A History of Jewish-Muslim Encounters: F

Much of what Americans know today about Jews and Muslims historically comes through journalistic depictions of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. This seminar will introduce students to a far longer history of the many social, cultural, political, and economic encounters and entanglements between Jews and Muslims that spans centuries and continents. We will nuance narratives of both Jews and the Middle East as we move both chronologically and thematically to trace the experiences of Jews in Arabia before and with the rise of Islam, and how Jews and Muslims shaped the theology and religious literature of one another. We will examine how the Islamic conquests brought about the need to create an institutional framework for minorities, and the histories of Jewish communities under various Islamic caliphates, moving from Babylonia, to the eastern Mediterranean, and al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Following Sephardic Jews with their expulsion in 1492, we will trace the formation of a Sephardic diaspora across the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Finally, we will chart modern transformations in Jewish-Muslim encounters in daily life, popular culture, religious practice, and political movements. In doing so, we will consider their encounters as part of more global and interregional processes in the Middle East and beyond, such as colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, the formation of modern nation states in the Middle East, and the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Through reading scholarly literature and analyzing primary documents—including letters and petitions, newspapers and state records, literature, music, and photography—this course guides students in thinking like historians, reading texts, and formulating interpretations. By centering a wide range of historical voices, we will examine how encounters between Jews and Muslims were shaped by gender, class, race, religious practice, and regionality. In taking our guiding frameworks and approaches from different disciplines and fields, including history, anthropology, visual culture, and postcolonial studies, we will work to better understand the long history of Jewish-Muslim encounters in the Middle East and beyond.