Foreigners and Their Food explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize "us" and "them" through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating ...with such outsiders. David M. Freidenreich analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the "other." Freidenreich illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and he demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes pathbreaking contributions to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.
Early Muslims told a tale about Baḥīrā, a Christian monk who identified the young Muḥammad as the long-awaited prophet and warned the boy’s guardian to protect him from murderous Jews. This legend ...proved so popular that not only later Muslims but also Christians, Samaritans, and Jews themselves retold it in widely divergent ways. This study analyzes the foundational version of the Baḥīrā legend that appears in the Sīra of Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. ca. 768 CE) alongside others whose genealogical relationship to it is demonstrable. Within these tales, comparison functions as a powerful rhetorical tool by means of which premodern authors denigrate their targets. Academic comparison of the Baḥīrā legend’s many versions, in contrast, reveals the distinctive ways in which premodern authors from different communities understood the similarities and differences not only between their own community and its rivals but also among those rivals. This article demonstrates the utility of Oliver Freiberger’s methodological framework for comparative religion and, more specifically, the analytical value of juxtaposing sources in order to generate insights that deepen understanding of each comparand in its own right.
Patriarch Timothy I and Theodore bar Koni, late eighth-century members of the Church of the East, brand Muslims as “new Jews,” in Timothy’s words, on account of their refusal to accept Christian ...doctrines about Christ. Like many other Eastern Christians, these authors employ the discourse of anti-Judaism against Muslim targets to reinforce the faith of their Christian audiences. Timothy and Theodore, however, are the only known authors of the initial Islamic centuries who employ the rhetorical device of polemical comparison when associating Muslims with Jews. Analysis of the elements with which Timothy and Theodore construct their comparisons reveals the goals that they hoped to achieve through their innovative use of traditional anti-Jewish discourse as well as the distinctive contributions of this rhetorical device to their arguments on behalf of Christian truth claims. This essay demonstrates a broadly applicable method for rhetorical analysis of polemical comparisons.
This article distills theoretical arguments that I advance in Foreigners and Their Food, arguments relevant to a wide range of religious studies scholars. In addition, it makes the case for ...comparison as a method that sheds light not only on specific comparands and the class of data to which they belong but also on the very boundaries which the comparison transgresses. Through a comparison of Latin Christian and Shiʿi Islamic discourse about the impurity of religious foreigners, I illustrate methods by which religious authorities develop and transmit conceptions of foreigners. I then analyze this case study using Oliver Freiberger’s “Elements of a Comparative Methodology” while assessing the strengths and limitations of Freiberger’s methodical framework. I offer personal reflections on the process of conducting comparative scholarship, advice for those embarking on this demanding yet rewarding approach to the study of religion, and desiderata for further reflection on comparative methodology.
This essay considers three different models attested within halakhic literature for attending to the beliefs and practices of the Muslims among whom most medieval Jews lived. Familiarity with these ...models, which can be found within classical fiqh literature as well, may prove valuable to present-day authors of both Jewish and Islamic responsa (teshuvot and fatawa).
Rabbinic Sages change the practical implications of received normative statements through the manipulation of context. The strategies of contextualization that these Rabbis employ when ascribing ...their own opinions to predecessors who espoused different ideas become evident through analysis of passages of the Babylonian Talmud that address the law prohibiting Jewish consumption of bread baked by gentiles. Analysis of these passages, moreover, sheds light on the way in which Rabbinic Sages think about gentiles. By placing Talmudic texts within an analytical context that includes texts from the New Testament, John Chrysostom, and various Muslim authorities, this article also demonstrates the value to academic scholars of comparing texts produced within multiple religious communities.
The Beam of the Passion, a painted pine beam created in early thirteenth-century Iberia for display above the eucharistic altar, unexpectedly depicts Judas's second encounter with the priests in its ...central Crucifixion scene. Even more surprisingly, the priests and ciders of first-century Jerusalem look like stereotypical African Muslims. Prior scholarship emphasizes the Beam's depictions of Muslims as Christ's enemies, but this work is not ultimately about Muslims. Rather, "Moorish" figures-like the Jewish figures they displace-play an instrumental role in an effort to bolster faith in Christ and the Eucharist. In this respect, the Beam's anomalous iconography illustrates a common dynamic within medieval anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim rhetoric, whose true focus is often a fellow Christian. The full significance of the Crucifixions Moorish figures and their dismissive quid ad nos becomes apparent through analysis of the Beam in its entirety within its architectural, liturgical, and political contexts.
Social historians of the Middle Ages can gain a richer understanding of interreligious relations by examining the ways Christians, Muslims, and Jews interacted over food. Legal and non‐legal sources ...from the eleventh through sixteenth centuries shed light on commercial, social, and cultural exchanges across faith communities, both in the market and at meals. These texts convey a broad spectrum of attitudes toward the food and food ways of religious foreigners, ideas whose variation reflects the contested and shifting status of minorities within Catholic Europe.
Marina Rustow and Uriel I. Simonsohn, in contrast, confront head on the complex challenges of writing social history about two fundamental rabbinic ideas, namely the notion that Qaraites^sup1^ are ...heretics and the principle that Jews should not take recourse to gentile courts. Rustow also offers detailed introductions to more obscure subjects, such as the science behind the Jewish calendar, the mechanics of book production, and-at great length-the political functions of honorific titles in the Abbasid and Fatimid empires.
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