Past Events

Renaissance Venice and the Production of Religious Knowledge

Exploring Leon Modena’s anti-Christian polemics, Magen we-herev (1643)

Renaissance Venice was undoubtedly a city of interreligious confrontation, economic exchange, and oriental knowledge. This study explores late Renaissance cultural interactions between Jews and Christians through the lens of anti-Christian Jewish polemics, focusing primarily—though not exclusively—on Leon Modena’s Magen we-herev, a text he composed toward the end of his life, around 1643.

Although Magen we-herev belongs to a well-established literary genre rooted in interreligious polemics, it introduces significant innovations that will be analyzed within the historical and urban cultural context that shaped it. As a work emerging from a process of religious co-production, Magen we-herev presents representations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam that are deeply embedded in the social fabric of a city defined by religious diversity.

This study seeks to uncover the nature of this co-production, incorporating voices from Christian anti-Trinitarians (Anabaptists), conversos from the Iberian world, and various Catholic figures operating at the margins of Orthodoxy. Ultimately, Magen we-herev will be examined within the broader context of Venice as both a hub of early modern Orientalism and a crossroads between the Christian world(s) and the Ottoman Empire.

Reading the Story of the Queen of Sheba in the Qur’an from a Gender-sensitive Perspective

The story of the Queen of Sheba has proved interesting to study from an interreligious framework, especially when comparing Jewish and Muslim perspectives. Gender also proffers a valuable lens: several studies have focused on negative portrayals of the Queen of Sheba’s hairy legs or demonic nature (Rees 2022; Stinchcomb 2022). What has not been attempted is an Islamic-theological analysis that seeks a gender-sensitive reading of the Qur’anic story compared to its possible intertexts. Therefore, this talk will focus on the Qur’anic story of the Queen of Sheba and particularly on how the Qur’an plays with gender roles, identifying three germane themes of the early Islamic version of this story.

Comparative Theology beyond Religionization

Scholars often distinguish between old and new comparative theology. The former tends (a) to affirm Christian superiority (b) while disregarding the self-understanding of other traditions. Such comparison (c) knows in advance what insights (truths) it will find. Thus, ‘old’ comparative theology involves a twofold process of selfing (constructing Christian identity) and othering (constructing alterity). Christianity’s others become the counter-image of normative Christianity. The aim of ‘new’ comparative theology is to undo and overcome some of the problems of the old by studying other traditions in-depth and engaging them as theological conversation partners. This presentation suggests new terminology for describing how Christians have historically sought to “map the world” of religious diversity. I suggest religionization as a concept-term for imagining how Christians have projected deficient religion onto others, while claiming true, good, and proper religion for themselves. The term religionization highlights the sense of process, the coming-into-being that underlies the perception of religious difference. Furthermore, this term better captures how Christians have imagined the world and its people not simply as a theological endeavor, but as a profoundly political one, i.e. as something related to how gain or keep power or advantage. My suggestion is also a call for new comparative theology that is more relational. The move towards this begins with attending to past and present processes of religionization.

Ra’anan Boustan (Yale University) and Karen Britt (Northwest Missouri State University)

This lecture considers a mosaic panel depicting a scene from the biblical story of Jonah the Prophet found in the late fourth-century synagogue in the village of Huqoq (eastern Lower Galilee). The Jonah panel is perhaps most noteworthy for its striking presentation of Jonah being swallowed by three successively larger fish. Curiously, the motif of the three fish makes its first appearance in textual sources only in the eleventh century, more than half a millennium after the Huqoq mosaic was installed, when it shows up in various forms in both Jewish and Islamic traditions concerning the figure of Jonah/Yūnus. We assess whether and how the distribution of this motif across visual and textual mediums can shed light on the relationship between rabbinic midrash and the visual culture of the late antique synagogue.

Western scholars have long tried to read the Qur’an’s portrayal of Jesus, the son of Mary, against the backdrop of various Christian Gospels, both canonical and apocryphal. Despite clear affinities, we can appreciate the historical context of the qur’anic Christ only if we equally take the Jewish tradition into account. In this presentation, we will explore how the Qur’an carefully constructs a narrative theology that critically endorses some key tenets of Christian and Jewish portrayals of Jesus while forcefully rejecting Jesus’ claim to divinity. We will see that this claim not only functions as a cornerstone of Christian theology but also takes center stage in the late antique Jewish anti-gospel known as Toledot Yeshu, allowing for a glimpse into the Qur’an’s multi-faceted response to both its Jewish and Christian contemporaries.

This presentation focuses on a Qaraite institution of learning (dār al-ʿilm) established in late tenth century Jerusalem and in continuous operation until the late eleventh century. The institution served as a communal center and place of prayer, a place of teaching and scholarly disputations (majālis), and a library. Over the course of a century, the circle of scholars associated with this institution produced an extensive body of literature in Arabic, which decisively contributed to a profound and lasting transformation of knowledge production, organization, and transmission among Jewish communities. This transformation reflected contemporaneous developments in Islamic cultures of knowledge.

Jews, Christians and Muslims have all, at some point, used each other to make sense of religious diversity and viewed one another as deviants from their own tradition. The boundary rhetoric produced by each of these groups regularly treated the ‘other two’ as ‘internal others’, acknowledging the proximity which both united – and divided – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This conference explores how concepts of heresy could have been co-produced across and between the three religions.

Did premodern Muslims possess a concept of "religion"? In this presentation, Ahmed el Shamsy will examine how the fourteenth-century Damascene theologian Ibn Taymiyya uses the Arabic term dīn to theorize phenomena as diverse as the Abrahamic faiths, Zoroastrianism, peripatetic philosophy, and the belief system of the Mongols. The overall goal is to stimulate a conversation about how emic theories can contribute to the analysis of the historical phenomenon of religion.

Historians often differ on the question of whether antisemitism is a distinctly modern phenomenon or whether it is rather essentially a continuation of pre-modern prejudice, violence, and discriminatory acts against Jews. As recent studies show, the possible answers to this question bear implications not only for our understanding of Jewish history, but also for our visions of politics writ large.

In this talk I will explore the implications of this historiographic controversy for the question of religion in the secularizing West after World War II. By pointing at the fundamental differences between religious and non-religious understandings of antisemitism, as well as between different approaches to the question of Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, I will analyze the role of the struggle against antisemitism within the broader struggle over the place of religion, and of Christianity in particular, in the secular-liberal society.

Co-hosted by the Journal of Interreligious Studies and Co-Produced Religions, this webinar will bring together experts from different areas of history, religion, and theology.

The keynote lecture, given by Katharina Heyden and David Nirenberg, will be followed by historical case studies of co-production from the ongoing research project.

Following these two portions, the webinar will turn to theological responses and reactions, breakout sessions, and a Q&A.

Panelists presenting historical case studies: Maureen Attali, Jillian Stinchchcomb, David Gyllenhaal, and Shlomo Zuckier.

Participants offering responses from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theological perspectives: Rachel Slutsky, Adam Gregerman, Lailatul Fitriyah, Mohammed Gamal, Marianne Moyaert, and Klaus von Stosch.

To participate, please register via the link provided here. For more information, see the event website here.

Muslims, Jews and Christians have lived with and thought about each other since their entangled beginnings and throughout the centuries. This session examines the ways in which adherents of these three religious communities have interacted in real life and in thought, and how the religious traditions have taken shape at different places and times.

Program

Katharina Heyden: Introduction into the Concept of Co-Production

Maureen Attali: Co-Production of Healing Pilgrimage Sites in the Eastern Mediterranean (5th–7th Centuries)

Rahel Schär: Religious Co-Production in the Legends of the 60 Martyrs of Gaza and the Martyrdom of Bishop Sophronius of Jerusalem

Paul Neuenkirchen: Struggle and Endurance in the Qur’an in the Context of Late Antique Piety

Sarah Islam: Examining Porous Boundaries Between Jewish and Muslim Litigants in Fāṭimid Courts: A Comparative Study of Jewish and Islamic Debt Acknowledgements (Iqrārs) in the Cairo Geniza

Final Discussion

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

MONDAY, JUNE 26th

4 pm Welcome Coffee and Registration

5 pm Opening session with live performance

Introduction Katharina Heyden and David Nirenberg

Historical narratives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in educational media. Case studies from past and present, David Käbisch

(Digital) Media as a space of Religious Co-Production, Anna Neumeier

Co-Produced Religions (Judaism-Christianity-Islam): Implications for Public Scholarship, Elisabeth Becker-Topkara

Live Performance, Nicolas Wolf

7.30 pm Dinner

TUESDAY, JUNE 27th

8.30–10.15 am Morning lectures
Moderation: David Nirenberg

‘The Jews of this Nation’: The Co-production of Sectarian Identity in the Fatimid Caliphate, ca. 1120, Mohamad Ballan
‘My earth is wide’: the concept of migration in Judaism and Islam during the Muwahidi era, Miriam Frenkel

10.15 am Coffee break

10.45–12.30 am Parallel workshops

I Seminar room: Hondrich
Moderation: Yonatan Binyam

10.45–11.30 am: The Life of the Prophets: A Window into the Judeo-Christian Co-Production of Tomb Pilgrimage (1st-4th century), Maureen Attali

11.45–12.30 am: Reading the Alphabet of Ben Sira, Jillian Stinchcomb

II Seminar room: Einigen
Moderation: David Gyllenhaal

10.45–11.30 am: Counter-Narratives of Birth in the Gospels, Israel Yuval

11.45–12.30 am: Tales of Difficult Neighbourhood. Early Modern Jewish Counter Narratives, Susanne Talabardon

III Seminar room: Merligen
Moderation: Sarah Islam

10.45–12.30 am: Fiction or not, that is not the question: Conceptual, religious, and social insights through the unique dialogue Qui ceptum by the Jewish convert Peter, Uncastillo (Aragon), c. 1222, Matthias Tischler

12.30–13.45 pm Lunch

2–4.05 pm Parallel lectures

I Seminar room: Morgenberghorn
Moderation: Paul Neuenkirchen

2–2.35 pm: The Matter of the Resurrection. Co-produced questions and answers about the physics of life after death as a case study of Jewish-Christian-Islamic intellectual exchange, Barbara Roggema

2.45–3.20 pm: Jewish Printers and Christian Artists Designing a Book for Sefardi Exiles in Naples, 1492, Katrin Kogman-Appel

3.20–3.55 pm: Religion as a function of social circumstances? Co-production in Shlomo ibn Verga`s Shevet Yehuda, Wolfram Drews

II Seminar room: Einigen
Moderation: Sarah Islam

2–2.35 pm: The doctrine of alteration leading to the doctrine of sticking to the text: Muslim attitudes to the Qur'an in opposition to accusations against Jews of changing the Torah, Amir Dziri

2.45–3.20 pm: The mystical charge of the coffee preparation ritual in Ethiopia, between baraka and eucharist: layers of co-production between Sufi Islam and Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity, Eloi Ficquet

3.30–4.05 pm: A case study lecture on Co-Production in Christianity and Islam – past and present: The derivation of religious and social tolerance in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Prince Sorie Conteh

4.05 pm Coffee break

4.30 pm Afternoon lecture
Moderation: Katharina Heyden
Embrico of Mainz: Re-inventing Muhammat for the Christian Simony Controversy, Volker Leppin


6–7.30 pm Commented Concert: Three Cultures; Muslims, Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain
Spiez Castle Church
Welcoming address: Katharina Heyden
Moderation: David Nirenberg

Co-produced music from medieval Spain
Cesar Carazo: canto árabe, hebreo, latín, galaicoportugués y español y viola (fídula)
El Wafir Sheikheldin: canto árabe y laúd árabe
Jorge Rozemblum: canto hebreo y español sefardí, cítola (guitarra medieval) y pandero
Eduardo Paniagua: coro, salterio, flautas y dirección

7.30–9 pm Apéro Riche in the Castle Courtyard



WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28th

8.30–10.15 am Morning lectures
Moderation: Katharina Heyden

Reading the Theology of the Other: Engaging with Herman Cohen’s “Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism”, Ufuk Topkara

Conviviality in Motion: Moments of contemporary interreligious co-production in super-diverse communities, Andrea Bieler

10.15 am Coffee break

10.45–12.30 Parallel workshops

I Seminar room: Morgenberghorn
Moderation: Jillian Stinchcomb

10.45–11.30am: Cows and Co-Production: Surah al-Baqarah in relation to Exodus 32, Numbers 19 and Deuteronomy 21, Kate F. Tinson

11.45–12.30am: Porous Communal Boundaries and Coproduction between Muslims and Jews in Fatimid Egypt: an examination of the Jewish Iqrar Genre in the Cairo Geniza, Sarah Islam

II Seminar room: Einigen
Moderation: Maureen Attali

10.45–11.15 am: Arabic Manuscripts as Interactive Products: Some Case Studies, Arianna Dottone
11.15–11.45 am: Pre- and Post-reform Umayyad coinage as an example of late antique material co-production, Paul Neuenkirchen
11.45–12.15 am: Discussion

12.30–1.45 pm Lunch

2–4.05 pm Parallel lectures

I Seminar room: Morgenberghorn
Moderation: Paul Neuenkirchen

2–3.20 pm: In Search of a Sinful Pun: A Granular Analysis of Q. 2:58-59, David Gyllenhaal and Shlomo Zuckier (double lecture)

3.30–4.05 pm: Symbolic Kinship as Co-Productive of Race and Religion in Early Christian Literature, Yonatan Binyam

II Seminar room: Einigen
Moderation: Jillian Stinchcomb

2–2.35 pm: ‘Livre de Sidrac’ and the Co-Production of a Mediterranean Encyclopedia, Uri Shahar

2.45–3.20 pm: Lex Abrahae. The Co-Production of a Qur’an-Inspired Concept in Renaissance Christendom, Davide Scotto

3.30–4.05 pm: Co-Producing Blasphemy: The Satanic Verses, the Muhammad Cartoons and the Strange Case of Auto-Blasphemy, Thomas Hoffmann

III Seminar room: Hondrich
Moderation: Sarah Islam

2–2.35 pm: Pledging Water: Muslim Judges and Jewish Water Ownership in a Southern Moroccan Oasis, Aomar Boum

2.45–3.20 pm: Solidarity and Co-Productive Theologies in Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Work in the UK, Yulia Egorova

3.30–4.05 pm: A Christology, sensitive to Jewish and Muslim concerns, Reinhold Bernhardt

4.05 pm Coffee break

5–7 pm Closing session with live performance
Moderation: David Nirenberg and Katharina Heyden

Conference Reflections by CORE-Academic Collegium members, Christine Hayes, Michael Seewald, Yousef Casewit
Final discussion

Live Performance, Nicolas Wolf

7.30 pm Dinner

Tannous introduced the notion of the “simple believer” and suggested that a key to understanding late antique Christianity is to take into account that much of the Christian population of this period was agrarian and illiterate. For this reason, accounts of late antique Christianity which privilege sophisticated Christian doctrinal disagreements as the backdrop to the “rise of Islam” are misleading. Understanding the Middle East's Christian population to have been largely comprised of “simple believers”, Tannous also suggested, is essential for understanding early (and medieval) Christian-Muslim interactions. Understanding Christian and Muslim communities in this period as being made up of adherents with layered levels of religious knowledge and engagement can offer a more nuanced vision of what it meant to be a Christian or a Muslim for the vast majority of people and help us think around the elitist (and distorting) biases of our sources.

This lecture operates under the metaphorical analogy implied by its title. In 70 CE, Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed by the Romans under Titus, as recounted by the historian Flavius Josephus (c. 37–100 CE). As presented in Josephus’ Jewish War, the physical rubble of Jerusalem became conceptual rubble that, for Josephus’ later Christian readers, represented the effective end of the Jews in history. Yet, out of this rubble would emerge a new vision of Jewish identity, grounded – somewhat paradoxically – in the historical idea and narrativization of the ‘destruction of the Jews.’ Two marked points at which such identity construction took place were the late-4th and early-10th centuries. In the former, a Latin Christian writer used Jerusalem’s downfall to imagine a triumphal supersessionist vision of Jewish identity, one that placed essential Jewish identity into the perennial pluperfect tense, as it were; in the latter, a Jewish writer rescripted this story in Hebrew on the basis of this Latin Christian text, re-envisioning who the Jews are based on the same late-Second Temple story. This talk will attempt to conceptualize the dynamics of (inter)religious co-production at work in this legacy of historiography by comparing two versions of one key passage that appears in the Latin Christian work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (or ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’) and the Jewish Hebrew work called Sefer Yosippon.

Scholars have long discussed the Qur’an’s engagement with Jewish and Christian traditions. Most scholarly work on this question has centered on the relationship of narratives in the Qur’an with Biblical narratives or other para-Biblical and post-Biblical traditions. Recently a number of scholars have argued that the Qur’an does much more than repeat or restate these traditions. It actively reshapes Biblical characters and stories for the purpose of its own theological agenda. But how important, finally, is the engagement with Biblical tradition to the articulation of the Qur’anic message? In this talk, Reynolds will propose that Judaism and, in particular, Christianity is a conversation partner that thoroughly penetrates that message. In this conversation the Qur’an is fully attentive to its audience in its choice of words and turns of phrase. Reynolds will make this case in part by presenting evidence from the Qur’an itself where there is both explicit and implicit engagement with Christianity. He will also turn to recent analyses of paleo-Arabic inscriptions that suggest Christianity was an important presence throughout Arabia at the dawn of Islam.

Israel Yuval focuses on the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 and its later interpretations in Christian and Talmudic literature until its enigmatic appearance in the Qur'an, in which the identity of the bound son was obscured. He argues that the Qur’anic story reflects silenced counter-narratives on a biblical story, which created the religious identity of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

Zoom seminar with Marina Rustow: “Scribes, Documentary Culture, and Jewish-Muslim Co-Production in the Abbasid and Fatimid Realms” 23.01.2023

This presentation will explore if and how the scriptural figure of Enoch and those of his non-biblical avatars might provide a fertile textual and cultural domain for observing the phenomenon of ‘co-production’.  Some attention will also be given to the making of Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2018), itself a ‘co-produced’ work in progress.

The Western tradition of scholarly engagement with the Qur’an and Islam—the intellectual project formerly called Orientalism—is frequently contrasted with native Muslim perspectives on the Qur’an. Orientalism is commonly depicted as a strategy of domination—a reflex of political and economic imperialism, a discourse constructed to denigrate and demolish Islam. This characterization is certainly accurate for some aspects of the Orientalist tradition from the nineteenth century to the present day, but at least where the Qur’an is concerned, the dominant modern Western approach to the Qur’an established by Theodor Nöldeke, Abraham Geiger, and their contemporaries actually shares much in common with Muslim approaches. In this talk, I will argue that Geiger’s approach to qur’anic biblical material in particular reflects a striking synthesis of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions and concerns; these various elements not only converge in Geiger’s project, but continue to shape Western scholarship on the Qur’an up to the present day.

In this project, Abbasi and Malka argue that the Quran engages deeply with the biblical covenantal subtext of “witnessing” in its frequent references to the act of shahada. By employing an inner-Quranic and intertextual analysis, they demonstrate that when the Quran uses variations of the root sh-h-d in a theological context this clearly indicates the taking of the oath through which one enters into a covenant with Allah. The Quran thus develops, in their view, a systematic vocabulary around this specific biblical theme and in so doing expands the mechanism of the covenant into an entire theological structure embedded at the very heart of its revelatory message.

The opening conference for the project Interactive Histories, Co-Produced Communities: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (CORE) was convened at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on October 6th and 7th, 2022. Participants included the project’s Principal Investigators, Post-doctoral and members of the Academic Collegium from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. The conference was the first opportunity for this network of scholars to meet in-person. 

The conference began with a discussion of a pre-circulated conceptual paper by Katharina Heyden and David Nirenberg, intended to provide a shared foundation from which to explore the concept of co-production and of co-produced religions. Each Postdoctoral Scholar then presented their research project for the coming year, including the motivating questions, the corpus of relevant sources, and the intersection with the concept of co-production, with ample time reserved for feedback from members of the Academic Collegium. A concluding panel, entitled The Historical and the Constructive, allowed historians and theologians from the Academic Collegium to reflect on how research in the history of religion re-shapes religious tradition(s) themselves; and to explore the actual and potential relationships between the approaches of historians and those of theologians. The conference concluded with a shared commitment to engaging with and refining the concept of co-production and co-produced religions through our own research. 

Conference Schedule

October 6th

Opening discussion of pre-circulated conceptual paper

Sarah Islam, Examining Porous Boundaries Between Jews and Muslims in Fāṭimid Egypt:  A Comparative Study of Jewish and Islamic Debt Acknowledgements (Iqrārs) in the Cairo Geniza | Mohamad Ballan respondent

Paul Neuenkirchen, “Those Who Spend the Night Prostrating Themselves”: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Ascetic Background of the Qur’an | Fred Donner respondent

Yonatan Binyam, Inventing a Jewish Race: Apocalyptic Race-Thinking in Early Christianity | Sofía Torallas Tovar respondent 

October 7th

Jillian Stinchcomb, Co-Producing the Biblical Past through the Queen of Sheba | Miriam Frenkel respondent

Shlomo Zuckier, The Production of “God-Willing”: One Expression, Two Millennia, Three Religions | Yousef Casewit respondent

Maureen Attali, Kursi: a co-produced Jewish and Christian pilgrimage center from the Late Roman Empire until the Umayyad caliphate | Israel Yuval respondent

David Gyllenhaal, ‘A Leftover Punishment': Syriac Christianity and the Birth of the Muslim Plague Martyr | Mercedes García-Arenal respondent

Panel The Historical and the Constructive: Andrea Bieler, Volker Leppin, Michael Seewald, Ufuk Topkara

Closing Discussion