The Philological Uncanny: Nineteenth-Century Jewish Readings of the Qur'an

Abstract

Is the Qur'an a Jewish book? When Jews first began studying and analysing Qur'anic texts as students at German universities in the 1830s, they experienced what this essay calls a ‘philological uncanny’—elements and aspects which are both recognisable and alien, giving a sense of being at home and in a different place simultaneously. The Qur'an, in that moment of first reading, may well have appeared uncanny to these young Jewish students, suddenly rendering in Arabic, in the Scripture of Islam, words from the Hebrew of the Mishnah. This article follows the experience and interpretation of these elements in the writing of key figures among Jewish scholars of Islam from the 1830s to the 1930s. These Jewish scholars, raised in religiously observant homes and given a classical Orthodox Jewish education in Talmud and its commentaries, played a central role in establishing the field of Islamic Studies in Europe. From Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) and Gustav Weil (1808–1888), to Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) and Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942), they shaped an approach to the Qur'an that placed it within the context of rabbinic Judaism, outlining parallel texts and religious practices, even as they also created an important stream of Jewish self-definition in which Judaism and Islam were identified as the two most intimate monotheistic religions.