Co-Produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam

Our goal is to provide the foundations of a new history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as co-produced communities, a history that makes clear the many different ideas and ideals that each of these communities has formed, and continues to form, by interacting with or imagining the others.

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Source in the Spotlight

The Alba Bible: A Medieval Spanish Co-Production by a Rabbi and the Friars of Toledo

Religious co-production may take many forms, arising from interactions that may be physical or purely imaginary, and processes of transference and adaption which may be candidly admitted or carefully concealed. The Alba Bible is comparatively rare in advertising itself as the result of a deliberate collaboration between members of different religious communities. It is a late-medieval Bible, translated into medieval Castilian for a Christian patron by a rabbi, working under the supervision of several Christian friars, and illustrated by a team of artists in Toledo. The result was a remarkable interreligious coproduction created during a period in which Jewish life in medieval Spain was particularly precarious. After many centuries of obscurity, the Bible has been embraced in recent decades as a symbol of the deep roots of Sephardi Jewish culture in Spain and as an example of tolerant interfaith collaboration. For all that, the story of its origins makes it an ambivalent emblem for the cooperation across the assymetries of power between religious majority and minority.

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Latest Case Study

Religious Markers on the Graves: Co-produced Displays of Religious Affiliation in Late Antique Cemeteries

From the 3rd century CE, new religious images emerged, arguably in line with the growing rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. One of the places where these new visual vocabularies could be used was in cemeteries, and in particular in the catacombs.

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Event: Workshop

"Judaism and Islam: Co-produced Religions"?

August 5, 2025, 6pm Ben Zvi Institute Jerusalem

with Miriam Frenkel, Katharina Heyden, David Nirenberg, Sarah Stroumsa, Guy Stroumsa, and Shlomo Zuckier

Event: International Conference and Workshop

Insular Entanglements: Malta, 300-1700

June 16-19, 2026 Valetta, Malta

International Conference in Valetta, June 16-19th, 2026

Organizers: Mohamad Ballan (Stonybrook University) and Katharina Heyden (University of Bern)

Our upcoming conference "Insular Entanglements: Malta, 300-1700" examines Malta as a case-study of Mediterranean entanglement from Late Antiquity through the Early Modern period. The notion of entanglement that we propose is quite capacious, encompassing not only (nor even primarily) quotidian interreligious interactions but ideas of connections, polemics, memory, histories, and texts more broadly. This will include intellectual networks, economic and political connections, language, cultural encounters, religious thought and polemics, as well as the relationship between the local (Malta) and regional (Mediterranean). The idea of frontiers and borderlands will constitute an important theme of the conference, but we will also explore questions of materiality and material culture in early Christianity, the complex (and ever-changing) relationship between religious and cultural traditions, and the larger political transformations taking place across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean world.

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Latest Publication

Co-produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Harvard Theological Review 118 (2025), 159-180.

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About

Who we are

The project is coordinated by Katharina Heyden, Professor for Ancient History of Christianity and Interreligious Encounters at the University of Bern (Switzerland), and David Nirenberg, Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (U.S.), and includes a network of collaborators across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

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