Jewish Revival and Respect for Islam in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

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)]: ...