id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
alusur-8903	Pregill, Michael E.	Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities: The Jews of Arabia, the Quranic Milieu, and the “Islamic Judaism” of the Middle Ages	2021-12-05	47	.pdf	application/pdf	27443	992	45	I do not think it unfair to say that inquiry into the intersections between Islam and Judaism, especially in the era before the full flowering of the Judeo-Arabic culture of the Middle Ages, remains marginal to mainstream Jewish studies despite the important implications of such research.119 Hughes positions himself as a scholar of religion first and seems condensed and repurposed (or simply taken over verbatim) from Shared Identities as well. As one means of indexing this marginality, one might peruse the conference schedules and archived 297 • Michael e. Pregill Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021) foremost, but his main academic appointment is in Jewish studies, and so his books address numerous problematic approaches and conceptions that remain conspicuous in the latter field: the persistent emphasis on rabbinic normativity; the perennial quest to discern the original roots of an essentialized Judaism; the corresponding neglect of the complex and, yes, fluid nature of Jewish identity at various points in Late Antiquity; and the consequent foreclosure of the possibility that the historical dialogue between Jews and Muslims exerted a significant impact on integral aspects of both. Seen in this light, Hughes’s attempt to revive Wasserstrom’s project is laudable, renewing the call for a more vigorous investigation of this supposedly obscure period in Jewish history and especially for more scholarly activity in this area on the model of the ample attention now paid to the Jewish-Christian “symbiosis” of the early centuries CE.	cache/alusur-8903.pdf	txt/alusur-8903.txt