Jewish Revival and Respect for Islam in Nineteenth-Century Europe
On May 17, 2013, Joseph V. Montville, director of the Esalen Institute’s “Toward the Abrahamic Family Reunion” project (http://abrahamicfamilyreunion. org), addressed a select audience at the IIIT headquarters on pre-Zionist Jewish scholarly interest in Islam. He began by recalling how Germa...
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| Format: | article |
| Language: | EN |
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International Institute of Islamic Thought
2013
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| Online Access: | https://doaj.org/article/7944234d6fd948df9bd23fcd228734c9 |
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| Summary: | On May 17, 2013, Joseph V. Montville, director of the Esalen Institute’s “Toward
the Abrahamic Family Reunion” project (http://abrahamicfamilyreunion.
org), addressed a select audience at the IIIT headquarters on pre-Zionist
Jewish scholarly interest in Islam.
He began by recalling how German and Austro-Hungarian Jewish scholars
discovered remarkable similarities in the Torah, the Talmud, and the
Qur’an. While hardly a surprise to Muslims, this was a “major revelation and
surprise” to European Christian philologists and historians of religions. This
new interest emerged as Europe was losing its fear of the Ottoman Empire,
and of Muslims in general, because the now militarily inferior empire was in
retreat and anti-Semitism was on the rise. Jewish intellectuals sought to blunt
this latter trend by combating Christian disdain, if not hostility, of Jews and
Judaism. They therefore played a major role in this scholarship, for, quoting
from Bernard Lewis [“The State of Middle Eastern Studies,” American
Scholar 48, no. 3 (summer 1979: 369-70)]: ...
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