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In a book entitled Comparative Religion, its Genesis and Growth, published in 1905, Louis Henry Jordan (1855–1923), analysed the genesis and growth of a then new and blooming approach—especially in England—to the study of religious phenomena, an approach of which he was the great herald. More than a hundred years later, ‘Comparative Religion’ would appear at first sight to be a moribund discipline, now replaced by Departments of ‘Religious Studies’ whose existence depends on whether enough students are attracted for the topic to be deemed worthy of existence by the ruthless laws of market imposed upon universities in the twenty-first century. These departments look all too often like amorphous patchworks and spineless entities, in which ‘anything goes’. ‘Comparative Religion’, by contrast, had at least the advantage of a clear method: religious phenomena from various historical and cultural milieux could and should be compared. Their differences as well as their similarities were to be highlighted, as they alone would offer the key not only to the nature, but also to the syntax of religion in its different manifestations. In many ways, the phenomenology of religion, en vogue mainly between the two World Wars, and immediately after the Second World War, should be seen as the sequel of Comparative Religion. As we shall see, however, this method (as all methods in the Humanities) was hardly value free (wertfrei in Weberian parlance), and reflected both explicit theologies and implicit ideologies (or explicit ideologies and implicit theologies) of the imperial and colonial age. It remains obvious, nonetheless, that, like languages and cultures, religions could and should be compared, families of religions identified, and taxonomies established.
The field of ‘comparative religion’ reflects the state of the art in the late nineteenth century. The expression itself points to the intellectual milieu in which it was conceived: the Victorian age, when the British Empire was at its zenith, encouraged the comparison of cultures in all fields: linguistics, history, archaeology, law, political and economic systems, as well as religion. The last three decades of the nineteenth century, which saw the birth of ‘comparative religion’, also witnessed the emergence of ‘world religions’. These ‘big’ religions in terms of numbers of believers or practitioners were also deemed ‘great’ and comparable, mutatis mutandis, to Christianity in their theological riches, geographical spread, historical span, and impact on a number of civilizations.
Islam, obviously, belonged to this ‘club’, but it was eclipsed, to a great extent, by the great religious traditions of India, which all in all attracted more immediate interest and deeper sympathy. As we now know, ‘Hinduism’, a term which has no Sanskrit equivalent, is a recent western scholarly invention, which represents the ‘consolidation’ of the many and varied religious traditions of India. Buddhism, on its side, a religion to a great extent discovered by the West in the nineteenth century, fascinated the minds as a godless religion, and also as some kind of eastern parallel to Christianity, stemming from the archaic rituals and beliefs of India just as Christianity had emerged from those of ancient Israel. In contradistinction with Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism were considered to be rich and complex religions, at once exotic and fascinating.
In order to understand this deep difference in European attitudes to Islam and to what would be called, following Friedrich Max Müller (1824–1900) and his major translation project of ‘The Sacred Books of the East’, ‘the religions of the East’, we must recall the nineteenth-century classification of languages into families: the Aryan or Indo-European languages versus the Semitic ones. This linguistic classification had a deep impact on the taxonomy of religions: it was usually assumed to be paralleled by ethnic and religious classifications: hence, the categories of Semitic peoples and of Semitic religions, and the postulated existence of a single, original Semitic people, and of a single, original Semitic religion. On the other hand, just as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin (and other European languages) shared many traits, so the cultural and religious traditions of India were perceived as retaining some kind of family resemblance to those of Europe. This was a major scholarly fallacy. To be sure, it was not the cause for the mounting racial anti-Semitism and feelings of spite or strong distaste for Islam among European intellectuals. It remains beyond doubt, however, that the fallacy would strengthen such attitudes and offer them scholarly support.
I shall deal here with a major puzzle in the history of modern scholarship. The obvious ‘family resemblances’, to follow Wittgenstein’s usage of the term, between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had been clearly recognized throughout the centuries and up to the Enlightenment. The modern scholarly study of these religions, however, has shown a remarkable lack of interest in thinking and studying the three religions together, in comparative fashion. The historical and comparative study of religions, which developed as a discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, has rarely discussed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the same framework, and thus has remained to a great extent unable to perceive clearly, from a structural as well as from a genetic perspective, either their close similarities or their deep differences. It is only very recently that the locution ‘Abrahamic religions’ has become fashionable among scholars and that the comparative scholarly study of these religions seems to have picked up momentum. Established four years ago, the Chair that I had the honour to inaugurate at Oxford has now been followed by one at Cambridge (with the more theologically coloured name ‘Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values’), and by various similar positions or programmes in other academic institutions, at least in Great Britain. Moreover, a plethora of books, certainly not all of them scholarly, are being published these days on topics such as ‘Abraham, our common father’ and the Abrahamic religions. Hence, it is from various angles that one should study the intellectual, cultural, and religious context of the late emergence and slow, erratic development of the comparative study of the Abrahamic religions, in a number of European countries, during the last two centuries.
Focusing on Wissenschaftsgeschichte in a peculiar way, the present inquiry is to a great extent the study of an absence. Why is it, it asks, that nineteenth-century scholarship neglected the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? This inquiry also stands at the confluence of a number of disciplines: Orientalism (more particularly the study of Islam, as well as Arabic, Turkic, and Iranian philology, all disciplines blooming in the period under study), and Jewish Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums), the multi-disciplinary study of post-biblical Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish languages and literatures, a field more or less created ab ovo by Jewish scholars in the nineteenth century, and the scholarly study of Christianity (in particular early and late antique Christianity), as it slowly sought to disengage itself from theology—without ever fully succeeding in achieving this goal. These different fields of study were special cases in the emerging comparative and historical study of religions (or Religionswissenschaft, Histoire des religions). They are also related to the invention and early development of the concept of ‘world religions’ in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
In a sense, this inquiry offers a sequel, dealing with a later period, and more sharply focused, to my study of the modern science of religion, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason. In this book, I argued that the modern science of religion started in the period between Reformation and Enlightenment rather than, as is usually claimed, in the late nineteenth century, when the first Chairs devoted to the study of religion were established. In her excellent book, The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa calls attention to the fact that the nineteenth-century scholarly discovery and study of the religions of South and East Asia, principally Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as Confucianism and Shintoism—all terms forged by European scholars—entailed (or reflected) a weakened interest in the religions born in the Near East, first and foremost Islam, but also Judaism. In a previous period, the Near East, usually simply referred to as ‘the East’, had been considered to be the soil of all human religious origins. Now relegated to the East of the West, but belonging to the West of the ‘true’ East, as it were, Islam and Judaism thus fell between Europe and India, between the two poles of Indo-European cultural and religious creativity. To be sure, no one could deny the quality of ‘world religion’ to Islam, and the ‘Semitic mind’ was endowed, most famously by Ernest Renan, with the unique insight of the unity of God, but all in all, the attraction of the ‘true’ East, coupled with the combination of growing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, meant a strong devaluation of both Islam and Judaism, and a clear preference for Indo-European religious systems and cultural traditions over Semitic religions and cultures. Christianity, perceived as essentially a European religion, was thus managing to escape its Jewish, Near Eastern origins.
Throughout the centuries, there was a close family relationship of sorts between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, although it always remained quite a problematic one, engendering, more often than brotherly love, vicious arguments over primacy. This family relationship was now bound to become seriously weakened. From the days of the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century on, a remarkable and widespread, although certainly not universally shared, lack of deep interest in Islam and Judaism, seems to break the spell of what we now call the Abrahamic religions. For a full millennium, roughly from the eighth to the eighteenth century, Christian thinkers had perceived the world as divided between four main religious families: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and ‘the rest’, also known as ‘paganism’. This fourfold taxonomy did not as a rule entail the existence of a ‘Triple Alliance’ between the monotheistic traditions. Polemics remained the usual medium of communication between them. But one should note that a ‘theological triangle’ (to use the expression coined by the Swiss historian of religion Philippe Borgeaud) has one major advantage over a dual or polar relationship: it permits a more complex relationship, not necessarily centred upon ‘zero-sum-game polemics’.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not represent the first such ‘theological triangle’. Antiquity had already witnessed that between Greece, Egypt, and Israel, and then that between pagans, Christians, and Jews. One could also refer to the San Jiao of Medieval China, in which Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions and rituals created a remarkable syncretism and symbiosis of constant exchanges. But the Abrahamic triangle certainly represents the major such complex interface of religions in western history. As proof of its remarkable duration, let us mention only the deep popularity in the days of the Enlightenment, of the anonymous Liber de Tribus Impostoribus, probably the most popular samizdat of the eighteenth century, at least in its French version, Le Livre des trois imposteurs. The other obvious witness of the presence of the similarity between the three monotheistic religions in the Enlightenment is the ‘parable of the three rings’ in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (the play, written in 1779, was first produced in 1784)—a parable which has been shown to have a very long history, starting with a Syriac text of the eighth century, and undergoing through the ages a number of reformulations, including, famously, in Boccaccio’s Decameron.
In order to identify the vectors of the transmission and transformations of knowledge, we must probe the reasons for the odd disappearance of the natural relationship between the three Abrahamic religions, through the study, in the period lasting approximately from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, of a number of exceptional individuals, coming mainly from three intellectual cultures of Western Europe: German, French, and English. One can analyse the comparative approaches of three great scholars, the French Ernest Renan, the German Julius Wellhausen, and the Scotsman William Robertson Smith. While these three very different but equally towering scholars were well equipped to launch the modern comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they did not quite do so, and we shall inquire into the reasons for this odd fact. It should be noted that all three scholars, owing to their ambivalence towards the orthodoxies of the various churches into which they were born and in which they were educated, ran into some serious conflict with the religious and academic authorities of their respective countries, in each case with dramatic impact on their career. The history of scholarship, it should be pointed out, is obviously more than the list of the achievements of individual scholars; it is also a record of the scholarly institutions and the frames they offer which permit or prevent free research and intellectual breakthroughs. Such scholarly institutions include universities, of course, but also theological seminaries, scientific academies, scholarly journals, conferences, and publishing companies. Although it will not be possible to deal here with these scholarly institutions, one should not forget the crucial role they played in our story. In contradistinction with early modernity, when scholarship remained essentially the personal adventure of highly gifted and idiosyncratic individuals, from the nineteenth century on research has mainly been carried on within universities. It is, indeed, the dialectical interaction between individual thinking and institutionalized systems of knowledge that transforms disciplines. Moreover, although we do not deal directly with Christian theology and modern ideologies, one cannot really understand intellectual discourse and scholarly practices without constant reference to their cultural, religious, and ideological background.
Some major vectors highlight the leading role of Jewish scholars in the study of Islam as an Abrahamic religion. In the nineteenth century, Romanticism, national movements, and the emergence of modern universities, with their division into Faculties (due to which the study of religion became split between the faculties of theology, philosophy, and classical philology and oriental studies) all contributed to the break-up of the integrative reflection on the Abrahamic religions. This break-up was finalized by the combined impact of growing Islamophobia, which reflected a condescending and denigrating attitude to Islamic societies, an aversion to rather than a fear of Islam, together with rising racial anti-Semitism (a term coined by one of its protagonists, Wilhelm Marr, in the 1870s, which reflects the mutation of traditional Christian anti-Judaism in an age of secularization). The cultures to which Muslims belonged were usually perceived as deeply foreign to those of Europe, and at once strikingly and irremediably inferior to them. At the time, the Jews of Europe were starting to go out of the ghettos—and discovering, painfully, that this was not enough to get them what Heine called an ‘entrance ticket’ to European society, a ticket which still only baptism could fully provide. The Jews were identified as stemming from the Orient, and often considered as still belonging to it in many ways. It should be noted that Jews often embraced these oriental roots with pride. This self-identification is reflected in the orientalizing architecture of many nineteenth century synagogues, a style often meant to allude to the mythical symbiosis, or convivencia, between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in al-Andalus, medieval Islamic Spain, and it would also be echoed in the Zionist urge to return to the East, to Palestine. At the turn of the century, art in Jewish Palestine, too, would embrace the orientalizing trend. The Jewish chapter in the history of the comparative study of the Abrahamic religions, moreover, is endowed with a particular importance, as Jewish scholars offered some major contributions to the comparative study of Christianity and Judaism as well as of Islam and Judaism. Indeed, some particularly gifted Jewish scholars, from Abraham Geiger to Ignaz Goldziher transformed the European approach of Islam.
In the twentieth century, major events such as the globalization processes, the genocide of the European Jews, and the immigration waves of varied Muslim populations to Western Europe would offer both the immediate context and the necessary conditions for lowering the artificial, ideological boundaries erected between the different fields of study under discussion. The rise of the concept of the ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’, mainly after the Second World War, and then of the concept of the ‘Abrahamic religions’ (starting in the 1970s) offered intellectual justification for accepting, first, the remnants of the now-defunct Jewish communities, and then the fast-growing Muslim communities, into the European family, as it were, a family now recognized as being a family of religions as much as of nations, although until very recently it could only conceive of itself in Christian terms. Although the concept of the Abrahamic religions is first rooted in the perceived need for new interfaith approaches, it is now more and more widely adopted in reference to the scholarly study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Its adoption is borne out by recent attempts to both enhance and question its heuristic value. One might ask whether this use of the term is legitimate, and whether it is helpful for the critical and comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I think, however, that ways can be found through which the scholarly, comparative study of the Abrahamic religions should be approached in order to avoid pitfalls.
We can detect, then, some paradigm shifts in systems of knowledge and on the reconstruction of central cognitive structures, throughout the trajectory of modern scholarship on religion. The formation and restructuring of concepts and methods modifies fields of study, sometimes deeply transforming them. It should be obvious, I repeat, that such fields are never innocent productions of knowledge. They are ultimately related to the construction of the self through the understanding of the other, in particular when they deal directly with religious identities. In a sense, this historical and comparative study of religions, a particularly delicate, interdisciplinary field of scholarship, should also have an impact on the conditions of transformation of European identities. I shall now review a number of medieval and pre-modern comparative approaches to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in order to describe the state of affairs in the early nineteenth century.
Although the expression ‘Abrahamic religions’ is quite recent, its gestation has been a very long one. While the term ‘comparative religion’ reflects the modern, non-theological approach to the study of religious phenomena, it would be naive to conceive it as representing a clear break from a non-scientific past, and to oppose a wholly scholarly present to a totally theological past. In the pre-modern world, religious interaction between members of different religious communities was mainly polemical, but religious polemics also included cognitive elements. Beyond the obvious fact that it was useful to know the opponent’s position in order to refute it, one must remember that already in late antiquity, both Greek philosophers and Christian theologians had recognized the existence of a single, deep truth, disguised by the various mythological and religious traditions, but shared by the sages of all camps. What needs emphasizing in our present context is the fact that since antiquity, religious polemics were never devoid of an effort, at times a serious one, to understand other religions, as well as of real hermeneutical contacts between religious intellectuals from all sides. Far from being a completely modern phenomenon, the comparison of religions thus has a very long pedigree, hailing back, at least, to Herodotus. In antiquity, comparing religions was a common exercise in cultural relativity. To give only one instance, in the interpretatio graeca Herakles was identified with both the Roman Hercules and the Phoenician Melqart.
This deep belief in the fundamental closeness between the elites of the different religious and cultural traditions, pagans, Jews, and Christians, was at once reinforced and complicated in the ‘Abrahamic triangle’. The idea of a ‘family resemblance’ between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is as old as the appearance of the third of these religions. The close genetic relationship between Judaism and Christianity had been obvious since at least Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew in the mid-second century, and patristic literature makes it very clear that Christians, as well as Jews, conceived of themselves as being the true children of Abraham. Nascent Islam sought to reiterate the same argument of the true fidelity to Abraham’s pure religion, original monotheism, in front of its perversion by earlier communities, this time not only Jews, but also Christians. And John of Damascus, the first Christian polemic writer against Islam, makes it clear in the early eighth century that for him Islam was more a Christian heresy than a fully fledged religion.
As soon as Islam appears on the scene, the idea of comparing the three cognate monotheisms becomes at once possible and imperative. In a sense, the assumption is that there was only one divine revelation, and hence only one true message of God, while similarities in other religious traditions are conceived as proofs of their origin as falsifications of the original message. The devil, God’s main imitator, is held responsible for the striking similarities between falsehood and truth. Hence, the two ideas of a shared truth and of religious imposture are as in fact two sides of the same coin.
Like the comparison of religions, religious imposture has a long history. In the biblical tradition, it is identical with the idea of false prophecy. As is well known, Livy tells us in the tenth book of his History how Numa Pompilius, Rome’s first mythical king, forged the story of the nymph Egeria’s nightly revelation of the religion he wanted to impose on the Romans. He did so in order to assuage his barbarian nation, which otherwise would not have accepted his religious laws willingly, thus putting religious imposture in the service of political leadership. Religion, indeed, is usually perceived in Rome as a political invention, as noted by Cicero in his De natura deorum (1.118). For Livy, Numa’s lie is a pious one, and it is a legitimate one—a lesson which Macchiavelli will learn very well. Lucian of Samosata, in the second century ce, gives us a classical example of religious imposture, in the case of Alexander, the false prophet from Abonoteichos. In monotheistic climate, since the Hebrew Bible, religious imposture is usually perceived as false prophecy. Prophecy usually ignores established forms of religious authority, and establishes a direct link to the deity. In early Christianity, the Second, glorious Coming of Christ, the parousia, was to be preceded by the appearance of the Antichrist, a devilish imitator of Jesus Christ. This is the background of the nexus between heresy and false prophecy in early Christianity, for instance in the case of Montanus in the second century, or in that of Mani in the third. The Jewish perception of Jesus as a false prophet, or the Christian (as well as the Jewish) perception of Muhammad as a false prophet, should be seen in the same perspective.
Throughout the Middle Ages, a vast and complex web of interreligious intellectual exchanges developed, for the most part expressed in polemical literature: Jewish–Christian, Christian–Muslim, or Jewish–Muslim. Although much knowledge of the religious other is reflected in those texts, such knowledge usually remains embedded in the polemical framework. The triadic approach, involving not only two disputing sides, but a third party, offers the promise (not always kept) of a less direct polemical attitude, as well as that of a more balanced, comparative approach—hence the crucial importance of such texts, which can be seen as the prehistory of the modern, comparative study of the Abrahamic religions. I shall therefore refer here, very briefly, to a number of authors who, throughout the long Middle Ages, offered particularly interesting developments on the comparison of the three Abrahamic religions.
Obviously, the parable of the three similar, or even identical rings, which we now know mainly through Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), cannot antedate the appearance of Islam. It appears for the first time, it would seems, in an eighth-century Syriac text which purports to preserve a debate supposedly held in 782 between Timothy, the Nestorian Patriarch from 780 to 823, and al-Mahdī, the third Abbasid caliph. A rather similar story occurs in The Proof of the Christian Religion, a theological tract in Arabic written by Abu Raita al-Takriti, who died no later than 830.
In the early twelfth century, the Andalusian Jewish thinker and poet Judah Halevi (1075–1141) authored the Book of Kuzar, or Kuzari, an apology of Judaism, the ‘despised religion’. In the Kuzari, written in Judeao-Arabic, he describes how the Khazar king, in his search for religious truth, hears a Christian and a Muslim sage before moving to a Jewish sage—who alone will provide satisfactory answers to his intellectual queries and spiritual quest. It may be worth noticing that Halevi’s almost exact contemporary, the French Pierre Abelard (1079–1142), has a philosopher instead of a Muslim argue with a Jew and a Christian in his Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian, a text redacted between 1136 and 1139. To some extent, the philosopher takes the place of the Muslim, since for medieval thinkers such as Abelard, the only Muslims with whom one could possibly have an intellectual discussion were philosophers. The expected identity of the winner in such texts (the Christian for Abelard, the Jew for Halevi) is less important than the fact that the discussion is presented as a rational one, where the characters of the three religions (or of Christianity, Judaism, and philosophy for Abelard) all seek to present rational arguments in support of their faith.
In the following century, Saʿad Ibn Manṣūr Ibn Kammūna (d. 1284?) would pen what is perhaps the most remarkable comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle Ages, his Examination of the Three Faiths (Tanqīḥ al-abḥāth lil-milal al-thalāth). Ibn Kammūna was a Jew, but it is as a philosopher that he approaches the comparative study of the three monotheistic faiths, starting with a general study of prophecy before moving to a critical examination of and reflections on each of the three religions. Ibn Kammūna is obviously familiar with Halevi’s Kuzari. Despite his essentially critical attitude, he shows sympathy for both Jesus and Muhammad. (In contradistinction to his philosophical works, it would seem that the Tanqīḥ did not attract much attention on the part of Muslim or Jewish intellectuals, neither at the time nor later). As Ibn Kammūna’s works survived only in Arabic (rather than Judaeo-Arabic) manuscripts, persistent rumours circulated about his conversion to Islam, late in life. The truth of these rumours, however, has been recently questioned and refuted. A biographical detail which may be less doubtful is his having barely survived an attempted lynch in 1284, about four years after the completion of his comparative work, and close to his death. This attempted lynch reflects the violence of the reaction within the Muslim community to Ibn Kammūna’s critical view of religion.
More or less in the same years that Ibn Kammūna wrote his Examination of the Three Faiths, Ramon Llull (c.1232–c.1315), the inspired Franciscan mystical thinker from Majorca who has often been called Arabicus Christianus, published in Catalan his Book of the Gentile and of the Three Wise Men (1274–6). The book presents (in an elaborate literary frame) a pagan asking a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim to describe their religion for him. The three sages, each in his turn, present the case for the unity of God and for other central tenets of their different religions. The work reflects a rather good knowledge of Judaism and Islam, a rare occurrence at the time. Most noteworthy and unusual is the fact that the author does not tell us which of the three religions the pagan chose.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) wrote his Decameron around 1353. As is well known, this work offers (in Day 1, Tale 3) the classical version of the parable of the three rings, more or less as it will appear in Lessing’s play. Sultan Saladin had asked the Jew Melchizedek which one of the three religions was the true one, and Melchizedek answered the Sultan by telling the story of the three rings (two of which are perfect copies of the original one) given by a merchant to his three deserving sons, so that none of them would become his sole inheritor. Lis dou di vrai aniel, a French poem from the thirteenth century, seems to have been the proximate channel through which the legend reached Boccaccio. From then on, in any case, the parable would become very widespread during the Renaissance. Carlo Ginzburg (1980) has shown in a seminal study how the story appears again in the mouth of the sixteenth-century heretical Italian miller Menocchio.
Renaissance Christian thinkers also dealt with the comparison of the three Abrahamic religions in another register. In his De pace fidei (XIX), a book written shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Nicolas of Cusa (1401–64) imagines an interreligious dialogue taking place in heaven, the only rational region. There, a religious concordat is agreed upon by wise Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Given full powers, they then meet in Jerusalem, their common religious centre, to receive, in the name of all, the single faith (una religio in rituum varietate), and they establish perpetual peace within the city, ‘in order that in this peace, the Creator of all things be glorified in all saecula. Amen.’
A century later, at the dawn of modernity, the two French thinkers Guillaume Postel (1510–81) and Jean Bodin (1530–96) would also offer various reflections which can be described as ‘Abrahamic’. For Postel, a visionary Jesuit who became the first Professor of Hebrew at the newly established Collège de France, God had revealed himself essentially not through one but rather through two chains of tradition: in parallel to Abraham, the Indian Brahmans represented the second transmission of divine wisdom to humankind. Although Postel is usually perceived as a rare ‘illuminé’, it should be noted that people as different as Isaac Newton and the Catholic theologian Pierre-Daniel Huet supported the same view. In his Absconditorum clavis (1547), Postel describes how Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all successors of the law of nature, will equally be saved if they observe the law of Abraham. For him, both Moses and Muhammad had received a part of the divine spirit, fully revealed in Jesus.
Jean Bodin seems to have harboured a particular sympathy for Judaism, which he considered to be, among the different religions, closest to the law of nature. In his Heptaplomeres (assuming the work is indeed truly his), the Jew Solomon draws a parallel between Jesus, Simon Magus, and Apollonius of Tyana, all three of whom he considered religious impostors. In the same work, Senamy, the religiously indifferent, states that the great number of religions may indicate that they are all equally true.
In 1570, the French Franciscan Melchior de Flavin (d. 1580?) travelled to the Holy Land, where he preached the union between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in order to counter growing atheism. From now on, the comparison of religions in the West would happen within the framework of a religiously complex pluralism, as Jews and Muslims start appearing there as real protagonists.
In the Ottoman Empire, of course, things remained much more traditional. Abd al-Ghani ibn Isma’il al-Nabulsi (1641–1731), a scholar stemming from a Palestinian family, wrote a polemical treatise on the religious status of the dhimmīs (i.e. the religious minorities, essentially Jews and Christians) which reflected a remarkably liberal attitude. Just like Guillaume Postel for Jews and Muslims, al-Nabulsi argues that Jews and Christians can be saved in the hereafter even without converting to Islam. Suffice it for them to have faith (iman) in their hearts. Such a tolerant attitude to religious minorities may well be less striking on the part of a Muslim than on that of a Christian, and yet it seems to have been rare enough to be worthy of notation.
Perhaps the most interesting work of comparative study of the Abrahamic religions during the Enlightenment is that of the Irishman John Toland (1668–1722), Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity. The book, published in 1718, developed ideas already expressed by Toland in a French manuscript of 1710, Christianisme judaïque et mahométan. Toland established his argument upon the Gospel of Barnabas, an apocryphal text of which a single Italian manuscript was the only testimony. His goal was to offer a historical argument on the Jewish roots of Christianity in order to promote the status of the Jews in contemporary European societies. Similarly, in Les Lettres persannes (Lettre 60; 1721), Montesquieu refers to Christianity and Islam as to the two branches from the old Jewish stem.
Around the same time, an anonymous treatise started to circulate in Europe, the Traité des trois imposteurs, ou l’esprit de M. de Spinoza. This was a very curious book, rather different from the earlier Latin De tribus impostoribus, in which Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were presented as three religious impostors who had sought to keep humankind under the yoke of false religions. Despite the fact that the book has elicited a very great number of studies, much remains mysterious about its contents, its sources, and the circumstances of its appearance. The idea of the three impostors incarnates the revolt against monotheism. In his Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul (1516), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) had stated that the three monotheistic religions affirmed the immortality of the soul only in order to ensure the people’s obedience. The idea of imposture was at the core of religious polemics in the second half of the seventeenth century, mainly in England and Holland. In the eighteenth century, however, the idea of the three impostors would also be used as a foil, barely covering an essentially anti-Christian attitude. For the radical Enlightenment, the fight against the church (see Voltaire’s famous expression: ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’) was immediate and concrete, while the presence of Moses and Muhammad was mainly meant to camouflage the perception of Jesus as a religious impostor.
Like the parable of the three rings, the story of the three impostors goes back, at least, to the Middle Ages. Although, as we have seen, the concept of religious imposture has its roots in antiquity, the idea of the three impostors appears of necessity later than the parable of the three rings. For Renan, the three impostors were originally a medieval chimera, ‘born in the mind of theologians shocked by the cohabitation of the three worlds at the courts of Palermo and Toledo’. Muhammad, of course, had always been considered by Christian and Jewish thinkers alike to have been an impostor. This view was repeated at the turn of the eighteenth century in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd edn 1802; English translation 1709). In the early Muslim world, the idea of religious imposture was also present, for instance among a number of freethinkers, Ismaili dissidents, and Qarmatians. But for medieval Christian authors, it is Averroes (the Latinized name of the twelfth-century philosopher and legal scholar Ibn Rushd) who stood at the root of the idea of a religious imposture shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. According to the Italian theologian Gilles of Rome (1247–1316), Averroes had stated that the religion of the Christians was impossible, that of the Jews infantile, and that of the Muslims made for pigs. According to Gilles, Averroes had claimed: ‘Quod nulla lex est vera, licet possit esse utilis’ (in free translation: ‘since no religion is true, religion may at best be useful’), a return to the Roman conception of religion as the cement of civil society, with no truth value.
In Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Saladin’s three sons, who possess each a ring apparently identical to the other two, are called Betrüger, impostors. Indeed, the role of the parable in the play is to respond to the story of the three impostors. Similarly, Lessing intended in The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts), a text from 1780, to offer a revision of the thesis that humankind had been successively deceived by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Rather than a series of deceptions, one read the history of the monotheistic religions as a series of steps in the progressive religious education of humankind. While the origins of the idea of the three impostors must remain in the dark, what counts for us here is the clear thematic affinity between it and the parable of the three rings. In a remarkable and idiosyncratic book, Veritas sive Varietas, Lessings Toleranzparabel und das Buch von den drei Betrügern, Friedrich Niewöhner has shown that ‘the two traditions were closely associated with the doctrine of religious tolerance’. As Niewöhner has shown, Lessing, who was at heart a Spinozist, was deeply influenced by the twelfth-century Jewish thinker Maimonides in his comparative approach to religion.
At the time of the French revolution, therefore, European intellectuals knew, in one way or another, that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, and that the religious history of humankind had to be approached, to a great extent, as the interface of these three religions and their intertwined history. The birth of the Abrahamic religions as a field of study, then, should have started in the early nineteenth century, with the development of philology and orientalism in the German universities. We must ask, then, why this did not happen?
Instead of a provisory conclusion, I shall offer here some reflections on the cognitive shift which happened in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, which has been deemed by some German historians the Gründungsjahrhundert, the foundational century, the major categories used to understand the contemporary world took shape. A number of phenomena, which happened more or less simultaneously, are at the root of what we can call the Abrahamic eclipse of the nineteenth century.
Herder, who had been Kant’s student in Königsberg, wrote moving pages on the spirit of the Orient in general, and of Hebrew poetry in particular. Herder also supported granting full citizen rights to the Jews. A free spirit like Schoppenhauer was able to speak of ‘the Jewish faith and its two branches, Christianity and Islam’ (Marchand 2009: 301), but he belonged here to a minority. Such voices would soon be muffled by very different sounds. For most German Romantic thinkers, Judaism was a fossil religion: ‘Judaism is long since a dead religion’, claimed Schleiermacher in his fifth speech On Religion (1996: 113–15; the text was first published in 1799). On his side, Hegel had no use for Islam in his historical taxonomy of religions. For him, Islam was characterized by its ‘fanatic religiosity’, although it had the advantage of having been purged from the nationalist character of Judaism. For most European intellectuals in the Romantic age, Islam was indeed perceived as a ‘regression’ in the historical progress of world consciousness. Such a perception of Islam would long remain prevalent among many historians of religions. In this respect, one could refer to the Dutch Old Testament scholar and orientalist Abraham Kuenen.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the mental world of European intellectuals was changing rapidly. The Enlightenment Republic of Letters was fast being replaced by the competing nationalism of intellectuals in the Europe of nations. These nations, establishing different educational systems and scientific institutions, developed at the same time national traditions of scholarship in general, and of orientalism in particular. The new growth of national patterns and traditions of scholarship was rendered even more complex by the religious fault lines between Protestant and Catholic societies.
At the institutional level, the creation of different faculties in German universities meant that students of Graeco-Roman antiquity worked in isolation from both theologians and Orientalists (as a rule, Hebraists taught in Theological rather than Oriental faculties). According to the recent discovery of the families of languages, Sanskrit and ancient Iranian belonged to the same family as Greek, Latin, and almost all other European languages. This linguistic taxonomy offered an easy step to identifying the peoples speaking those languages as related to one another, and, moreover, to their religions belonging to similarly large families. Hence, one started speaking about Semitic and Aryan religions. Now this move happened at a time of secularization. As Christianity was more and more conceived as the cultural capital of Europe, intellectuals and scholars alike became deeply ambivalent to its genetic relations with Judaism, a Semitic religion of the ancient Near East. Jesus was now perceived more as a European Christian than as a Palestinian Jew. The conundrum of growing secularization and nationalism thus left less and less room for the Jews in Europe. Precisely then, as they were starting to exit the ghettos, they sought to integrate the ambient societies, in which they were clearly made to feel unwelcome. These were the times of the transformation of traditional Christian anti-Judaism into a new form of racial hatred, anti-Semitism. In such conditions, both Judaism and Islam were felt to belong to an East too close to Europe for not being perceived as a threat, rather than to a distant, exotic, and attractive Far East. In a sense, one could say that both Judaism and Islam became the victims of the European mechanism of boundary building. Regrettably, the close relationship between the study of Judaism and that of Islam (and the Jewish study of Islam) in the nineteenth century does not seem to have interested Edward Said. Yet, it is in this context that we can justify his description of Orientalism as that ‘strange, secret sharer of Western Anti-Semitism’ (Said 1978: 28).
Perhaps the most decisive element that prevented the development of the triple-faced study of monotheist religion was the more and more common use of the concept of ‘world religions’, which can be found already in 1864 (Nongbri 2012: 128). While Judaism, a national rather than a universal religion, clearly did not belong to that exclusive club, Islam remained marginal in it, despite both the huge numbers of its practitioners and its worldwide geographical spread, remaining much less attractive to students of religion than Buddhism, for instance, the religion of the East which one liked to compare to Christianity in the West. We are entitled, then, to claim, together with Jürgen Osterhammel (2009: 1240–4), that the discovery of the ‘World religions’ disrupted the ‘Abrahamic family’. Much before the end of the nineteenth century, the three rings had disappeared, together with the three impostors. For the great majority of scholars, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had so little in common that their comparative study was not deemed significant. Our question, then, should be rephrased: How was the idea of a family relationship, of a suggeneia, between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reclaimed by scholarship? This would be an arduous and tortuous way.
For a history of the modern study of religion, see Kippenberg 2002 and Masuzawa 2003, with further bibliography for further reading. It is to be noted that little deals specifically with the Abrahamic religions in most studies of comparative religion. A contemporary theory of religion (Riesebrodt 2010) offers interesting suggestions on the Abrahamic religions. For a recent criticism of the usefulness of the concept of Abrahamic religions, see Hughes 2012. The very rich study of Marchand 2009 focuses on Germany, but offers many insights of general interest for our topic. Massignon (1997, but the different texts were published starting in the 1920s) was seminal for the recent use of ‘Abrahamic religions’, on which cf. Stroumsa 2011.