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)]: ...