Jewish Muslims? The Pulver Family Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College explains his oxymoronic title as follows: “Premodern Christians fully understood that Muslims are not Jews. Precisely for this reason, many found it useful to allege that Muslims are Jewish – or, if you prefer, “Jew-ish” – as a means of defining Muslims and Islam as the enemies of Christians and Christianity. This intentionally counterfactual assertion of similarity bordering on identity, like the insult, ‘you’re a pig!,’ is metaphorical: it adds value to rhetoric by distorting reality. … The assertion that Muslims are Jewish is also an intentional distortion that, many Christians believed, increases the value of their rhetoric by applying to Muslims familiar negative ideas about Jews.”
Freidenreich finds that premodern Christian polemicists resorted to portraying Muslims as Jewish for three related purposes: to place Muslims in a biblical context, to justify assaults on Muslims, and to formulate proper Christian behavior. The last goal has greatest importance: His book, the author explains, concerns “Christians who intentionally misrepresented Muslims as Jewish because they believed that such rhetoric would spur their audiences to become better Christians.”
The historical study reviews two groups of Christian polemicists: those who lived in the Middle East during the first two centuries of Islam and those who lived in Europe during the first millennium of Islam. The dozen chapters take up one more unlikely topic of intentional confusion after another, as indicated by their titles, including: “Muhammad the Jew, and Other Moralizing Slurs,” “The Logic, and the Consequences, of Defining Muslims as Judaizers,” “Conspiracy Theories: Muslim Agents of Jewish Malevolence,” “How Muslims, Jews, and Romans Became Worshippers of Muhammad,” and “Luther’s Rivals and the Emergent Discourse of Anti-Islam.”
Jewish Muslims usefully corrects the 1986 study by Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew As Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism. The Cutlers saw the connection between Jews and Muslims in Christian eyes; Freidenreich show their mistake of thinking that this connection discredited Jews when it actually discredited Muslims.
