of the greater part of the population of the earth in glorifying him and considering themselves as blessed through his memory, so that even those who do not belong to his progeny pretend to derive from him’ (in Maimonides 1963: II. 515). It appears that in this statement Maimonides was both settling theological scores with his Christian and Muslim rivals while also attempting to show that the biblical promise that Abraham would be ‘blessed through him’ has been fulfilled. Similarly, Judah Halevi (d. 1141), in his pro-Jewish polemical work Sefer ha-Kuzari, makes it clear that he is aware of the rival (Christian and Muslim) claims to Abraham’s legacy. In one instance he simply states that ‘The essence of Abraham passed over to Isaac, to the exclusion of the other sons who were all removed from the land, the special inheritance of Isaac…’ (Halevi 1946: 58). In another he is even more direct: ‘For there exists no connection between God and any other creed, as He pours out His light only on the select people. They [the Jews] are accepted by Him, and He by them. He is called “the God of Israel” and they [the Jews] are “the people of the God of Abraham”’ (p. 177). Elsewhere too (p. 103) Judah Halevi stresses that the ‘people of the God of Abraham’ whom we encountered in Psalm 47, are the Jews—perhaps indicating that he was aware of counter-claims lodged by Christians in his day. Interestingly, in the correspondence between Hasdai ibn Shaprut (d. c.975) and the Khazar king of his day, the latter explains that his ancestor chose Judaism because ‘the Israelite religion is the best and truest. I have chosen it, as it is the religion of Abraham’ (p. 276), once again scoring points for the Jewish claim to Abraham’s legacy, even though the Khazar king also mentioned in his letter that he was a descendant of Noah’s son Japheth, and hence not genealogically related to Abraham at all (as the latter was from Noah’s son Shem). We shall return to Judah Halevi’s work below.
Somewhat less territorial over Abraham’s legacy was the quranic exegete Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210), who—writing on the other side of the Muslim world from the Mediterranean of Judah Halevi and Maimonides—described Abraham as ‘An individual whose merit is recognized by all religious groups and sects…among the People of the Book the Jews and Christians acknowledge his merit and are honoured that they are among his children’ (al-Rāzī 1981: IV. 36).
In summary, from biblical times to the Middle Ages, Abraham’s role and legacy were debated amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who could not but recognize his centrality not only to their own religious tradition but to those of others. Occasionally, perhaps influenced by the Bible’s own prophecy about Abraham’s shared legacy, some scholars came to appreciate Abraham’s role in bringing rivals together, such as the rabbis who described Abraham as one who ‘united mankind before God’. At least to some degree the ‘Abrahamic’ aspect of modern Abrahamic initiatives has forerunners in pre-modern history.
It could be argued that ‘Abraham’ is not actually what the idea of ‘Abrahamic Religions’ is about: rather, it is about the comparability of the three (or more) religions whose adherents have sought in recent decades to bridge the divides that separate their respective communities by appealing to the shared attributes of their religions. What we are dealing with, then, is a quest for commonalities, only one of which (and a minor one at that) is the figure of Abraham himself. In the preceding pages I have attempted to show that from time to time these communities could be brought together—in agreement or in debate—with reference to the figure of Abraham. In what follows, I will attempt to show that they also did so without reference to Abraham, demonstrating that there were Jews, Christians, and Muslims through the ages who, in both theory and in practice, sought to acknowledge that their religions belonged to a single, preferred group of religions, which distinguished them from other, inferior groups. In other words, it will be shown that the idea of considering these religions together is one that has arisen before, at various times and in a variety of places.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Jews have been more likely than Christians or Muslims to look for common ground or cause with the other religions, for two reasons: first, Jews from the first to the twentieth centuries have almost always lived under the rule of others and they had neither the inclination nor the political muscle to impose inflexible interpretations of interfaith relations on themselves or on others. It was in their interest that Christians and Muslims deem them to be familiar rather than alien. Second, perhaps under the influence of the historical circumstances just mentioned, Jewish theology came to include concepts and frameworks that would allow certain types of non-Jews to be recognized as righteous or even deserving of a portion in the Hereafter. The central concept in this context is the idea of ‘Noachide Law’, this being a set of seven largely moral laws (prohibiting theft, murder, adultery, and the like) that are intended for all but the Jews. There are thus two ‘Torahs’: one for the Jews, the other for the other ‘Children of Noah’ and those who follow the rules stipulated for them (be they Jews following the Torah or Noachides following the code devised for them) will be rewarded accordingly (Novak 1983: passim). Crucially, in addition to the ‘moral’ laws prescribed for non-Jews are prohibitions against blasphemy and idolatry. Thus, although in theory Noachide Law should be universal, it only really applied to non-idolatrous theists, and in actual fact Jews almost always had Christians and/or Muslims in mind when considering the concept.
An interesting historical implication of the idea that the non-Jewish descendants of Noah should have a monotheistic system of moral laws is that Jews could, on occasion, be seen to take a favourable view on the emergence of Christianity or Islam in areas that were hitherto pagan. In some cases, in fact, Jesus or Muhammad were deemed to have been ‘true’ prophets who were simply sent by God to ‘the Gentiles’, as part of the process of spreading Noachide religion where it did not yet exist. Precisely this message was spread by the various messianic pretenders who emerged in the eastern Islamic world, from the mid-eighth century and for 200 years thereafter, characters such as Abū ʿIsā al-Iṣfahānī, Yūdghān of Hamadan, and Mushkā of Qum (al-Shahrastāni 1961: 215–18). Regarding Abu ‘Isa, the karaite scholar al-Qirqisānī (d. 937) writes:
Abu ‘Isa confessed the prophetic nature of Jesus b. Miriam and that of [Muhammad] and said that each of them was sent [by God] to his people. He ordered [his own disciples] to read the Gospels and the Quran and to gain an understanding of their meanings. He said that the Christians and Muslims are required to observe their faiths just as the Jews are required to observe the one they claim. (In Nemoy 1930.)
That Jewish theology could support such a position, and that there were those who adopted it does not mean that such ideas were, in practice, accepted widely: when, in 2002, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published his The Dignity of Difference, in which he argued that, ‘God has spoken to mankind in many languages: through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims…God is God of all humanity, but no single faith is or should be the faith of all humanity’ (Sacks 2002: 55), there was an outcry of such force (amongst certain ultra-orthodox Jews) that Rabbi Sacks was compelled to remove the offending passages from a subsequent edition of the book.
Perhaps a better received discussion of Judaism’s relation to other religions is that of Judah Halevi in his Sefer ha-Kuzari, which we have encountered above. The book was produced in early medieval Spain, where a ‘Golden Age’ of interfaith tolerance is said to have been enjoyed by local Jews, Christians, and Muslims; and as it is written in Judaeo-Arabic, the book itself exemplifies the hybrid Jewish-Muslim culture of the time. And yet, Sefer ha-Kuzari is a polemical work, aimed not at showing that all three religions are equally valid pathways to God/Heaven/Salvation but rather that only [rabbinic] Judaism is God’s religion. Interestingly, in making his case Judah Halevi provides us with some of the most tantalizing evidence for the existence of an Abrahamic ‘idea’ some 900 years ago. Of particular significance to us are those discussions in the text where Halevi attempts to show that despite getting close to Judaism, both Christianity and Islam have fallen short. The first passage is a (fictitious) exchange between the Khazar king and the rabbi representing Judaism in the debate, concerning the Jewish Sabbath:
King: Other nations desire to imitate you, but they only have the pain without the joy, which can only be felt by him who remembers the cause for which he bears the pain.
Rabbi: Even in other instances of imitation no people can equal us at all. Look at the others who appointed a day of rest (yawm li ‘l-rāḥa) in the place of Sabbath. Could they contrive anything which resembles it more than statues resemble living human bodies? (Halevi 1946: 125).
Many modern Abrahamic initiatives would similarly focus on the shared idea of a weekly Day of Rest, but presumably with a more conciliatory tone than that adopted by Halevi here. A second passage from this work that deserves our attention is one in which the Khazar king and the rabbi discuss the validity of other religions and their practices:
King: Certainly if later religions admit the truth, and do not dispute it, then they all respect the place [viz. the Holy Land—AS] and call it the stepping stone of the prophets, the gate of heaven, the place of gathering of the souls. They, further, admit the existence of prophecy among Israel, whose forefathers were distinguished in a like manner. Finally, they believe in the work of creation, the flood, and nearly all that is contained in the Torah. They also perform pilgrimages to this hallowed place.
Rabbi: Their veneration of the land of prophecy consists chiefly in words, and at the same time they also revere places sacred to idols…Retaining the relics of ancient idolatry and feast days, they changed nothing but the forms. These were, indeed, demolished but the relics were not removed. I must also say that the verse in the Bible, occurring repeatedly, ‘Thou shalt not serve strange gods, wood and stone’ (Deut. 28: 36, 64), contains an allusion to those who worship the wood, and those who worship the stone…The leader of each of these parties maintained that he had found the divine light at its source, viz. in the Holy Land, and that there he ascended to heaven, and commanded that all the inhabitants of the globe should be guided in the right path. They turned their faces towards the land in prayer, but before long they changed and turned towards the place where the greatest number of their people lived. (Halevi 1946: 190ff.)
There is a lot going on here, not least of which is the Khazar king’s question. Presumably Halevi placed this question in the king’s mouth because he deemed the idea to be worthy of refutation. Were there in fact Jews at the time who challenged the rabbis with questions about the validity of Christianity and Islam? The answer that Halevi has provided (via the rabbi, of course) is complex and not at all straightforward. He argues both that other religions are insincere in their religious beliefs (re: the Holy Land), that they retain pagan traditions (clearly referring here to the ḥajj), that the Bible itself prophesied that these religions will emerge and should not be followed (quoting Deuteronomy), and that although a religion might have started off the right path (referring here to the early Muslim practice of facing Jerusalem in prayer) they quickly strayed from this path for frivolous reasons. Halevi appears to be trying everything here but try as he may, the Khazar king’s question itself (as well as aspects of the rabbi’s reply) are clear indicators that people were thinking ‘Abrahamically’ in twelfth-century Andalusia.
As stated, Andalusia is often associated with a ‘Golden Age’ of interfaith cooperation and tolerance. One of the convincers for this argument is the literary productivity of Jews writing under Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal, who not only produced works of great quality and quantity but who also created literary styles unique to the region. Most famously, Jewish poets created Hebrew verse using a fusion style based on Arabo-Islamic paradigms. Judah Halevi (himself a poet) makes an interesting statement amidst all his pro-Jewish polemicizing that indicates yet another layer of Abrahamic consciousness: language. With regard to the Hebrew language the rabbi of the work says:
It is the language of [Abraham’s grandfather] Eber after whom it was called Hebrew, because after the confusion of tongues it was he who retained it. Abraham was an Aramaean of Ur Kasdim, because the language of the Chaldaeans was Aramaic. He employed Hebrew as an especially holy language and Aramaic for everyday use. For this reason, Ishmael brought it to the Arabic speaking nations, and the consequence was that Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew are similar to each other in their vocabulary, grammatical rules, and formations. (Halevi 1946: 109)
Now, as an educated Jew Halevi will have been schooled in the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Bible and of the rabbis, and as a product of Andalusian society he learnt Arabic too. It is therefore conceivable that he is simply making a linguistic point about languages that he knows. But it is also possible that—bearing in mind the many comparisons he draws (albeit reluctantly) between the three Abrahamic religions—what Halevi has in mind here are the languages of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad respectively.
The caveat remains, of course, that Judah Halevi was not arguing in favour of comparisons between the Abrahamic religions but against them. What is interesting to us is that in doing so he inadvertently demonstrated that such comparisons were current where and when he lived.
One scholar who was heavily influenced by the Sefer ha-Kuzari was Saʿad Ibn Kammūna (d. 1285). Unlike Judah Halevi, however, Ibn Kammūna’s Examination of the Three Faiths, which describes and actually defends against criticism each of the three Abrahamic religions, is not an overtly polemical work. In the words of one scholar, it is ‘dispassionate, claims to be and tries to appear unprejudiced and objective, treating all parties with equal detachment…The Examination is indeed a piece of comparative religious study by a thirteenth-century author’ (Perlmann 1967: xi). In fact, the work was so fair in its coverage of each religion that initially it was unclear precisely to which community the author belonged and it was not uncommon to assume that it was the work of a Muslim author (Pourjavadi and Schmidtke 2006: 19). Writing in Iraq under Mongol rule, Ibn Kammūna began his work with an excursus on the idea of Prophecy, which all three religions share, thereby giving his work a theoretical framework of sorts. One imagines that Ibn Kammūna would not have spoken about ‘Abrahamic’ religions as much as about ‘Prophetic’ ones. (That other religions, e.g. Zoroastrianism, have prophets too does not seem to have troubled the author.) Eventually Ibn Kammūna was outed as a Jew and although no single question about Islam raised in the book is not to be found in Muslim sources too, ‘the cumulative sting of their array was no doubt resented by some people as malevolent and arrogant’ (Perlmann 1967: x). To us, Ibn Kammūna’s treatment of the three religions might seem even-handed; to a majority Muslim population in Iraq, considering the three religions with such equilibrium is itself an insult to Islam’s superiority and Ibn Kammūna was given a death-sentence in absentia. The point remains, however, that his work would not be out of place on any modern ‘Abrahamic’ bookshelf.
It should be noted that both Judah Halevi and Ibn Kammūna were active during periods of interfaith strife: the Reconquista, the Crusades, and then the Mongol conquests of the Near East each had a traumatic impact on relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims (and, in some cases, within each religion). It is thus not necessarily the case that scholars adopted an ‘Abrahamic attitude’ only when social and political circumstances were favourable. And it is not only from the medieval Muslim world that Jewish scholars emerged who argued for a comparative and cooperative approach to Christianity and Islam.
Jacob Emden, a German rabbi of the eighteenth century (d. 1776), was probably more concerned with theological developments within Judaism in his time (especially the influence of Sabbatean movement) than he was with Judaism’s relations with other religions. And yet, his enormously influential works display an unequivocal acknowledgement of the validity of other Abrahamic religions (though of course he does not use such terms), and the following statement of his implies that such ideas were widespread at the time: ‘That which we have mentioned several times in our works is well-known, that all those who believe in the Torah of Moses (be they from whatever nation) are not in the category of idol worshippers and the like even though they do not observe it [the Torah] fully because they are not commanded to do so. Our Rabbis have already taught: “The pious of the nations of the world have a share in the World to Come”’ (Elman 2011: 370). Emden was influenced by the Enlightment’s ideas of tolerance and wove them into the Noachide framework that rabbinic Judaism afforded him.
Centuries before either Emden or the Enlightenment another Jewish authority was fashioning the Noachide framework in ways that are of great interest for our purposes. The French rabbi Menaḥem ha-Meiri (d. 1309) focused on the category of ‘Ones Possessed of Religion’ (baʿal dat) or ‘Nations Ordered by the Ways of Religions’ (ummot ha-gedurot be-darkhei ha-datot), a category that basically comprised Christians and Muslims. In the Meiri’s view, those belonging to this category are exempted from the limitations imposed by the Talmudic rabbis on Jews’ interactions with ‘Gentiles’. A particularly striking example of the Meiri’s boldness in redefining the relationship between Jews and others comes from his exegesis on the Talmudic saying ‘Israel is not subject to the stars’ (eyn mazal le-yisra’el; b. Shabbat 156a). This statement is, quite naturally, taken to be a Jewish rejection of astrological determinism. The Meiri accepts that the saying is anti-astrological but insists that by ‘Israel’ the rabbis meant all ‘those who are restricted by the ways of religion’ (Halbertal 2000: 16), thereby including Christians and Muslims too. Moshe Halbertal interprets the Meiri’s attitude towards ‘ones possessed of religion’ as being the ideological descendant of philosophical attitudes held by Jewish philosophers emanating from the Muslim world in the preceding century (Halbertal 2000: 18–19). In particular, it has recently been shown (Ben-Simon 2012) that the Meiri’s approach towards other monotheists was shaped by the works of the philosopher Jacob Anatoli (d. 1256) who spoke in a similarly conciliatory tone about ‘Nations that Resemble [Judaism]’ (ummot ha-mitdammot). Anatoli, for his part, was an enthusiastic student of Maimonides’ works (his father-in-law was Samuel Ibn Tibbon (d. 1230), who translated Maimonides’ works from Arabic into Hebrew, and who greatly influenced Anatoli’s formation). One little-known statement of Maimonides himself is of particular relevance to us, for reasons that will be immediately apparent. In a passage from the Mishneh Torah that appears to have been excised from numerous editions of this work, Maimonides says:
Man does not have the power to grasp the thoughts of the Creator, for our ways are not His ways and our thoughts are not His thoughts. [Hence, for example] All the preaching of Jesus the Christian and of that Ishmaelite who came after him were only [effected] in order to pave the way for the Messiah and to heal the entire world [through] worshipping God together. As it is stated [in Zeph. 3: 9] ‘For at that time I will change the language of all peoples to a clear speech, that all of them may call upon the name of God and serve him together.’ (Maimonides 1998: 12: 289)
Maimonides is echoing (albeit, probably inadvertently) the Noachide ideas that the false Judaeo-Persian messiahs discussed above espoused, namely that Jesus and Muhammad were agents of God, sent to bring pagans to monotheism. But he was also reflecting the sort of thinking that was apparently common amongst Jewish ‘Philosophers’ of his day in the western provinces of the Muslim world. A glimpse into their mindset, with particular reference to their views on Jewish/Gentile relations, comes from a statement in the Sefer ha-Kuzari. No great fan of (Aristotelian) Philosophy himself, Judah Halevi puts into the Khazar king’s mouth the following statement: ‘In the opinion of the Philosophers…he becomes a pious man who does not mind in which way he approaches God, whether as a Jew or a Christian or anything else he chooses’ (Halevi 1946: 98). This statement, while associated in Halevi’s mind with the derided Philosophers, may well reflect the sort of flexible, cooperationist thinking that influenced the Meiri, Anatoli, Maimonides, and their sources. It sounds remarkably like something one would find in the manifesto of a modern Abrahamic initiative and, taken together, the materials surveyed above demonstrate that Jews from ancient to early modern times devised conceptual categories within which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were accommodated, compared, and distinguished from all other religious systems.
Both the ‘Noachide’ framework and the categories of ‘Nations that Resemble [Judaism]’ and ‘Nations Ordered by the Ways of Religions’ have an equivalent of sorts in Muslim ideas about other religions, particularly that of ‘the People of the Book’ (ahl al-kitāb). Just as Jews used ‘Noachide’ to denote non-Jews—though they too were descendants of Noah—Muslims used the phrase ‘People of the Book’ to denote certain non-Muslims—though Muslims too had a ‘Book’. Before exploring the idea of ‘People of the Book’ it is worth bearing in mind that according to a recent theory (Donner 2010), Islam itself began as an ecumenical ‘Believers’ movement aimed at bringing together strict monotheists—be they Arabians, Jews, or Christians—who subscribed to a set of beliefs about God and Salvation (monotheism, prophecy, scripture, reward and punishment, the Hereafter, amongst other things). This movement, moreover, made Abraham a headlining figure and should Donner’s mildly revisionist reconstruction of early Islam be accepted it will be possible to see this period as the best candidate for a historical ‘Abrahamic experiment’ along modern lines.
Be this as it may, within a century Muslims clearly differentiated between their religion and the religions of others. The category of ‘others’ included both those who did not have a scripture (or ‘Book’, kitāb) and those who did, the ahl al-kitāb.4 The distinction is quranic, as is the acceptance of those who possess scripture as legitimate religious communities. As the Quran (3: 199) puts it:
And there are, certainly, among the People of the Book, those who believe in God and in that which has been revealed to you, and in that which has been revealed to them, humbling themselves before God. They do not sell the Verses of God for a little price, for them is a reward with their Lord. Surely God is Swift in account.
Elsewhere, the Quran (2: 62) identifies these communities as being Jews, Christians, and the elusive ‘Sabians’, and suggests that the righteous amongst these communities will be rewarded by God. Both the practical questions arising from a Muslim’s dealings with non-Muslim neighbours (mostly Zoroastrians in the east and Christians in the west) and the fact that the Quran itself mentions these communities in such interesting terms, led Muslim scholars to consider their relationship to members of other communities and the category of ‘People of the Book’ was continually reinterpreted to accommodate other religions as realities dictated. Hence, Zoroastrians and even Hindus could—in the eyes of some scholars—qualify for inclusion.
In the twelfth century, the Persian scholar al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153) sought to make analytical sense of the differences between the various religions and sects known to him.5 In his chapter on the People of the Book he distinguishes between those who have an ‘authentic Scripture’ (kitāb muḥaqqaq) such as the Jews and Christians, and those who have a pseudo-scripture, such as the Zoroastrians and Manichaeans (Shahrastānī 1961: 208ff.). In his view, the Quran only has the former in mind when referring to the People of the Book.6 He also recognizes that both Jews and Christians on the one hand, and Muslims on the other, have a ‘direction of prayer’ (qibla), with the latter facing Mecca the former Jerusalem (p. 209).
Not only did Muslims accept that Jews and Christians also had scriptures (and qiblas) but—obvious though it may sound—they also recognized that each of the three religions had a pivotal character bearing that religion’s message.7 An anecdote preserved in a tenth-century Arabic geographical work describes some ninth-century travellers discovering a sarcophagus in a chamber of one of the smaller pyramids in Egypt:
We found in the sarcophagus the corpse of a ruler (shaykh); under his head was a tablet of white onyx that had cracked from the fire we had set…we took the tablet, and joining it together, found on one side two images of gold. One of the images was of a man, in his hand was a serpent, the other was the image of a man on a donkey, holding a staff, on the other side of the tablet was a third image of a man mounted on a camel bearing a rod. So we took all of this to Ahmad ibn Tulun (d. 884—AS), who called for an artisan to join together the tablet. We collectively came to the consensus that the three images corresponded to Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. (Muhallabi 2006: 160)
Associating each religion with a founding-figure is hinted at in Judah Halevi’s statement concerning the similarity between Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic (as mentioned above) and is overtly indicated by the author of the medieval anti-religious work ‘The Treatise of the Three Imposters’ (De tribus impostoribus), which sought to discredit Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by attacking the credibility of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad respectively (Minois 2012). Similarly, defending the credibility of these three could serve to establish the legitimacy of their religions in general. In the words of Ibn Kammūna (Perlmann 1971: 39):
As it is impossible to mention every claimant to prophethood and to mention the arguments for his prophethood, let us confine ourselves to the most important claimants widely known in our time and place, the arguments of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims about the prophethood of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, may they all be blessed.
It is not only philosophers who could be seen to think ‘Abrahamically’ but also, perhaps predictably, mystics. Maimonides’ son, Abraham, invested considerable energies (and at a considerable personal price) towards the advancement of what is commonly called ‘Jewish-Sufism’, which aimed to meld Jewish theology and practice with Islamic patterns of spirituality. And of course one finds that Sufis themselves—who are often (in)famous for blurring the details of orthodoxy in favour of the big picture (as they see it)—also made tolerant noises about members of other (monotheistic) religions. In the words of perhaps their most famous proponent, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273):
The love for the Creator is latent in all the world and in all men, be they Magians, Jews or Christians, indeed in all things that have being. How indeed should any man not love Him that gave him being? Love indeed is latent in every man, but impediments veil that love; when those impediments are removed that love becomes manifest. (Arberry 1961: 214f.)
Although Rūmī includes Zoroastrians alongside the expected Jews and Christians, it is clear that he restricts his judgement to monotheists (and considers the Magians to be monotheists, rather than dualists), both from his assumption that they love ‘the Creator’ (singular) and from the following statement of his: ‘After all, everyone acknowledges the Oneness of God, that He is Creator and Provider, that He controls everything, that to Him all things shall return, and that it is He who punishes and forgives’ (Arberry 1961: 108). It is as though Rūmī is unaware of the existence of pagans and polytheists and in this case, and others like it, it may be that when we find Muslim authors making tolerant statements about Jews and Christians they are not being specifically ‘Abrahamic’ but more generally ecumenical; their worldview was merely restricted to the monotheistic world. Accordingly, scholars whose worldview was suitably broad might be deemed to have been ‘ecumenical’ rather than ‘Abrahamic’. Hence, when al-Bīrūnī (d. 1048) sought to make conciliatory comments about other religions he adopted a fair and sophisticated approach to Judaism and Christianity (as expected) but also included the obviously polytheistic, idolatrous Hinduism within the category of religions who worship a single God, devoting an in-depth and respectful monograph to the religion (Jeffrey 1951). Others, such as Shahrastānī, chose specifically to distinguish Judaism and Christianity from other religions (such as Hinduism, of which he was well aware), and group them together with Islam as being Scriptural religions. The point here is that not all Muslim scholars who were tolerant of other religions were specifically ‘Abrahamic’, though some clearly were.
In many ways, the ‘Abrahamic’ idea makes good political sense, as can be seen from the political support that modern Abrahamic initiatives enjoy, especially in countries where Jews, Christians, and Muslims exist in significant numbers and interact (e.g. the USA, the UK, France, and elsewhere). Such considerations also applied in pre-modern times and there are cases in which political leaders created or sponsored interfaith institutions and related initiatives. Perhaps most striking is the case of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great (r. 1556–61), who created what he called the Dīn-i Ilāhī (‘Divine Religion’; Roy Choudhury 1985). He built a multi-faith ‘House of Worship’ (ʿIbādat khāna), where interfaith discussions were held, and he further eroded the distinction between Islam and other religions by repealing the poll-tax (jizya) that non-Muslims are expected to pay. Generally speaking, his initiative aimed at reconciling Islam with Hinduism, Christianity, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism and, as such, while it was ecumenical it was not, strictly speaking, Abrahamic.
Akbar’s religious innovations influenced the Persian ruler Nader Shah Afshar (r. 1736–47), who is quoted as having said: ‘If God is one, religion must be one!’ (Fischel 1952: 31). He thus ordered the heads of the Jewish and Christian communities to translate their scriptures into Persian, but the Abrahamic initiative did not go much further than that. Both Akbar the Great and Nader Shah were, at least to some extent, motivated by political realities: Akbar was a Muslim ruling over a largely Hindu population and Nader Shah was a Sunni ruling over a largely Shiʿite one; blurring the differences between the competing sects and religions in one’s realm could serve to blunt any religious basis for objecting to their rule.
Little attention has been paid to Christian ideas about the commonalities shared with Judaism and Islam. This is for the most part because Christianity did not develop in any meaningful way categories such as ‘Noachide’ peoples, ‘Nations Ordered by Religions’ or ‘Peoples of the Book’ and examples of inter-Abrahamic cooperation led by Christians tend to consist of individual actions or statements on the part of individual Christians rather than wide-ranging theoretical categories within which to embrace Judaism and Islam as comparable religious traditions.8 As with Judaism and Islam, it is within the circles of medieval philosophers that we find Christian acknowledgement of the value of other Abrahamic religions: Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) could cite the works of the Jew Maimonides and the Muslim Averroes in support of his own religion’s arguments, just as Michael Scott (d. 1232) read the works of Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes in their original Arabic, while having interacted with and influenced the Jewish Jacob Anatoli, whose ideas about other religions we have encountered above.
A tantalizing example of Christian acknowledgement of theological commonalities with other Abrahamic traditions comes not from the circles of philosophers but from the travelogue of William of Rubruck, which describes the latter’s mission to the Mongol court in the thirteenth century, where he partook in an interfaith debate between Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. We are told that on the eve of this disputation, ‘Rubruck dissuaded the Nestorian priests from engaging first with the Muslims as they had intended, pointing out that as fellow monotheists the Muslims were their allies against the “idolators”; and when the Nestorians proved unable to prove the existence of God but could only quote the Scriptures, he induced them to allow him to open for the Christian cause’ (Itinerarium, ed. Jackson 2013: 17; and see Kedar 1999).
While certain mystics, philosophers, and (Jewish) messianic pretenders encountered above seemed able to accept other monotheistic religions as equally valid paths to God, Heaven, or Salvation, most of the examples cited concern those who merely reserved a higher level of interreligious tolerance for members of other Abrahamic religions, while still maintaining that their own religion was superior to the others. Although many modern Abrahamic initiatives adopt a tone or manifesto that implies parity between the religions, it is surely the case that many participants still hold exclusivist beliefs: would participating Christians really not prefer the Jews and Muslims around the table accept Jesus? Would the Muslim participants not want the Jews or Christians to embrace Islam? Similarly, it is important to stress that proponents—both past and present—of the Abrahamic idea do not seek and have not sought to argue that the three religions are ‘the same’, as that would challenge the integrity, individuality, and raison d’être of each religion. It is, moreover, the logic of racists and other bigots to take a group of individuals who share certain attributes and judge them to be ‘all the same’.
Rather, Abrahamic initiatives then and now seek to underline the fact that the three religions can reasonably be grouped together on account of their common attributes, that there is more that unites them than divides them, and that they belong to a discrete group of religions, which are—for whatever reason—preferred to those religious or irreligious communities that are outside the Abrahamic fold. This is not to say that the history of relations between adherents of these three religions has been dominated by fuzzy feelings of ‘Abrahamic’ camaraderie. Quite to the contrary, it is arguable that there have been more low points in the history of Abrahamic interfaith relations than high points, and for every even-handed coverage of the three religions that we find on medieval bookshelves there are many more polemical works written by Jewish, Christian, or Muslim scholars against each other. The point of this chapter has merely been to show that both the focus on Abraham as a unifying figure and the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are comparable and familiar (in the literal sense of the word), have important precedents in the history of these religions.
1 It is a curious fact that the Monk in this exchange, despite being circumspect about this Abramo-centric religion, was called ‘Abraham’ himself (Crone and Cook 1977: 163 n. 23).
2 We will see below how Judah Halevi interprets this phrase. Interestingly, already in the ancient Greek (LXX) and Syriac versions of the Psalm the word ‘nation’ (‘am) is read as though it says ‘with’ (‘īm), thereby neutralizing the phrase somewhat.
3 There is evidence of pagans revering Abraham too, and the annual festival of Abraham near Hebron that Sozomen describes for the fourth century ce, was attended not only by the expected Jews and Christians but also by pagan ‘Palestinians, Phoenecians, and Arabs’ (in Stroumsa 2011: 17–18; and Stroumsa 2013: 163–4).
4 This latter category largely overlaps with, but is still entirely distinct from, the category of protected peoples, ahl al-dhimma. The main difference for our purposes is that whereas the People of the Book is a label which places Jews, Christians, and Muslims on equal footing (though each would argue that his ‘Book’ is superior to the other ones), the idea of Protected Peoples places Muslims above Jews, Christians, and others who came to benefit from Muslim protection.
5 It should be pointed out that his book on this topic is remarkably balanced in its coverage of other religions.
6 The practical distinction between the two groups is that although one can have routine relationships with the pseudo- ahl al-kitāb and they are protected communities, one cannot marry them or eat meat that they have prepared (whereas this is permitted with those possessing an ‘authentic’ Book).
7 Interestingly, Muslim scholars recognized yet another commonality shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, namely their splintering into scores of sects. As a famous ḥadīth attributed to the prophet Muhammad has it: ‘The Jews divided into seventy-one sects, the Christians into seventy-two sects, and my community will divide into seventy-three sects’ (in Mottahedeh 2006: 156ff.). The dubious one-upmanship aside, this statement (and the many variations on it found in ḥadīth collections) presupposes that the three religions are to be compared to each other.
8 It is hard to reconcile ecumenical, interfaith ideas with Paul’s clear statement ‘If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord”, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved’ (Romans 10: 9). The implication is that one cannot ‘be saved’ without signing up to these ideas. Similarly, Jesus himself is quoted as having said ‘No one comes to the Father but by me’ (John 14: 6), which again categorically excludes non-Christians from Salvation.