CC: 🇺🇸 🇪🇸 عربي
In the 19th century, some Jewish scholars in Central Europe looked to early Islam and in particular to the Prophet Muhammad for inspiration and consolation. For these scholars, the Muslim prophet could serve as a heuristic model for reforming Judaism. John Tolan, Professor of History at the University of Nantes, France, explores this interesting topic. It's based on a chapter of his book, _Faces of the Prophet: A History of Western Portrayals of Muhammad_.
You can get the book from Princeton University Press (press.princeton.edu/books/har....
Follow us on social media:
Facebook: / emirsteincenter
Twitter: / emirsteincenter
Instagram: / emirsteincenter
Website: www.emir-stein.org
Script:
The nineteenth century was a tumultuous time for Jews of central Europe. They had been granted new freedoms and for the first time were equal to other citizens before the law in most European countries. Yet at the same time, they continued to face bitter and at times violent anti-Semitism from Christians who claimed that Jews were unassimilable into European culture. Amidst the anguish and upheaval, a handful of Jewish scholars of the time looked to early Islam and in particular to the Prophet Muhammad for inspiration and consolation. In memory of what they saw as a golden age of Jewish culture in Medieval Muslim cities, such as Baghdad and Cordoba, Jewish communities in central Europe built gleaming new synagogues in the Moorish style, looking like mosques with their minarets.
I am John Tolan, professor of history at the University of Nantes in France. For over thirty years, I have been researching the intertwined histories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Europe and the Mediterranean world. This video is based on a chapter of my recent book, Faces of the Prophet: A History of Western Portrayals of Muhammad. In this book, I show that while many Europeans, from the Middle Ages to today, had a negative, polemical perception of Muhammad, others looked on him with fascination and admiration.
Rabbi and reformer Abraham Geiger sought to usher in innovations in the practice of Judaism, in order to facilitate Jews’ greater inclusion into an increasingly secular European society and to counter anti-Semitism. Geiger’s scholarship on the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was closely related to his reform project. He compared the Jewish traditions of the Bible and the Talmud with the text of the Qur’an and concluded that Islam was closer to Judaism, truer to the spirit and Law of Moses than was Christianity, and that Muhammad was not an imposter. According to Geiger, the Prophet Muhammad “seems rather to have been a genuine enthusiast, who was himself convinced of his divine mission, and to whom the union of all religions appeared necessary to the welfare of mankind. He so fully worked himself into this idea in thought, in feeling, and in action, that every event seemed to him a divine inspiration.” For Geiger, Judaism “developed its own fullest potential in closest union with Arab civilization.” Islamic civilization is not only friendly to the development of Judaism, it represents a pure, unsullied form of monotheism that can serve as a model for nineteenth-century Jews in their efforts to reform Judaism.
Gustav Weil was a fellow student of Geiger’s at Heidelberg: the two studied Arabic together. Weil subsequently traveled to Algeria, Cairo, and Istanbul, writing for German newspapers, teaching French, and studying Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. On his return to Germany, he published works on Arabic poetry and German translations of Arabic texts, in particular The Arabian Nights. Among his many studies of the early history of Islam was a biography of Muhammad (1843). According to Weil, Muhammad is no imposter but a sincere reformer. In accordance with Geiger and with many eighteenth-century authors, Weil views Muhammad as seeking to renew the unsullied, original monotheism of the patriarch Abraham. In Weil’s account, Islam was a purified version of both Judaism and Christianity: “A Judaism without the many ritual and ceremonial laws, which, according to Muhammad’s declaration, even Christ had been called to abolish, or a Christianity without the Trinity, crucifixion and salvation.” Like Geiger, Weil stresses how medieval Muslim rulers allowed Jewish culture to flourish.
...