Jews in Early Biographies of Muḥammad: A Case Study in Shifting Muslim Understandings of Judaism

Abstract

AbstractAlmost from its beginning, adherents of Islam were in competition with those of Judaism, yet the extent and intensity of that competition is portrayed differently in the earliest extant sources. Although in biblical studies there is by now a broad consensus that the synoptic gospels reflect different interpretations of the life of Jesus among the early Jesus movements, analogous realizations have still to fully take root in studies about the Life of Muḥammad. Minor differences in the portrayal of Jews in biographies of Muḥammad indicate a shifting understanding of Muslim-Jewish relations: whereas initially Jewish voices were needed to legitimize the new Arabian prophet, accusations from Christian apologists that Islam was a “new Judaism” led Muslims to take their distance from that religion. Muslim historians adapted Christian anti-Jewish canards of treachery and “propheticide” (analogous to deicide) to emphasize such distance. Early Muslim biographies of Muḥammad are thus witnesses to a complicated history of relationships between adherents of Islam and those of Judaism in late antiquity.