Source in the Spotlight
The Early Islamic Menorah Copper Coin as a Material Case of Co-Production
Sometime during the last fifty years of the Umayyad’s reign, a unique copper coin was issued in one of the western regions recently conquered by the first dynasty of Islam. On the reverse side of the coin is the second part of the šahāda, the Islamic profession of faith, which reads, “Muḥammad is the messenger of God”, while on the obverse is the first part of the Islamic creed, “There is no god but God, alone”, a formula commonly found on Islamic coins of the period. However, the obverse also features the Jewish symbol par excellence, the menorah, making this coin a fascinating case of co-production.
Event: International Conference
Conference: Co-produced Rituals between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Uncovering a Common Late Antique and Early Medieval Religious Culture
April 2–3, 2025 Bern, Switzerland
Learn moreEvent: Conference
Conference: The “Excluded Third” in the Co-Production of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
June 10–13, 2025 Villa Vigoni (Como Lake, IT)
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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, Director and 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.
New Case Study
Genealogizing Deviance: George of Trebizond on the Islamo-Platonic Conspiracy of Gemistos Pletho
According to his enemies, the Byzantine philosopher Georgios Gemistos Pletho (ca. 1360–1454) was an apostate who broke away from Christianity and, with a shadowy group of followers, began worshipping the pagan gods of ancient Greece. Gemistos’s Neopagan sect was claimed to be a co-production of the most pernicious kind, whose doctrinal origins went back to Elissaeus, a Jewish apostate alleged to have been Gemistos’s teacher, or to Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, to a nameless Christian heretic from Alexandria, to Epicurus, and, ultimately, to the diabolical philosopher Plato. In this essay I focus on one of Gemistos’s enemies – George of Trebizond (aka Trapezuntius) – to show how he drew on Christian heresiology and fears of Islamic conquest to create a new and monstrous vision of Gemistos. Together, Trapezuntius and others forged a remarkable co-production from the ideas of diverse and competing religious groups: Gemistos Pletho became a Jewish-trained “second Mohammed” and “fourth Plato” whose doctrines were poised to destroy Christianity.