Abstract
This paper examines the concept of symbiosis in Islamic history as developed by Schlomo Dov Goitein, the 20th-century Jewish German scholar in the area of Jewish and Arabic studies, and discusses its application to the identity sourcing of Prophet Muhammad in particular. The aim of the study is to review the historical outline briefly on the background and formation of “symbiosis” preceding and in the aftermath of Goitein’s conceptualization and context, following a qualitative research approach with an intertextual criticism to his references and discussing their possible philological aspects in his mindset. The study found that, while the Islamic historical sources presented the relations between Jews and Muslims in the Madina period of Islam as negative, in Goitein’s works, the Jewish perception of early Islamic history is positively grounded on a mid-eight century Jewish messianic-apocalyptical text, namely, The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai as traditionally understood in Judaism for describing Ishmaelites as the savior of Jews from Christian oppression. This finding seems to be in explicit contradistinction to the concept of innovative “creative symbiosis” with subversion of historical experience.
Highlights
Academic efforts to understand and explain the nature of the historical relationship between Islam and Jewish traditions within orientalist studies have reached today a remarkable level in terms of quantity and quality
The term symbiosis, which at first glance seems to be borrowed from biology, was first used by Goitein in his article "Jewish-Arab Coexistence" published in 1949, in his book Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Social and Cultural Relations in the mid-50s, and later in his work on Mediterranean society in the 1980s (Libson, 2018, 164)
Goitein’s adoption of symbiosis from biology to use in social sciences is still a controversial idea today and after painstaking efforts, the recent studies asserted how some of its simple aspects proved to be failing because of its equivocality ranging from the definition of the term, the philological issues such as the appropriateness of the metaphor, its possible various interpretations, and the plethora of the synonyms replacing the symbiosis and its historical adaptability
Summary
Academic efforts to understand and explain the nature of the historical relationship between Islam and Jewish traditions within orientalist studies have reached today a remarkable level in terms of quantity and quality. Goitein seems to know how to avail the picture of such utopian image to “bolster the notion of a Jewish Muslim” symbiosis In this context, the question of whether Goitein used this term based on the historical relations of both communities or whether, as Libson suggested (Libson, 2017, 164), was influenced by the concept used by German Jewish scholars to describe the relationship between Germans and the Jewish minority in Germany becomes important. The question of whether Goitein used this term based on the historical relations of both communities or whether, as Libson suggested (Libson, 2017, 164), was influenced by the concept used by German Jewish scholars to describe the relationship between Germans and the Jewish minority in Germany becomes important To respond this question, the concept of symbiosis requires to briefly review the historical outline on the background and formation of “symbiosis” before and after Goitein's creation and context. Goitein’s interpretative ideas of the Qur’anic passages are questioned from an inner-textual consistency and his political motives of a co-existential order of a historical Jewish-Arab “symbiosis” presumption is critiqued on the basis of his theological assertion
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