Analogising Judaism and Islam: nineteenth- and twentieth-century German–Jewish scholarship on Islam

Abstract

This paper focuses on one chapter of the history of Jewish–Muslim intellectual encounter by examining the work of three Jewish scholars of Islam: Gustav Weil, Ignác Goldziher and Ilse Lichtenstadter. In recent years, (German–)Jewish Orientalism has received growing attention, with scholars arguing that Jewish Orientalists used the study of Islam to confront issues related to their own position as members of a religious minority in Christian Europe. This paper focuses in particular on the analogies these thinkers drew between Judaism and Islam in general and between Jewish and Islamic ‘responses to modernity’ in particular. I argue that the idea that Judaism and Islam are similar remains an idée fixe from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century (and beyond) but that it is also malleable. I conclude with some remarks about contemporary calls for an ‘Islamic reformation’.

Keywords:

• Orientalism
• Jewish reform
• Islamic reform
• German–Jewish thought
• Abrahamic

Notes

1. Papers of Ilse Lichtenstadter (PIL). Travel diaries, 1947–1971. Diary (1950), in folder ‘Cairo, 1950’. 13,457 Box 1 Harvard University Archives (HUA).

2. Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, No. 123 (May 24, 1831): 492.

3. Ibid.

4. Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, No. 205 (Aug. 27, 1832): 820.

5. PIL. Travel diaries, 1947–1971. Travel diary, 1955 in folder ‘[Travel in the Near and Middle East, 1955].’ 13,457 Box 1 HUA (emphasis in original).

6. PIL. Travel diaries, 1947–1971. Diary (1947), in folder ‘Cairo Diary, 1947.’ 13,457 Box 1 HUA.

7. Ibid. Lichtenstadter does not specify which mosque.

8. Ibid.

9. PIL. New York University files 1947–66 and undated. Draft of Egyptian Days, in folder ‘Egyptian Days, 1950–51.’ 13,457 Box 4 HUA.