Pre-Modern Judaism: Religion and Society

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course will examine the “births” of “Christianity,” “Judaism,” and “Islam,” and challenge narratives that treat these as three self-evidently separate, internally coherent entities with discrete origin points. We will explore modes of interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval Islamic world, and test the utility of terms like “influence,” “cross-pollination,” “symbiosis,” and family tree metaphors, as well as new conceptual frameworks like Heyden and Nirenberg’s “co-production.”