The Convergence of Judaism and Islam
Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions
"Scholars working on the history, culture, literature, and thought of Middle Eastern Jewry, or Jews in Islamic lands, will find this book to be essential."—Daniel Frank, The Ohio State University
The Convergence of Judaism and Islamoffers fifteen interdisciplinary studies that investigate the complex relationships between the cultures of Jews and Muslims during the medieval and early modern periods. They reveal that, for the most part, Jewish-Muslim relations were peaceful and involved intellectual and professional cooperation.
Eschewing a chronological approach and featuring contributions from European, Israeli, and North American scholars, including veterans and recent PhDs, the volume makes many fascinating and stimulating juxtapositions. To give one example, chapters on early Islam and the shaping of Jewish-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages shed light on the legal battles over the status of synagogues in twentieth-century Yemen or the execution of a fourteen-year-old girl in nineteenth-century Morocco.
Sure to provoke controversy and discussion, this volume focuses on a period of free exchange between these two cultures that resulted in some of the most seminal breakthroughs in math, science, and medicine the world has known.
Michael M. Laskier, professor of Middle Eastern studies and director of the Menachem Begin Center for the Study of Resistance Movements at Bar-Ilan University, is the author or editor of numerous books, including North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century,winner of the U.S. National Jewish Book Award. Yaacov Lev, professor of Islamic medieval history and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Bar-Ilan University, is the author of Charity, Endowments, and Charitable Institutions in Medieval Islam.
