Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 29 (2021): 256-302

  Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities:  
The Jews of Arabia, the Quranic Milieu, and  
the “Islamic Judaism” of the Middle Ages*

Aaron W. Hughes. Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern 
Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2017), 240 pp. ISBN 978-01-906-8446-4. Price:  $105.00 (cloth).

Aaron W. Hughes. Muslim and Jew: Origins, Growth,  
Resentment (London: Routledge, 2019), 106 pp. ISBN 978-11-
385-9944-4. Price: $60.00 (cloth). 

Michael e. Pregill
Lecturer, Chapman University and Postdoctoral Researcher,  

ERC Synergy Project “The European Qur’an”

(michael.pregill@gmail.com)

Abstract
This article discusses critical issues surrounding the Jewish-Muslim encounter, framed as an evaluation of 
the approach and conclusions of two recent publications by Aaron W. Hughes: Shared Identities: Medieval 
and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017) and Muslim and Jew (2019). Hughes’s works present a critique 
of the established historiography on Jewish-Muslim relations and exchanges, examining such subjects as 
the Jews of late antique Arabia, the Jewish matrix of the Quran and formative Islam, and the Judeo-Islamic 
synthesis of subsequent centuries. I interrogate Hughes’s use of sources, treatment of previous scholarship, 
and privileging of the specific lens of the “religionist” in approaching the historical evidence. Both of the works 
under consideration here exhibit numerous problems of conception and argumentation that undermine their 
value for broadening current horizons of research or refining prevailing pedagogies. Ultimately, although they 
provoke numerous important questions and deftly expose the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of 
older scholarship, the books fail to offer a constructive path forward for specialists or stimulate a meaningful 
paradigm shift in the field.

* Feedback from numerous readers improved this essay tremendously. I am exceedingly grateful for the 
productive comments I received from Phil Lieberman, Brian Pennington, and Stephen Shoemaker, as well as 
from the anonymous reviewers of the article. Luke Yarbrough provided numerous invaluable suggestions at 
multiple junctures. I also thank Cate Bonesho for her kind help with a bibliographic matter. Naturally, errors 
and failures of judgment remain my responsibility alone.

© 2021 Michael E. Pregill. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.

Review Essay

mailto:michael.pregill%40gmail.com?subject=


257  •  Michael e. Pregill

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Despite the long flourishing of scholarship on the topic, the Muslim-Jewish encounter remains for the most part an undertheorized and less than cogent field of research.1 This is perhaps not surprising, because the scholarly work relevant to it, though 
considerable, is distributed among a number of areas that are notionally interconnected 
but have little to do with one another in practice. Thus, someone broadly interested in 
Jewish-Muslim relations and exchanges might take note of the significant research done 
in recent years on the Quran’s representations of Jews and relationship to traditions of 
late antique Judaism, or of the perennial effort to uncover the social and religious history 
of the Jews of Arabia in the time of Muḥammad. Regarding the later period, the massive 
advances in Geniza studies over the last couple of decades, illuminating numerous aspects 
of the florescence of an Islamicate Judeo-Arabic culture in the high Middle Ages, are surely 
no less relevant for the subject. One might also consider the ongoing revision of our under-
standing of that titan of medieval Jewish intellectual and religious life, Maimonides, whose 
profound engagement with not only Arab but also Islamic thought has been at the forefront 
of recent endeavors to reorient the prevailing image of his significance. We could readily 
adduce other topics that demonstrate the persistent importance of the Muslim-Jewish 
encounter for our understanding of the history and development of both traditions. Given 
the complexity of the evidence, the lack of cross-pollination between fields, and the sheer 
magnitude of research production in Europe, the Americas, Israel, and parts of the Islamic 
world, a competent synthesis integrating these disparate areas of inquiry into a theoreti-
cally coherent whole is likely beyond the ability of any single scholar.

The perceptive reader will notice that I have already invoked a couple of slippery 
descriptors for the religious, cultural, social, and historical relationships between Jews 
and Muslims. Although terms such as “encounter,” “exchange,” and “engagement” 
seem innocuous enough, upon reflection they are far from transparent, and each carries 
a significant amount of cultural and ideological baggage. Other terms have often been 
deployed in describing those relationships, and many of them are even more self-evidently 
problematic: “influence,” “dependence,” “borrowing,” “symbiosis,” “coevolution.” This 
lexicon features prominently in the most important works on the subject by some of the 
greatest scholars of Jewish and Islamic studies stretching back two hundred years to the 

1.  There is no equivalent in the field of premodern Jewish-Muslim relations to Gil Anidjar’s provocative 
and complex The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), which 
focuses on modernity. Anidjar prefers the ethnonym “Arab” as the antipode to “Jew” and generally eschews a 
specific focus on religious identity. However, despite this, many of Anidjar’s observations apply equally well 
to Muslims as an ideological construct in European thought as to Arabs, reflecting the fact that “Muslim” and 
“Arab” are often used interchangeably in the heavily racialized discourses of historical and contemporary 
Islamophobia in the Anglo-European world. Conversely, despite the broader remit implied by Hughes’s focus 
on Muslims and Islam, he is overwhelmingly concerned with the Arabophone world in both of the books under 
consideration here. Another important theoretical precursor to Hughes’s endeavor in Shared Identities is Rina 
Drory’s functionalist-structuralist approach to Islamicate Jewish literature in Models and Contacts: Arabic 
Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Though her critique of shopworn 
conceptions of “influence” is relevant to Hughes’s project, he cites Drory only in passing in Shared Identities, 
making one brief reference to her article on the proliferation of established Arab-Muslim genres in Karaite 
literature. 



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Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities  •  258

early nineteenth century. Despite those aspects of their work that now seem objectionable 
or outmoded, the impact of figures such as Abraham Geiger, Ignác Goldziher, S. D. Goitein, 
Bernard Lewis, and Norman Stillman still resonates today, and their vision and ideas haunt 
much contemporary scholarship.

The legacy previous generations of scholars have bequeathed to us, particularly the 
terminology and frameworks we use to conceive of and describe the dynamic of Jewish-
Muslim relations, is the subject of two recent books by Aaron Hughes. The first, Shared 
Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam, is an extended reflection on the 
historiography of the Jewish-Muslim encounter from the early Islamic period to the Middle 
Ages. Here Hughes focuses on the methodologies and underlying ideologies that guided past 
scholarship in an attempt to come to a more theoretically sophisticated understanding of 
that encounter. The second, Muslim and Jew, is a streamlined survey, presumably intended 
for classroom use, that is much broader in scope than Shared Identities.2 Here Hughes offers 
a suite of three concise chapters centering on major themes in Jewish-Muslim relations—
“Origins,” “Growth,” and “Resentment”—from the foundational period to the modern 
era. Hughes avers that this new survey offers a fresh perspective that builds upon the 
theoretical insights he developed in Shared Identities, setting it apart from the classic 
works in the genre by Goitein, Stillman, Lewis, and others that are still often used as 
introductory textbooks today.3 Shared Identities and Muslim and Jew perhaps represent 
the most significant, and certainly most ambitious, attempts at reevaluation and synthesis 
of the Judeo-Islamic encounter in recent years; given that such attempts are relatively rare, 
appearing only once every couple of decades at most, Hughes’s works warrant close and 
critical scrutiny.4

Hughes contends that much historical scholarship on the subject of Jewish-Muslim 
relations has been driven by questionable ideological commitments, and that these 
commitments merit careful examination and interrogation. This is especially so, he 
argues, because contemporary scholarship, though usually less transparently ideological, 
barely improves upon older research insofar as it tends to be theoretically anemic and so 
fails to come to a more refined understanding of how Jewish-Muslim relations should be 

2.  With a list price of 60 USD for a short hardcover, Muslim and Jew is perhaps not practical for classroom 
use, though in the post-COVID era the e-book version of the volume, priced under $20, may present a reasonable 
alternative.

3.  Hughes explicitly notes at the beginning of Muslim and Jew (p. xi) that in this book he operationalizes 
the “post-symbiotic” perspective developed in Shared Identities, where he claims to have articulated the 
critical vocabulary that enables the reassessment he offers in his brief survey. The most important precursors 
to Muslim and Jew in English are S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs, first published in 1955 and subsequently revised 
(3rd rev. ed., New York: Schocken, 1974); Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Sourcebook 
(New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979); and Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, NJ: 
Princeton University Press, 1984).

4.  The only other synthetic work of this sort to appear in the twenty-first century, at least in English, is Jacob 
Lassner’s Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities (Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 2012), a work that is now almost a decade old. Notably, Hughes has a third volume on the 
Jewish-Muslim encounter forthcoming: Somewhere between Islam and Judaism: Critical Reflections (Sheffield: 
Equinox, 2021).



259  •  Michael e. Pregill

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conceptualized and described. The main questions I will pursue here are whether Hughes 
succeeds in his task of theoretical reevaluation in the first book, and whether the second 
consequently represents a significant improvement over currently available surveys. I 
suggest that although Hughes’s critical intervention is timely and necessary, his efforts in 
both volumes are impaired by various conceptual roadblocks that he fails to surmount. In 
the case of Shared Identities, despite the work’s many virtues, pervasive problems in both 
conception and the handling of evidence undermines the work’s value for its intended 
audience of scholarly specialists who work in this field. These problems recur in Muslim 
and Jew, where they are considerably exacerbated by still other problems, and these flaws 
obscure many of the issues that would be critical for the book’s intended audience of 
nonspecialists and students to apprehend clearly.

A “Post-symbiotic” Perspective on the Jewish-Muslim Encounter

In Shared Identities, Hughes investigates the critical period from the seventh through 
the eleventh century CE, during which time both Judaism and Islam gradually acquired 
their mature forms through complex dialogical processes of mutual enrichment and 
codevelopment. Judaism contributed to major aspects of Islam during the latter’s formation, 
and Islam subsequently came to “return the favor” by contributing to the reformulation 
and reshaping of Judaism during the high Middle Ages.5 This is why the history of Judeo-
Islamic (or Islamo-Judaic) engagements should be characterized as a dynamic of reciprocity, 
in contrast to the emphasis among previous generations of scholars on Judaism’s antiquity 
and thus originality and priority as the donor tradition, with Islam as the latecomer and 
so the passive recipient of that donor’s largesse.6 As noted above, Hughes is particularly 
interested in dissecting and exposing “the cognitive problems associated with framing 
metaphors” and so seeks to rectify or discard conceptual and descriptive frameworks such 
as “influence,” “exchange,” and “symbiosis” that so frequently predominate in the literature 
on these processes.7 

5.  Shared Identities, ix.
6.  Hughes presents normative Judaism and normative Islam as both only gradually crystallizing out of 

a complex and fluid milieu in the early centuries after the Arab conquests; this is his main justification for 
considering mature Judaism and Islam as the products of mutually fruitful processes of coevolution. This 
statement regarding messianism as a discourse transcending the boundaries between groups is typical of his 
approach: “[A]n unstable Islam created further instability in various Jewish and Judaizing groups by providing 
vocabularies and tropes, many of which had been adopted and adapted, reused and recycled, from earlier 
Jewish messianic circles” (Shared Identities, 64). Bulliet makes a similar observation about Christianity and 
Islam, which can be imagined as two halves of a single civilizational complex that emerged at roughly the 
same time and followed parallel trajectories for centuries. This argument is predicated on the idea that after 
the Arab conquests Christian culture was essentially “rebooted” (my term), with Islam gradually becoming 
demographically dominant in what became the Muslim Middle East and Christianity eventually dominant in 
Europe. See Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 
2004), ch. 1.

7.  Shared Identities, 29. One does occasionally find slippages in the book, as when Hughes refers to 
forms of Judaism “beholden” (p. 70) or “indebted” (p. 80) to Islam. I am fully sympathetic to the difficulty 
he faces in critiquing problematic terminology while attempting to redescribe the phenomena to which it is 



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Blurred Boundaries and Novel Normativities  •  260

These frameworks have often been predicated on the notion that Judaism and Islam were 
largely well-defined and stable entities already at the time of their earliest encounters, and 
especially that Judaism was a fully formed and largely monolithic tradition when Islam 
emerged. Further, many scholars of the past proceeded from the assumption that the 
relationships between Jewish and Muslim communities were superficial and transactive 
rather than impactful and transformative. However fruitful their reciprocal engagements 
may have been—so the conventional narrative goes—the two communities remained 
separate and discrete throughout their long shared history, distinct and immutable in their 
spiritual and doctrinal essences.8 In particular, despite the considerable impact of Islamic 
“host cultures” upon Arab, Persian, Central Asian, and Andalusian Jews in the Middle Ages, 
their Judaism at its core remained a pure, unadulterated Judaism, the essential, unchanging 
faith of their forefathers. As Samuel Bäck put it in his 1878 History of the Jewish People, 
despite the massive achievements of the Jews of medieval Spain under Muslim rule and 
their profound embeddedness in a culture dominated by Islam, they “maintained a steadfast 
fidelity to their religion . . . [they] never forgot that they were Jews.”9

To Hughes, the premises that inform such an approach simply do not and cannot 
withstand critical scrutiny. Throughout Shared Identities, he repeatedly emphasizes that 
in fact the opposite situation must have prevailed: during the initial centuries of their 
interactions and engagements, not only were Judaism and Islam both quite malleable 
and pluriform, but at various junctures, groups of Jews and Muslims may have been 
largely indistinguishable from one another. Approaches that assume otherwise vastly 
overstate the degree to which the traditions had cohered on the practical level, let alone 
been codified on the doctrinal level; scholars of the past (and many today as well) err in 
assuming that religious communities are always and everywhere characterized by stable 
essences. In asserting that the porous boundaries between the traditions were populated 
by “Jewmuslims” or “Muslimjews” who drove the encounters that shaped both traditions 
over the centuries during which the classical forms of their doctrines, practices, and textual 

conventionally applied, since I have myself written a number of studies critiquing the concept of “influence” 
and likewise struggled, perhaps even less successfully, to formulate and implement meaningful conceptual and 
terminological alternatives.

8.  This model typically centers language as the primary index of identity, with Arabic supposedly being 
the medium of “secular” culture and commerce among diglossic or polyglot Jews but Hebrew maintaining its 
time-honored status as the preferred language of religious expression and creativity (and so being privileged 
as the primary and indispensable marker of personal and communal identity). With the much-discussed Greek/
Hebrew divide in antiquity, “Hellenism” has traditionally been downplayed as only minimally manifest in, 
and so irrelevant to, “Hebraic” (that is, quintessentially Jewish) cultural forms; similarly, many scholars have 
tended to assume that the ongoing use of Hebrew in religious and some cultural contexts indexes an absence 
of significant Arabization or Islamization, at least as determining individual or communal identity. Recent 
research has shown, however, that Hellenism or Romanization may be reflected in and expressed through 
literary production in Hebrew. This is only one of the ways in which the dubious dichotomy between Hellenistic 
and “original” Hebraic Judaism has been challenged in contemporary scholarship.

9.  Hughes’s translation of the German of Bäck’s Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes (Shared Identities, 23). 
A similar emphasis on the normative, mature, and clearly bounded form of Judaism that impacted the rise of 
Islam is found in the works of Geiger and Graetz; see, e.g., Shared Identities, 24–25 and 50–51.



261  •  Michael e. Pregill

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traditions coalesced, Hughes sets his sights on no less grand a goal than the formulation 
of “a new paradigm . . . that acknowledges and taxonomizes the fluidity of religious and 
ethnic identity.”10 However, it is unclear whether he really achieves this goal by the book’s 
conclusion.

In seeking to articulate a new paradigm—explicitly described in both Shared Identities 
and Muslim and Jew as a “post-symbiotic” perspective11—Hughes sets the stage by examining 
the previously (and currently) dominant outlook governing the study of Jewish-Muslim 
relations during this germinal period. Thus, in the introduction and chapter 1 of Shared 
Identities, he discusses the regnant categories invoked in scholarship and the various 
figures of the nineteenth and twentieth century—Heinrich Graetz, Bäck, Goitein, and 
others—whose work established much of the terminology, framing, and conceptual baggage 
that we still bring to the subject today and that continues to influence research agendas in 
ways both subtle and overt. Subsequent chapters of the book focus on specific subtopics 
that traverse the historical period under consideration here: the emergence of Islam and 
the problem of Muḥammad’s relationship to the Jews of his milieu (and supposed “debt” to 
Jewish informants); the heterodox fringe of early Jewish (or Judeo-Islamic) messianism after 
the Arab conquests; kalām as a shared rationalist discourse that bridged and shaped both 
Jewish and Muslim intellectual developments and ultimately contributed to the doctrinal 
(and thus notional) distinction of the traditions; the vaunted “Golden Age” of convivencia 
that produced Maimonides and other magisterial Jewish thinkers and litterateurs of the 
Judeo-Arabic tradition; and finally Jewish Sufism as a case study demonstrating the ongoing 
porousness of boundaries between Jew and Muslim after the maturation of both traditions 
and the general hardening of social and religious distinctions between groups.

Specialists who work in fields touching upon Muslim-Jewish relations will likely 
recognize the necessity, even urgency, of Hughes’s attempt to interrogate and refine the 
categories and language we use in seeking to describe those relations. In both books, but 
especially Muslim and Jew, Hughes explicitly acknowledges the larger political implications 
of this work in our contemporary context. Although he expresses some caution regarding 
the politicization of scholarly priorities, he himself sets an overtly political agenda for his 
project in Muslim and Jew.12

10.  Shared Identities, 63. In his treatment of the early Islamic period here, Hughes repeatedly refers to the 
work of Peter Webb on Arab ethnogenesis (Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam [Edinburgh: 
Edinburgh University Press, 2016]), which has received a fair amount of criticism for exaggerating the degree 
to which Arab identity was an invention of the caliphal era, a point that seems germane to Hughes’s approach 
to the sources as well (see, e.g., the review of Youssef M. Choueiri, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 76 [2017]: 
377–79).

11.  The term “post-symbiotic” recurs a number of times in Shared Identities, though only once in Muslim 
and Jew (p. xi), which is, as already noted, presented as a “post-symbiotic” survey.

12.  Thus, in Shared Identities Hughes critiques the concept of convivencia as problematically inflected by 
contemporary concerns, particularly a quest to anchor the modern value of tolerance in the past (pp. 29–30). 
However, he explicitly presents his own work as intended to address contemporary political problems, for 
example in both the introduction and chapter 3 of Muslim and Jew, as well as in the conclusion of Shared 
Identities itself (pp. 145–49).



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Hughes’s reevaluation is particularly indebted to the pioneering and massively influential 
work of Daniel Boyarin, whose approach to the early Jewish-Christian relationship Hughes 
seeks to apply to the comparatively underexplored Jewish-Muslim dynamic.13 Shared 
Identities in particular also conspicuously rehearses the arguments of Steven Wasserstrom’s 
1995 monograph Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam, 
a groundbreaking study that likewise aimed at a serious theoretical reevaluation of the 
early Muslim-Jewish encounter.14 Hughes’s book retreads much of the territory covered 
in Between Muslim and Jew, pursuing fundamentally similar goals and touching upon 
many of the same subjects. However, in what feels like an odd manifestation of the 
anxiety of influence—ironic given the topic at hand—Hughes downplays the importance 
of Wasserstrom’s precedent and cites his work explicitly only a handful of times in Shared 
Identities.15

In Between Muslim and Jew, Wasserstrom drew attention to the years after the Arab 
conquest of the Middle East as a notoriously obscure period in Jewish history.16 He engaged 
Goitein’s work specifically for its foregrounding of the complex and admittedly problematic 
concept of symbiosis (thus the subtitle of the book) and argued that in the early period, 
Islam and Judaism were so closely intertwined socially and religiously that at least some 
communities at the margins of the traditions were practically indistinguishable or even 
identical. This early proximity was largely ignored by later Jewish spokesmen, while Muslim 
commentators effaced most traces of it, relegating groups such as the Isawiyya, whose 
“syncretistic” (Wasserstrom’s term, p. 86) prophetological and messianic doctrines may 
be seen as vestigial traces of that proximity, to the category of “heresy.” Modern scholars 
have long been similarly perplexed by such seemingly hybrid groups, which explains the 
inability of the analytical language we have inherited to describe such phenomena in a 
sophisticated way, as well as why attempts to do so typically come up short.17 In subsequent 
chapters of Between Muslim and Jew, Wasserstrom showed that later developments—
kalām, heresiography, isrāʾīliyyāt, Judeo-Arabic philosophy—similarly preserve traces of 
the early intimacy (or even identity) of the traditions, as well as demonstrating the efforts 

13.  Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of 
Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The recent work of Michael Penn, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the 
Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), explicitly seeks to apply Boyarin’s 
approach to the Muslim-Christian encounter under Islamic dominion in the early centuries AH.

14.  Steven M. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

15.  Hughes graciously acknowledges Wasserstrom as a conversation partner at the beginning of Shared 
Identities (p. xiii), but the paucity of explicit citations of Between Muslim and Jew in both of his books seems 
to me to conceal a much more broad-ranging engagement with Wasserstrom’s work than is readily apparent.

16.  Steven Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 17–18, citing, among others, Salo W. Baron, Goitein, and 
Leon Nemoy; cf. Shared Identities, 83–84, focusing on Goitein’s view of the “blackout period” in particular.

17.  See Between Muslim and Jew, ch. 2. It is tempting to invoke the term “hybrid” in response to communal 
formations that seem to combine elements from others, especially larger or more dominant groups. However, 
the term is misleading because it implies the combination of traits from two established species, whereas both 
Wasserstrom and Hughes would emphasize that the existence of the “hybrid” form actually demonstrates the 
instability of the original entities.



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of later spokesmen to separate the two traditions and marginalize, quarantine, or eliminate 
ambiguous or boundary-challenging phenomena.

Hughes retreads much of the same territory that Wasserstrom explored almost thirty 
years ago, although the former’s work is rather more focused. Insofar as Hughes does 
acknowledge his precedent, he avers that Wasserstrom’s approach is marred by an uncritical 
reliance on the concept of symbiosis. To be fair, however, I read Wasserstrom as rather 
persistently interrogating and problematizing this notion, which we mainly inherit from 
Goitein, throughout Between Muslim and Jew. Questioning the utility of symbiosis as a 
concept while exploring some of its lesser-known implications seems to me to be the whole 
point of Wasserstrom’s book, and so Hughes’s critique strikes me as misplaced.18

Despite its significant impact on specialists working in this field of study (or perhaps 
because of it), it is certainly true that Wasserstrom’s book is ripe to be revisited and 
updated; moreover, many of his most important insights are often couched in language 
that is overly dense, opaque, or recherché.19 One of the great virtues of Hughes’s work is 
its clarity and accessibility: his prose is direct and elegant, and he excels at analyzing and 
summarizing complex historiographic problems, so that his exposition of the underlying 
ideology and implications of historical scholarship on Jewish-Muslim encounters is deft, 
vigorous, and lucid. While Wasserstrom’s book still strikes me as endlessly rich, provocative, 
and exciting, he often operates in what we might recognize as a mode of scholarly discourse 
characteristic of the history of religions approach pioneered in Islamic studies by Marshall 
Hodgson (whose inspiration Wasserstrom openly acknowledged). Like many provocative 
works, Wasserstrom’s book can be forbidding to the uninitiated; thus, we can welcome 
Shared Identities as a productive revisiting and reformulation of Wasserstrom’s attempt at 
a more theoretically self-conscious exploration of the Muslim-Jewish encounter that might 
be more comprehensible and appealing to nonspecialists.20

18.  While acknowledging the value of Wasserstrom’s work, Hughes claims that “the term nevertheless 
remains his default model, and it is ultimately left intact at the end of his analysis” (Shared Identities, 4). As 
proof he cites the concluding remarks of Between Muslim and Jew (p. 224), where Wasserstrom summarizes 
the ways in which he has sought to expand and reinterpret the concept of symbiosis. It is not clear to me 
how Hughes improves upon this by rejecting this term (among others) outright without replacing it with any 
practically deployable alternative.

19.  In the recent tribute volume  All Religion Is Inter-Religion: Engaging the Work of Steven M. Wasserstrom, 
ed. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Paul Robertson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), only a couple of the 
contributions refer to Wasserstrom’s theoretical insights in Between Muslim and Jew, and none engage its main 
subject matter directly. This suggests that it is Wasserstrom’s broader work on methodology in religious studies, 
particularly his monograph on the Eranos School, Religion After Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and 
Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), that has had the widest impact on the 
field. However, this author can attest (admittedly only on the basis of anecdotal evidence) that numerous other 
scholars who now work in the field of Judeoislamica/Islamojudaica were significantly impacted by Between 
Muslim and Jew in choosing to explore this area of research. A brisk, unsystematic survey of citations of Between 
Muslim and Jew via Google search demonstrates that the book has been cited in at least a dozen monographs of 
significance, as well as numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and reference works.

20.  Hodgson’s works on both historiography and esoteric Shiism are cited in Between Muslim and Jew. 
Moreover, an early paper of Wasserstrom’s dealing with both of these topics was awarded the 1984 Marshall 
G. S. Hodgson Memorial Prize at the University of Chicago and subsequently published as “The Moving Finger 



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However, specialists may find Hughes’s work frustrating, for it is not clear that 
it represents a significant conceptual and methodological advance over Wasserstrom’s 
achievement. For one thing, Hughes’s attempt to apply Boyarin’s approach to the formative 
Jewish-Christian encounter in Border Lines to its later Jewish-Muslim counterpart is 
obviously laudable, but the study of the former at the time Boyarin undertook this endeavor 
was light-years ahead of where the study of the latter is right now, despite the significant 
progress made in various fields of inquiry relevant to the topic over the last couple of 
decades. Moreover, Boyarin’s insights in Border Lines built upon his formidable command of 
the sources and extensive research in the years leading up to it; his theoretical intervention 
was grounded in his previous work on rabbinic literature and his demonstrable philological 
mastery of the relevant literature. Likewise, Wasserstrom’s approach was informed by his 
deep engagement with classical Islamic sources, particularly the work of the twelfth-century 
heresiologist Shahrastānī, whose survey of Jewish sects was central to Wasserstrom’s (still 
unpublished!) doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto.21 

In contrast, Hughes is a specialist in medieval philosophy; thus, unsurprisingly, his 
chapter in Shared Identities on the historiography of the Spanish Golden Age is the most 
robust and provocative section of the book.22 He has also published numerous works of 
methodological reflection on the discipline of religious studies, and one can see a direct 
continuity between the discourse analysis of contemporary academic approaches to the 
study of Islam he executes in those books and the analytical lens he trains on various 
influential figures in the study of the Muslim-Jewish encounter among previous generations 
of Anglo-European scholars in Shared Identities.23 However, Hughes’s approach to Islamic 
origins and the Jews of early Islam—subjects located in a period well outside of his area of 
main expertise—sometimes reflects a problematic handling of the sources and a neglect of 

Writes: Mughīra b. Saʿīd’s Islamic Gnosis and the Myths of Its Rejection,” History of Religions 25 (1985): 1–29. 
A mentor of mine who will remain anonymous here once remarked that Hodgson is the scholar most likely 
to induce fits of aggravation in undergraduates; my personal experience indicates that Wasserstrom is also a 
strong contender for this honor.

21.  Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Species of Misbelief: A History of Muslim Heresiography of the Jews” (PhD diss., 
University of Toronto, 1987).

22.  Hughes, Shared Identities, ch. 5.
23.  Hughes’s criticisms of the contemporary field of Islamic studies have often devolved into ad hominem 

attacks and precipitated strident counter-critiques, especially in online forums. A common response to his 
allegations is that they rest upon distorted characterizations of scholars of note and their claims. Thus, Hughes’s 
Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) focuses on a 
critique of what he sees as uncritical, and even “insular and apologetic” (p. 2), tendencies in the discourse and 
ideology of the academic study of Islam as practiced in North America, especially in circles of scholars associated 
with the American Academy of Religion. For an unvarnished evaluation of this book and its allegations, see 
Devin J. Stewart, “A Modest Proposal for Islamic Studies,” in Identity, Politics and the Study of Islam: Current 
Dilemmas in the Study of Religions, ed. Matt Sheedy, 157–200 (Sheffield: Equinox, 2018). Notably, this edited 
volume was itself a response to a public controversy between Hughes and Omid Safi and the discussions that 
followed; see the interview with the editor, “Identity, Politics, and the Study of Islam,” available online at 
https://edge.ua.edu/nota-bene/identity-politics-and-the-study-of-islam-an-interview-with-matt-sheedy/. 
Hughes reiterated many of the critiques of Theorizing Islam even more strenuously in Islam and the Tyranny of 
Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception (London: Equinox, 2016).



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significant ongoing debates that are directly relevant to his argument. I cannot say whether 
his questionable interpretations and misleading representations of texts stem from an 
indifference to philology or an insensitivity to historical matters, but at various junctures in 
both of the books under consideration here, one is confronted with perplexing oversights 
and misprisions, especially (but not solely) pertaining to early and classical Islam. 

A Skeptical Religionist Peers into the Darkness: The “Aporia” of Islam’s Origins

Of course, one cannot expect a scholar’s research interests to be bounded perpetually 
by their original or primary area of expertise. Naturally, scholars grow intellectually, 
foster expanding or divergent interests, and apply their knowledge and methods to new 
problems. But acknowledgment of Hughes’s disciplinary location and background—and 
the constraints they seem to impose on his project—seems to me to be justified not only 
because the issue is directly relevant to an evaluation of his work, but also because the 
author actually foregrounds the question of disciplinary specialization and orientation 
himself. At the beginning of Shared Identities, Hughes explicitly asserts that his work is not 
grounded in a historical or philological approach but rather is conceived as operating in 
a separate (and seemingly higher?) realm, that of the scholar of religion or “religionist.”24 
This perhaps explains why his “suggestive and critical intervention”25 is most effective 
when Hughes is critiquing the established scholarship on his subject, deftly dissecting the 
presuppositions and implications of much of the previous work on the Jews of the Islamic 
world; much contemporary work in religious studies operates in this Foucauldian mode of 
genealogical and discourse analysis. However, Hughes overlooks much current scholarship 
that is pertinent to his subject and sometimes seems to be operating at a sharp disadvantage 
in his handling of relevant, even indispensable, primary evidence as well.

In chapter 1 of Shared Identities, Hughes somewhat blithely critiques a number of recent 
contributions to the field of Judeo-Islamic/Islamo-Judaic studies (both premodern and 
modern) as being mainly or solely historical or philological in nature and so failing to 
achieve a broader synthesis or to reach deeper and more theoretically insightful conclusions. 
Hughes is correct that the works he mentions here focus on specific subjects pertaining to 
the Muslim-Jewish encounter—dismissed rather derisively as “micro topics”26—and aim 
at more specifically contextualized types of insights and conclusions. However, it seems 
rather unfair, as well as inaccurate, to disparage these authors for not reflecting on broader 
issues of specific concern to scholars of religion or for failing to explicitly invoke theoretical 
language or models that are conventional or fashionable in some circles in religious studies. 

24.  Further, Hughes is explicit that he is not concerned with bringing new evidence per se to the table 
but rather seeks to operate synthetically and critically, interrogating and critiquing the established literature. 
The implication often seems to be that the main task of the scholar of religion is to perform second-order 
analysis on data yielded by other, lower-level types of study that generally do not aim at or achieve true critical 
insights. This both sells scholarship generated in other disciplines short and effaces the significant work in 
critical, methodologically oriented religious studies done by scholars who directly engage the historical or 
contemporary phenomena they study, integrating both types of research activity. 

25.  Shared Identities, x.
26.  Ibid., 2.



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Further, needless to say, even absent such explicit reflection on the part of these scholars, 
the kind of second-order theoretical analysis Hughes wishes to engage in would not be 
possible without the more historically grounded or philologically rigorous research into the 
sources conducted by the scholars he disparages here.27

In chapter 2 of Shared Identities (“Origins”), Hughes interrogates past and contemporary 
scholarship on the Jews of the Prophet Muḥammad’s time.28 Since the foundational work of 
Abraham Geiger (d. 1874), scholars have persistently explored the question of these Jews’ 
identity and religious orientation, a question of great significance for our understanding 
of the Quran and the emergence of Islam. In particular, as Hughes notes, the “strong Judaic 
cast” of proto-Islam induced Geiger and others to speculate regarding the possible Jewish 
background of the Prophet’s career and milieu, as the impact of the Jews of Muḥammad’s 
time on the Quran was often explained via a unidirectional movement of ideas and practices 
from these Jews to the fledgling community. I have elsewhere dubbed this the influence 
paradigm, though Hughes for some unspecified reason favors the language of “larceny.”29 
The logic behind this coinage escapes me, since the scholars of past generations who 
posited this unidirectional movement of cultural goods from the Jews to Islam almost 
always utilized the language of debt and borrowing and seldom, if ever, characterized this 
movement of ideas as theft per se.30

27.  In the note in which he specifies the historical-philological studies he is talking about, Hughes explicitly 
states: “None of them . . . are interested in larger questions supplied by the study of religion” (ibid., 152, n. 3). 
This is a stunningly misleading characterization of the work of the scholars in question (Mark Cohen, Marina 
Rustow, David Freidenreich, Jessica Goldberg, Arnold Franklin, Shai Secunda, and Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman). 
It is possible that Hughes simply means to distinguish himself from these scholars, identifying them (in contrast 
to himself) as historians or philologists by training and method rather than scholars of religion per se. However, 
the point of such a distinction is lost on me, and it is simply incorrect in at least one case, that of Freidenreich, 
whose work is squarely located in religious studies and deeply embedded in its critical discourses. I will address 
the question of methodology, and what Hughes specifically claims to bring to the table as a “religionist,” further 
below.

28.  Moving into Hughes’s treatment of particular subjects in his books, I should note that on many occasions 
material from Shared Identities is repeated verbatim in Muslim and Jew; on others, the older material is 
synopsized but the takeaway is the same, while in a few other cases, Muslim and Jew offers a substantially 
different approach to a specific topic. I will sometimes note the parallels and divergences between the books 
below, though I have not attempted to do so systematically.

29.  See Shared Identities, 43–53 passim. Hughes cites my early article on Geiger (“The Hebrew Bible and the 
Quran: The Problem of the Jewish ‘Influence’ on Islam,” Religion Compass 1 [2007]: 643–659) in Shared Identities 
(166, n. 41), but I did not characterize the language shared between the Quran and contemporaneous varieties 
of Judaism as “Semitic” in nature there, as he seems to suggest (p. 48). For a more up-to-date version of my 
argument about the concept of “influence” as it has historically been deployed in discussions of the background 
to the Quran, see my The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late 
Antiquity to Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. 34–41.

30.  Hughes appears to attribute the language not only of borrowing but also of theft to Abraham Geiger 
(Shared Identities, 48), but I have not found a single reference to Muḥammad’s relationship to Judaism as 
Diebstahl in Geiger’s Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?, rev. ed. (Leipzig: Kaufmann; 
New York: Bloch, 1902), whereas references to Aufnahme or Ableitung are ubiquitous. Hughes is certainly 
correct in noting the extremely widespread impact of Geiger’s approach among scholars of the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries (Shared Identities, 48–49), but my overarching impression of this literature is that 



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Be that as it may, Hughes effectively unpacks the conspicuous and problematic political 
and ideological commitments that have so often informed scholarship in this area. In 
particular, he emphasizes that many attempts to resolve the question of the origins and 
pedigree of the Jews of the Ḥijāz reflect a deep-seated—and ultimately defensive and 
apologetic—concern with continuity. By asserting the antiquity of this Jewish community, 
as well as its basically rabbinic orientation, Geiger and his many followers establish not 
only the privileged and more original status of the Jews vis-à-vis Islam, but also forge an 
important link in a chain that stretches from Jewish antiquity to the Middle Ages, rooting 
the culture of European Jewry in the legacy of ancient Israel. However, as Hughes recognizes, 
the notion of a teleological spread of normative Judaism in this period—and the monolithic 
hegemony of rabbinic Judaism, in particular—has fallen out of favor among most scholars, 
as numerous studies have shown that rabbinic authority was only gradually constructed 
and established in diasporic Jewish communities in the high Middle Ages.31

The main impression one gets from Hughes’s approach to both Islamic origins in 
general and the Jewish background to Islam specifically is that of a pervasive agnosticism. 
In discussing older trajectories of scholarship, Hughes problematizes the idea that the 
Jews of Muḥammad’s time were straightforwardly rabbinic and thus that their beliefs—
and consequent impact on the Quran and formative Islam—conform to the supposedly 
“traditional” Judaism naturalized as authoritative in the classical rabbinic canon. He 
concludes this discussion by stating: “[T]he problem remains: What did Judaism look 
like on the Arabian Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries? Since we have no idea, 
how and why do we continue to claim that a normative rabbinic Judaism was present at 
the ‘birth’ of Islam” (p. 46). It is true that the array of questionable presuppositions and 
ideologically suspect answers scholars working on the “Jewish question” in Islamic origins 
have sometimes produced suggests that, like views on the historical Jesus, any conclusion 
one might draw about the Jews of Muḥammad’s time ultimately reflects only the image 
of the beholder. In other words, from the time of Geiger to the present day, scholars have 
gazed eagerly into the darkness, striving to catch a glimpse of historical reality, but have 
often just spotted their own reflection and so in the end merely confirmed their own 
 

Geiger’s followers have similarly favored the language of transaction and indebtedness rather than that of theft, 
and that the most prevalent characterization of the situation is not one of Jews being victims of “larceny,” but 
rather of Muslims being pervasively indebted to exemplary Jewish models. This is one of the most fundamental 
ways in which Geiger’s work impacted approaches to the Quran and Islamic origins in the Anglo-European 
tradition. In any event, Hughes presents the term “larceny” in quotation marks (e.g., in the heading “‘Larceny’: 
The History of an Idea,” 50) as if he is quoting someone else’s coinage, but I have been unable to discern any 
precedent for it. None is indicated by direct citation.

31.  See, e.g., Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval 
Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Hughes productively makes use of—dare 
I say “borrows”?—Bulliet’s metaphor of the “spreading inkblot” to describe ingrained conceptions of the spread 
of Islam after the Arab conquests—ineluctable, natural, and homogeneous. Hughes suggests, quite rightly in my 
view, that this is also how the spread of normative rabbinic Judaism in Late Antiquity is commonly imagined 
(Shared Identities, 8; cf. 53).



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presuppositions and biases.32 Here Hughes, too, gazes into the abyss, but what he sees is 
rather different from what previous generations managed to glimpse. 

To be clear, I absolutely share Hughes’s skepticism of overly positivistic studies on the 
subject of the Jews of late antique Arabia and the Jewish social and religious context of 
the Quran. Most notably, we concur in our evaluations of the 2014 monograph of Haggai 
Mazuz, who argues on the basis of a highly problematic negotiation of the evidence that 
the Jews of Medina were thoroughly rabbinic in orientation.33 Similarly, it is difficult 
to disagree with Hughes’s assertion that Islam could not have been—as Geiger and his 
followers postulated—the product of a unilateral communication of “influences” from a 
stable, well-defined Judaism to the Prophet and his fledgling Muslim community. As already 
noted, Hughes favors an alternative position, conjecturing that a host of diverse, but by and 
large unknowable, expressions of Jewish identity in the late antique milieu contributed to 
the precipitation of early Islam out of a variegated matrix, with what became the mature, 
normative forms of both traditions gradually emerging only over the course of centuries 
through a complex dynamic of mutual exchange and coevolution.

However, I am not confident that a position of complete agnosticism is merited or that 
it is the current consensus position among contemporary scholars working in this area. 
For one thing, considerable progress has been made in the study of Arabian Jewry on the 
basis of epigraphic evidence, in particular. In the case of South Arabia, the massive output 
of Christian Julien Robin and other scholars over the last two decades might allow us to 
draw some conclusions, however provisional, about the development and spread of some 
form of Judaism on the peninsula in Late Antiquity. In Shared Identities, Hughes briefly 
cites a single piece by Robin, his long article “Himyar et Israël” from 2004, but he does 
not take into account the substantial development of Robin’s thinking in the fifteen years 
since in his numerous subsequent contributions, nor the more recent and complementary 
work of Iwona Gajda and others. Granted, we cannot directly ascertain anything about how 
normative the Judaism of the Jewish tribes of Medina was—the main question of interest 
to Hughes—by studying the rather earlier Judaization of Ḥimyar, quite far afield from the 
Ḥijāz, though linked to it through trade and other networks maintained by the highly 

32.  This tendency is, of course, true of scholarly engagements with Muḥammad himself; for an incisive 
investigation of the complex investments Western scholars have brought to inquiry into the biography of 
the Prophet, see Kecia Ali, The Lives of Muhammad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Hughes 
himself asserts that contemporary professors of Islamic studies have produced an image of Muḥammad of a 
particularly apologetic bent by projecting their own values upon the founder of Islam (Theorizing Islam, 34).

33.  Haggai Mazuz, The Religious and Spiritual Life of the Jews of Medina (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Compare 
Hughes’s review in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83 (2015): 580–82 and my “The Jews of 
Medina and the Challenge of Early Islamic Historiography,” Review of Qur’anic Research 2, no. 2 (2016), https://
lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/rqr/article/view/332. Hughes efficiently exposes the problems with 
Mazuz’s methodology, focusing particularly on the latter’s problematic reliance on the principle of mukhālafa and 
positing that early Muslims’ insistence on acting in a fashion dissimilar to Jews in fact signals self-consciousness 
about the original similarity, or even identity, of the groups. Hughes’s criticism of the shortcomings of Mazuz’s 
methodology is spot on, but his critique would have been strengthened considerably by engagement with the 
major discussion of mukhālafa in Ze’ev Maghen, After Hardship Cometh Ease: The Jews as Backdrop for Muslim 
Moderation (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), which he overlooks.

https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/rqr/article/view/332
https://lockwoodonlinejournals.com/index.php/rqr/article/view/332


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mobile population at the time. Nevertheless, the case of Ḥimyar provides an important 
precedent for the similar (and far more successful) project of monotheization pursued by 
Muḥammad in the Ḥijāz. Moreover, considering what scholars have learned about “Judaism” 
and how it can or should be defined in the Yemenite milieu is surely informative for similar 
questions of definition as they might pertain to the later Ḥijāzī milieu. I am not suggesting 
that the example of Ḥimyar contradicts any of the conclusions Hughes draws here, only 
that given its direct relevance to the questions Hughes is asking, I would have imagined 
this case would have merited far greater consideration in his theoretical investigation in 
Shared Identities.34 Presumably Hughes came to recognize this lacuna himself, because 
Muslim and Jew includes a slightly more robust discussion of the Ḥimyarite evidence, where 
Hughes briefly notes its utility for corroborating the fluid and heteronormative nature of 
the “Judaism” to which the Yemenite kingdom supposedly converted in Late Antiquity.35 

We might also consider the significant contributions to the question of the Jewish 
background to Islam that have been made recently by scholars in Quranic studies. It is true 
that many scholars working on the Quran in a textualist-philological vein are generally 
reticent to advance more sweeping hypotheses of a positivist historical sort.36 Nevertheless, 
much of the work done in Quranic studies over the last decade is extremely pertinent to 
the topic of the Jewish impact on the Quran and Muḥammad, yet Hughes almost completely 
neglects this literature here, engaging it only as it relates to more peripheral topics.37 

34.  On the other hand, the case of Ḥimyar is not relevant for the reason Hughes explicitly adduces here, 
namely that Muḥammad sent some of his followers to seek refuge in Yemen “among other communities of 
monotheists” when he was being persecuted in Mecca (Shared Identities, 44). Hughes is likely thinking of 
the so-called first hijra to Axum, in which a small group of the Prophet’s followers fled to Ethiopia under the 
leadership of Jaʿfar b. Abī Ṭālib, Muḥammad’s cousin.

35.  Muslim and Jew, 14–16, citing a much broader body of secondary literature, including recent or relatively 
recent work by G. W. Bowersock, George Hatke, Norbert Nebes, and Iwona Gajda alongside somewhat older 
studies by Reuben Ahroni and Joseph Naveh (curiously, Robin continues to be represented by only the single 
article from 2004). Hughes has recently devoted a longer piece to the subject that more adroitly navigates 
the relevant primary and secondary sources: “South Arabian ‘Judaism,’ Ḥimyarite Raḥmanism, and the Origins 
of Islam,” in Remapping Emergent Islam: Texts, Social Settings, and Ideological Trajectories, ed. Carlos A. 
Segovia, 15–43 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Here Hughes aptly conjectures that Ḥimyarite 
monotheism may have been a combination of elements, “a thin overlay of some type of non-normative Judaism 
over a type of autochthonous Arabian monotheism,” and implies that a similar synthesis of elements may have 
been behind the rise of Islam in the Ḥijāz far to the north (pp. 37–38).

36.  See my discussion of the problematic disjunction between contemporary Quranic studies and current 
historical perspectives on the late antique milieu in which Islam emerged in “Positivism, Revisionism, and 
Agnosticism in the Study of Late Antiquity and the Qurʾān,” Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies 
Association 2 (2017): 169–99.

37.  Thus, the monographs of Holger Zellentin (The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a 
Point of Departure [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013]) and Emran El-Badawi (The Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel 
Traditions [Abingdon: Routledge, 2014]) appear in a note concerning Jewish Christianity in the early Islamic 
milieu (Shared Identities, 175, n. 64), though one readily imagines that they are, or should have been, much 
more central to Hughes’s discussion. Patricia Crone, “Jewish Christianity and the Qurʾān (Part One),” Journal of 
Near Eastern Studies 74 (2015): 225–53 appears here as well (though not its sequel from the following year). This 
is the only one of Crone’s more recent articles Hughes cites, although her notorious early study with Michael 
Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) is cited in both 



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Ignoring the substantial discussions of the Quran among specialists is a peculiar decision 
given their relevance to the question of what reliable information about the Prophet’s 
milieu may be discerned in or extrapolated from the corpus, broadly recognized as the most 
important primary source for the rise of Islam. To be fair, Wasserstrom did not engage with 
contemporary debates on the Quran at all either, but he published Between Muslim and Jew 
at a time when Quranic studies was a far less active field of inquiry than it is today. If one 
had to judge by Hughes’s bibliography, one would conclude—quite wrongly—that not much 
of significance had been happening in this area of research over the last fifteen years or so.38

Admittedly, much contemporary work on the biblical currents or subtexts in the Quran 
trends against the idea of a direct impact of rabbinic Judaism on the prophetic milieu—
favoring, for example, Syriac Christian literature as a more pervasive and proximate literary 
context.39 However, there is no shortage of other research that would tend to ratify the 
conclusion of Geiger and others that the Quran directly reflects the stamp of late antique 
 

Shared Identities and Muslim and Jew, and her Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 1987) appears in the former. Stupendously, there is no reference to Angelika Neuwirth at all 
except as coeditor of the collection in which the previously mentioned article of Nebes appears. The works 
of John Wansbrough receive some attention in Shared Identities, for example in dialogue with the work of 
Boyarin (pp. 85–86). Hughes is certainly correct in discerning Wansbrough’s analogous significance for inducing 
skepticism about the received narratives of Islam’s origins, but however instrumental Wansbrough may have 
been in triggering major changes in our understanding of formative Islam and the emergence of the Quran, 
his work is hardly reflective of where the field is today. The Quran features somewhat more prominently in 
Hughes’s article “Religion without Religion: Integrating Islamic Origins into Religious Studies,” Journal of the 
American Academy of Religion 85 (2017): 867–88, though much of the relevant research of the last decade is 
again ignored.

38.  There is a brief discussion of the Quran in Muslim and Jew, 18–19, that seems to reflect some minor 
improvement in the author’s awareness of issues of significance in the field today, such as the possible impact 
of the Quran on Jewish literature rather than vice versa as Geiger et al. asserted, but no secondary sources other 
than Geiger and James Kugel on midrash (In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts [Cambridge, 
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990]) are cited here. The reader is given the impression that Hughes’s insights 
on chronology are original, which they are not. This is hardly the only place in either book in which well-
trodden arguments are presented as if ex novo, or current scholarship is neglected. Another striking example 
is the discussion of Jewish Sufism in chapter 6 of Shared Identities; this topic has recently benefited from a 
significant uptick in scholarly interest, but judging by Hughes’s bibliography on the subject, one might conclude 
that very little had been published on it since the 1980s.

39.  In this connection, it should be noted that most scholars working on the origins of Islam and the 
background to the Quran today would emphasize that both were undoubtedly the products of complex 
interactions and dialogues between multiple communities in Late Antiquity, in which not only Jews but also 
Christians and pagans participated along with the Quranic community; this multifaceted dynamic continued 
well into the early and medieval periods of Islamic history. Hughes’s work reflects and responds to a particular 
trajectory in the historical scholarship, and so he emphasizes the Jewish-Muslim dialogue to the exclusion of 
other participants. For a model study that often succeeds in capturing the polyvalent complexities of social 
and religious interactions among Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others from Late Antiquity to the high Middle 
Ages, see Uriel Simonsohn, A Common Justice: The Legal Alliances of Christians and Jews under Early Islam 
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The aforementioned work of Lassner, Jews, Christians, 
and the Abode of Islam, likewise succeeds at triangulating between the traditions both theoretically and in the 
case studies it considers. 



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Jewish thought, though this is now conceived and articulated in a more sophisticated, less 
reductive way than it has been in the past. 

Here a conspicuous problem presents itself. On the one hand, the archaeological and 
epigraphic data suggest that a form or forms of Judaism prevailed in both Ḥimyar and the 
Ḥijāz that we can characterize at most as diffuse and heteronormative (at least relative to 
rabbinic normativity, an entirely problematic construct in the late antique context). On 
the other hand, some contemporary work on the Quranic evidence suggests that textual 
traditions rather close to those that survive either in the standard rabbinic corpus or in 
“pararabbinic” corpora (such as the piyyutim) supply the most plausible literary precursors 
for the Quran.40 It is not clear whether and how these trajectories can be reconciled. As with 
the case of Ḥimyar, it is striking that Hughes almost entirely ignores them.

It is a shame that Hughes generally overlooks recent work on the Quran, because there 
is much here that would enrich his perspective and perhaps move his argument forward 
out of the foggy state of agnosticism that he dwells in when discussing this critical period. 
In acknowledging the presence of Jews in and around the Arabian milieu, Hughes briefly 
mentions Ḥimyar but also refers to the famous community settled at Elephantine in Egypt 
during the Persian period; since the papyrus remains of the Jewish colony there date to 
the fifth century BCE, one wonders if this datum is really a relevant comparandum for 
illuminating the situation in Late Antiquity.41 What is surely more relevant is Crone’s 
work on the belief system the Quran attributes to the mushrikūn, Muḥammad’s “pagan” 
opponents. In a number of publications before her untimely death in 2015, Crone argued that 
the evidence of the Quran itself militates in favor of a view of the Prophet’s interlocutors 
as themselves informed by—and so presumably acculturated to—a worldview that is 
fundamentally “biblical.” Neither the tradition nor the Quran identifies the mushrikūn as 
Jews, and Crone opts for the hypothesis that at some point, presumably through direct 
contact with “Israelites”—a population somehow anchored in and defining itself in relation 
to some register of ancient biblical tradition—the Ḥijāzī Arabs of Muḥammad’s time had 
become strongly assimilated to monotheism of an Israelite-Judaic stripe.42 As in the case 
of Ḥimyar, the evidence of the Quran suggests gradual acculturation to a diffuse form 
of Israelite monotheism rather than conversion to a formally defined rabbinic or quasi-
rabbinic Judaism. This way of understanding the milieu and Muḥammad’s contemporaries 

40.  On the question of canonical rabbinic or pararabbinic precursors to Quranic material, see now my 
“The Two Sons of Adam: Rabbinic Resonances and Scriptural Virtuosity in Sūrat al-Māʾidah,” Journal of the 
International Qur’anic Studies Association 6 (2021) (forthcoming) and the bibliography therein.

41.  Shared Identities, 44. One could argue that the case of Elephantine is in fact relevant since the form of 
Judaism reflected in the papyri sometimes diverges quite acutely from what we know of the “normative” or 
“mainstream” Judaism of the time as evidenced in the literary (that is, biblical) sources for the period. Moreover, 
Karel van der Toorn has proposed that the Elephantine community was originally Samarian in origin and only 
gradually acquired a diasporic Jewish identity in response to changing circumstances in Egypt; see his Becoming 
Diaspora Jews: Behind the Story of Elephantine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). These points seem 
to me to be quite relevant for Hughes’s argument, but the case of Elephantine is raised only as evidence of a 
Jewish presence in the Arabian (or at least Eastern Roman) environs in the pre-Islamic period.

42.  Most of the studies collected in Patricia Crone, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, vol. 1 of 
Collected Studies in Three Volumes, ed. Hanna Siurua (Leiden: Brill, 2016) are pertinent to this theme.



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is surely pertinent to Hughes’s main point of interest in the proto-Islamic period, namely, 
the presence and status of Jews—or “Jews”—in the milieu, and his work would have been 
considerably enriched by engaging with Crone and other scholars working in the field of 
Quranic studies.43

Intriguingly, Crone’s approach dovetails with a strand in older scholarship that postulated 
that the Jewish tribes of Muḥammad’s time were “converts”—Judaized Arabs rather than 
Arabized Jews, as it were.44 It is emblematic of Hughes’s agnosticism about the Jews of the 
Ḥijāz that he is skeptical both of claims of the ancient Palestinian origins of the community 
and of the thesis that they were converts, as earlier scholars such as Hugo Winckler and 
D. S. Margoliouth held.45 However, although some of their ideas are now problematic, the 
approach of these older scholars is in some sense vindicated by contemporary research 
on the spread of some form of Israelite or Jewish identity in both Yemen and the Ḥijāz 
in the pre-Islamic period. Hughes’s objection to this approach centers on the fact that he 
sees conversion itself as a problematic notion in this context. Given the lack of doctrinal 
and institutional coherence Hughes sees as typical of most (all?) varieties of late antique 
Judaism, he justifiably asks what such putative converts are thought to be converting to; 
surely we cannot take for granted any kind of formal process of conversion signifying a 
decisive movement from one clearly delineated system of belief and practice to another. 
Another strange lacuna in Hughes’s work confronts us in this connection, for there is an 
established, and considerable, scholarly literature on conversion, expressions of communal 
belonging, and nominal-symbolic or practical boundary-crossing between communities in 
Late Antiquity, much of which would surely have been relevant to his interests here. 

Be that as it may, if we accept the notion that the “Jews” of Muḥammad’s time were 
neither rabbinic in orientation nor formal converts but rather Arabs who assimilated to 
some form of Judaic or Israelite cultural identity—Crone’s “God-fearers”46—we again face the 
question that is central to Hughes’s enterprise: what was Judaism in the late antique, proto-
Islamic milieu anyway? The evidence of the Quran, at least as read by Crone, corroborates 
Hughes’s thesis of a diffuse, poorly defined, heteronormative Judaism in this environment. 
And yet we must ask how diffuse membership in the Jewish community (or Banū Isrāʾīl, or 

43.  As noted, one of the most striking omissions is the work of Neuwirth, who for many years, in a massive 
corpus of publications, has articulated an extremely sophisticated approach to the genesis of the Quranic 
revelation, rejecting the influence paradigm that prevailed in the past in favor of a sophisticated, nuanced 
presentation of the Prophet and his community as deeply engaged with a Judaic literary and social environment. 
This is extremely relevant to the “Jewish question” as it pertains to Islamic origins, and so Neuwirth’s absence 
from Hughes’s discussion is especially glaring.

44.  In his discussion of the origins of Arabian Jewry in his classic A History of the Jews of Arabia from Ancient 
Times to Their Eclipse under Islam (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), Gordon Newby strikes 
a judicious balance between the accounts of ancient Jewish migration into Arabia—which he seems to perceive 
as grounded in historical reality despite the obvious ideological commitments of many scholars positing this 
model of origins—and the numerous traditions that suggest that many of the Jews of Arabia were converts. 
Trenchantly, Newby observes pre-Islamic Arab conversion to Judaism as a foreshadowing of Islamization (p. 53).

45.  Shared Identities, 51–53.
46.  Patricia Crone, “Pagan Arabs as God-fearers,” in Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the 

Qurʾan, ed. Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook. 140–64 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).



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Ahl al-Kitāb, all floating signifiers) could really have been in Muḥammad’s time, since it 
was cogent enough to be a major criterion of social distinction in the Quran itself. Quranic 
discourse presupposes that individual and communal identity are determined by the path 
one follows, and so we must infer from this that the criteria of distinction between the 
prophetic community of Believers and the Jews (yahūd, sometimes styled alladhīna hādū, 
“those who profess Judaism”) were substantial enough to be both legible and meaningful to 
the Quran’s audience. It is difficult to imagine that when the Quranic revelation insinuates 
that the Jews merit both worldly sanction and eschatological punishment for their misdeeds, 
the Prophet’s followers were uncertain about who was meant or how they differed from 
members of their own community. Though the distinctions may have been rudimentary 
and the social boundaries blurry at times, they must have been basically coherent; to 
be a Jew, whatever that meant, was something significant to the Quran’s audience. Nor 
could such distinctions have been ideal or abstract, unless one imagines—contrary to the 
consensus—that the Quran was revealed in a vacuum and that its message had no direct 
social implications. I assume Hughes would agree with this overall appraisal, but to me 
this all underscores the pertinence of the Quranic evidence to arguments about the Jewish 
context of Islam’s origins.

Those of us who work in this area are well accustomed to abiding in the shadowy realm 
of conjecture, and so we typically aim at probability and plausibility rather than absolute 
certitude. However, it is debatable whether a position of total agnosticism is still warranted 
today and whether we should be content to throw up our hands and claim that the attempt 
to reach any conclusions about the varieties of Judaism represented in the ambit of the 
proto-Islamic community is hopeless. There are surely some arch-revisionists still out there 
who would share Hughes’s supposition that we have no idea what was happening in the 
Ḥijāz in this period, but to present this as the status quaestionis seems like a rather nihilistic 
mischaracterization of the field as it now stands. Although this subject must surely be treated 
with caution and approached with skepticism, Hughes’s repeated emphasis on the “aporia” 
of the Jews of Late Antiquity and early Islam in our historical understanding—an extreme, 
though at times selective, revisionism—is conspicuously uninformed by contemporary 
debates.47 It is clear we cannot go back to the unreflective and unselfconscious positivism of 
the nineteenth century; but the Jewish presence in pre-Islamic Arabia is hardly a total black 
box either, and recent approaches have rehabilitated the perspectives of at least some of the 
scholars of past generations, though these approaches are largely overlooked by Hughes.

Among the Believers: From the Prophetic to the Early Islamic Period

A pervasive ambiguity regarding the reliability of the available sources for the proto-
Islamic period runs throughout Hughes’s work. While he generally adopts a skeptical pose, 
at times he equivocates and becomes more sanguine regarding what exactly we can know 

47.  The term aporia (literally a disjunction or impasse) recurs several times in Shared Identities; Hughes 
employs it to signify what he alleges to be the current state of our historical understanding (or lack of 
understanding) of the nature of Jewish-Muslim relations in periods for which we either have no sources or our 
sources cannot answer the kinds of questions we wish to pose to them.



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about the prophetic milieu (or at least what questions we can ask and plausibly answer 
on the basis of the sources). His perspective on the so-called Constitution of Medina is 
instructive in this regard. Hughes initially sounds a rather pessimistic note about this 
document given that it survives only in a source dating to more than a century after the 
time of the Prophet, the Sīrat Rasūl Allāh of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767). He observes that both 
Michael Lecker and Uri Rubin have sought to address the question of the identity (and 
specifically the tribal affiliations) of the document’s Jewish signatories and concludes that 
even if we judge it reliable, what it primarily attests to is the fuzziness of the boundaries 
delineating Jewish groups from others in the milieu: “[T]he contours of these ‘Jewish’ groups 
. . . are impossible to ascertain with any historical clarity.”48 He thus reads the document as 
an imperfect approximation of a complex reality in which “Jews,” however they might 
have been defined or identified themselves, were incorporated into or accommodated by 
the early umma. However, one might object that in the end, it is clear that the Jews are not 
reducible to simply one of several tribal configurations among the others mentioned in the 
Constitution of Medina; rather, these groups are exceptional among its signatories. Pace 
Hughes, one wonders what the basis of that exceptionalism is if it is not somehow religious 
in nature.

One senses a kind of revisionist sleight of hand here: the text of the pact, like the vast 
majority of extant traditions on the rise of Islam, is preserved in a source that dates from at 
least a century after the event and so is asserted to be intrinsically suspect; but at the same 
time, insofar as it is reliable, what it supposedly signals for Hughes is the blurry boundaries 
of the early umma and the impossibility of determining what “Jewish” identity could have 
meant in this context.49 Although Hughes does not cite him in this passage, one senses Fred 
Donner’s well-known thesis about the fluidity of the early movement of the Believers (as he 
dubs the primitive community under the guidance of the Prophet) in the background here.50 
Donner, according to whom muslim was not a distinct, formal religious identity per se but 
rather a designation limited to Arab converts lacking a previous monotheistic communal 
identity, is acknowledged elsewhere in Shared Identities, however; for example, he is cited 
as corroborating Hughes in emphasizing the vagueness of the terms qualifying someone 
as a member of the early community (p. 9), though in a footnote to this passage, Hughes 
actually criticizes Donner for characterizing the early movement as specifically “religious” 
in nature (p. 153, n. 21). 

48.  Shared Identities, 60. Stunningly, this is the only reference to Uri Rubin’s important work in either book. 
This is perhaps the apposite place to observe that Hughes chronically undercites works and authors relevant 
to his argument throughout both books; sometimes the omissions are quite startling, as when Hughes ignores 
studies that are indispensable to a responsible handling of the topic at hand. The problem is especially acute in 
Muslim and Jew. 

49.  This ambiguity is characteristic of Hughes’s approach to the Isawiyya as well, where late and 
problematically ideological sources are by and large assumed to represent historical verities when they confirm 
Hughes’s basic thesis about the blurring of boundaries and the ambiguity of identities. In this, Hughes follows 
Wasserstrom, who struggles to negotiate a critical approach to heresiography while relying on such works for 
his revisionist historiography. See the discussion of the Isawiyya and messianism below.

50.  Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 
2010). 



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However, it is not clear to me that Hughes has apprehended the real point of Donner’s 
argument. Donner’s project in Muhammad and the Believers is to show—primarily on the 
evidence of the Quran itself—that the early umma was far more ecumenical than has been 
previously recognized, and specifically that the first followers of Muḥammad welcomed 
pious Jews and Christians alongside muslim or “submitting” Arabs in a common pietistic 
and apocalyptic movement.51 To Donner, the Prophet was not founding a new, formally 
bounded and well-defined “religion” in the modern sense (and so here he and Hughes are 
in agreement), or even in the sense according to which Muslims would assert categorical 
prerogatives over Jews and Christians as an imperial ruling class only a few decades after 
his death. This does not mean, however, that markers of identity and distinction were not 
operative in the early community, or that they did not quickly come to predominate in the 
conceptual repertoire shared by various groups in the caliphal period—points Hughes fails 
to appreciate.52 

It is noteworthy that Hughes acknowledges Lecker more substantially in his discussion 
of the Constitution of Medina.53 In numerous studies published over the course of decades, 
Lecker has shown through methodical and at times ingenious interpretation of data 
provided in the oft-maligned traditional Muslim sources on the formative Islamic period 
that we can actually discern much useful and plausibly reliable historical information 
in those sources. Much of Lecker’s work pertains to the Jews of the Ḥijāz, and although 
he is predominantly interested in questions of tribal affiliation, diplomatic relations, 
genealogy, and so forth, he has also offered various conjectures pertinent to the subject of 
the Jewish tribes’ religion and its impact upon the formative Muslim tradition. However, 
most of Lecker’s titanic output is dismissed or simply overlooked by Hughes; there is no 
acknowledgment, for example, of his major 2014 monograph on Muḥammad and the Jews.54 
One might imagine that Lecker’s work was of limited benefit to Hughes’s project because 
Lecker by and large seems to assume that the Jewish tribes of Arabia were aligned with the 
rabbinic Judaism of Palestine and Babylonia; his conclusion that aspects of the Medinan 
Jews’ culture reflected a hegemonic rabbinic normativity contradicts Hughes’s argument on 
a fundamental level.55 More broadly, it is possible that Lecker’s disposition toward drawing 

51.  See now also Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity 
and Early Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), emphasizing apocalyptic piety both as 
the basis of the “ecumenism” of Muḥammad’s movement and as the common denominator shared with many 
other communities in the late antique and early Islamic period. 

52.  Donner’s thesis is cited more straightforwardly in Muslim and Jew, but again as demonstrating the 
indistinctness of the categories “Muslim” and “Jew” rather than the ecumenism of the umma, which I take to be 
the real thrust of Donner’s argument.

53.  See Shared Identities, 59–60; a briefer discussion appears in Muslim and Jew, 30.
54.  Michael Lecker, Mûḥammad ve-ha-Yehûdîm [Muḥammad and the Jews] (Jerusalem: Makhon Ben-Tzvi, 

2014). Lecker’s extensive scholarly output in English from the last twenty years is readily available in a number 
of collected volumes.

55.  Alternately, we might imagine that not enough of Lecker’s work addresses the religion of the Jews of 
Medina per se, although—as Hughes himself would remind us—it is supposedly impossible to isolate religion 
from other categories of identity and behavior at this time (this is the crux of his critique of Donner, which 
strikes me as somewhat misplaced).



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positivistic conclusions about the primitive Islamic milieu on the basis of the later Muslim 
sources is simply unappealing to Hughes, as it seems to be to many scholars of a revisionist 
bent; Hughes is hardly the only contemporary scholar who seems at best indifferent to 
Lecker’s numerous contributions to the field, whether published in Hebrew or in English.

The problematic nature of other aspects of Hughes’s navigation of the early 
historiographic tradition becomes apparent as he transitions from the prophetic period to 
the early centuries of the Islamic dominion. Aspects of Hughes’s treatment of the Sīra of 
Ibn Isḥāq in Muslim and Jew are strong, as when he recognizes that sīra traditions function 
exegetically, anchoring the interpretation of the Quran in episodes in the life of the Prophet 
rather than conveying objectively reliable historical information. He also notes that some 
aspects of the sīra serve to cast Muḥammad as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, a well-
established argument in the field.56 However, he veers into somewhat dubious territory 
when he asserts that the first section of Ibn Isḥāq’s work, the so-called mubtadaʾ, which 
collects traditions on Muḥammad’s prophetic precursors, was sheared off by Ibn Hishām (d. 
218/833) and other transmitters specifically because of Ibn Isḥāq’s copious reliance upon 
isrāʾīliyyāt, which had fallen into “disrepute” by this time.57 

Although the abridgment of the Sīrat Rasūl Allāh has been much discussed, the claim 
that it was judged to be necessary on the basis of on the work’s proliferation of isrāʾīliyyāt 
already in the third/ninth century (as Newby, Hughes’s source here, avers) is no longer 
tenable. For one thing, insofar as Ibn Hishām’s motivations for his interventions into Ibn 
Isḥāq’s work may be thought to be dogmatic in nature, this perception more likely stems 
from problematic narratives such as the famous Satanic Verses episode.58 As regards the 
mubtadaʾ specifically, most scholars would understand the truncation of the work as 
reflecting the rapid obsolescence of an approach to the sīra that anchored it in pre-Islamic 
prophetic tradition. The wide circulation of Ibn Isḥāq’s material on pre-Islamic history 
in other sources of the period—the basis of Newby’s reconstruction of the mubtadaʾ—
demonstrates that the supposedly censorious attitude toward that material that Hughes 
attributes to Ibn Hishām and other transmitters of the sīra could hardly have been 
widespread in the early centuries of Islamic history. Insofar as objections to the inclusion 
in the Sīra of material on the pre-Islamic prophets arose in this period, they were more 
likely based on evolving conceptions of genre than an aversion to reliance on materials of a 
Jewish or quasi-Jewish ambience such as would prevail in some circles much later on.

56.  These statements (Muslim and Jew, 21–22) reflect a nuanced understanding of the nature of sīra and 
how it functioned in the early period; however, they are rather familiar ones in contemporary scholarship, and 
Hughes fails to cite a single corroborating source here.

57.  Hughes’s source is the introduction to Gordon Darnell Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet: A 
Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muḥammad (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989). 
Newby’s account of the evolution of the Ibn Isḥāq corpus was stridently criticized at the time of its publication 
(see the review of Lawrence I. Conrad, “Recovering Lost Texts: Some Methodological Issues,” Journal of the 
American Oriental Society 113 [1993]: 258–63) and is quite out of date today.

58.  On the complex history of Ibn Isḥāq’s account of this episode, see Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The 
Satanic Verses in Early Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).



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Hughes’s position here demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the history and 
development of isrāʾīliyyāt as a concept. The copious preservation of Ibn Isḥāq’s material 
on pre-Islamic history itself suggests that the kind of censorial activity Hughes attributes 
to Ibn Hishām, based on the material’s “disreputable” association with Jews, is plainly 
anachronistic for the third/ninth century. But more to the point, much critical investigation 
of isrāʾīliyyāt has shown that this construct should not be taken at face value or understood 
to be operative in the early centuries of Islamic tradition, as is still sometimes assumed. 
Numerous studies have shown that the concept of the isrāʾīliyyāt is an ideological tool that 
developed quite late in the history of the tradition, but the notion of a categorical opposition 
to this material because of its questionable authenticity and association with Jews and 
Judaism has often been projected back and nativized as an aspect of Muslim scholarship 
early on, a position that simply does not hold up to critical scrutiny.59 The motivation to 
censor the mubtadaʾ as part of a concerted effort to suppress material of a Judaic cast can 
only fancifully be ascribed to authors and transmitters of the early centuries AH.

Hughes’s approach to the question of the isrāʾīliyyāt is unfortunate because this 
phenomenon is undoubtedly significant for his larger project; as a discourse, isrāʾīliyyāt is 
a preeminent example of an ideologically freighted form of traditional Muslim engagement 
with Judaism. The idea of the isrāʾīliyyāt as a corpus of traditions that contaminated and 
undermined a pure, genuinely “Islamic” form of knowledge handed down from the Prophet 
and the salaf is one component of an ideology of separation or boundary-drawing between 
Sunnism and various supposed heterodoxies that developed in the post-Mongol era—
assuming, as many would, that the Mamluk-era jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) should be 
recognized as the watershed figure in that development. Asserting that there was authentic 
hostility to supposed Jewish intrusions into the pure stream of prophetically validated 
religious knowledge from Islam’s very beginnings, or even in the early centuries AH, or 
that a corpus of so-called isrāʾīliyyāt could be objectively demarcated and partitioned off 
from genuinely Muslim lore, is to naturalize and validate a much later, conspicuously 
polemical, conception of the received tradition. Concerned as he is with the dynamics of 
differentiation and separation that have contributed to false ideas of a coherent distinction 
between Judaism and Islam—a distinction Hughes repeatedly avers was objectively lacking—
one would imagine that he would be more sensitive to the function of the very category of 
isrāʾīliyyāt as an ideologically motivated discursive tool used to promote a myth of pristine 
origins for the received tradition of Islamic religious knowledge. (One also imagines that 
Hughes should have been more sensitive to anachronistic arguments, given his propensity 
to target them in others’ works.) Curiously, when Hughes discusses the importance of such 
origin myths elsewhere, no reference to the discourse of isrāʾīliyyāt is to be found, though 
it would have augmented his argument considerably. I will return to this point presently.

59.  See Roberto Tottoli, “Origin and Use of the Term Isrāʾīliyyāt in Muslim Literature,” Arabica 46 (1999): 
193–210 and Michael Pregill, “Isrāʾīliyyāt, Myth, and Pseudepigraphy: Wahb b. Munabbih and the Early Islamic 
Versions of the Fall of Adam and Eve,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 34 (2008): 215–84, esp. 237–41. 
Hughes cites the latter article in his bibliography in Shared Identities but seems to miss the import of my 
argument.



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Hughes’s approach to other primary sources for the period and their interpretation is 
similarly problematic.60 One of these is the Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptiziati, a complex text 
in the Christian adversus iudaeos tradition that has attracted scholarly attention both for its 
putatively accurate attendance to actual Jewish beliefs on the eve of Islam and for certain 
statements it makes about Muḥammad, in particular its seeming attestation of Jewish belief 
in Muḥammad as a herald of the Messiah. Notably, the date of the text has been disputed: 
some see it as genuine contemporary testimony to early Jewish support for Islam as a 
messianic movement, while others note that at least some of the claims made in the text 
clearly reflect later conceptions.61 Hughes repeatedly cites the text (consistently referring 
to it as the Doctrina Iacoba) as evidence of the interconnection and porousness of the 
three monotheisms at the time, seeing groups from each community genuinely marshaled 
together under the apocalyptic banner of early Islam: “a rather generic late antique 
apocalypticism encompasses Jews, Christians, and Muslims.”62 However, the most cautious 
reading of the Doctrina is that it has conflated the Jewish belief that the rise of Islam is a 
harbinger of the coming of the Messiah (a plausible claim borne out by other sources) with 
the notion of actual active Jewish support for Islamic dominion (a rather less plausible one). 
It is more problematic, in my view, to read the text as evidence that Jews widely embraced 
Islam, that the movement was perceptible from the outside as “ecumenical” and friendly to 
Jews, or—the notorious reading of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook’s Hagarism—that proto-
Islam was rooted in a kind of Jewish messianic revolt. (I would judge all of these claims to be 
rather farfetched, as they seem to me to misconstrue what are at most polemical assertions 
about Jews in the Doctrina, but again, I admit that there is disagreement about all this.) 
At most, what the Doctrina seems to testify to is the coincidence of Jewish and Christian 
apocalyptic expectations on the eve of Islam, and that the mission of Muḥammad and the 
subsequent Arab conquests appeared to validate those expectations in the eyes of both.63 

60.  In Muslim and Jew Hughes raises the subject of “non-canonical” sources that shed light on early Islam 
(p. 26), though what he actually seems to mean are references to the Prophet and the rise of Islam found in 
early non-Muslim sources. These texts are indeed technically “non-canonical” from the Islamic perspective, 
in distinction to the Quran and hadith, but this strikes me as a rather idiosyncratic way to characterize them. 
I infer that the choice of label is motivated by Hughes’s desire not to project confessional categories onto the 
sources, his whole point being that we should not reify the distinctions between Islam and other traditions in 
this period. 

61.  The established consensus among scholars of Late Antiquity is that the text is genuinely dateable to the 
630s. Among Islamicists, this dating is accepted by Robert Hoyland and Shoemaker (Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing 
Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam 
[Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997], 55–61; Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Islam, 87–89, and compare his treatment in 
A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish Eyes [Oakland: University of California 
Press, 2021], 37–44). However, Sean Anthony favors a later date of composition sometime around the 670s (Sean 
W. Anthony, “Muḥammad, the Keys to Paradise, and the Doctrina Iacobi: A Late Antique Puzzle,” Der Islam 91 
[2014]: 243–65, now reiterated in Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam 
[Oakland: University of California Press, 2020], 41–58).

62.  Muslim and Jew, 27. As Hughes himself acknowledges, much of this chapter recycles material from his 
article “Religion without Religion,” and so this passage recapitulates the mishandling of the Doctrina found 
there (pp. 877–78).

63.  Hughes’s main source for his discussion of the Doctrina is Shoemaker’s The Death of a Prophet: The End 



279  •  Michael e. Pregill

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It seems like a significant overreading to suggest that the text is proof that “the three 
monotheisms are not separate from one another at this point in history.”64

Hughes’s discussion of the Doctrina is closely linked to the subject of the sect of the 
Isawiyya; Hughes views both that movement and the “polythetic and inclusive” messianic 
literary works of the period as reflecting the spirit of an age in which Jewish, Christian, 
and Muslim groups circulated, absorbed, and operationalized numerous ideas and claims 
that would later be branded as heterodox.65 For Hughes, as for Wasserstrom before him, 
this shadowy sect is particularly valuable as prime evidence of the reciprocity of messianic 
developments among Muslims and Jews in the early period.66 Muslims drew on Jewish 
traditions about the Messiah in articulating their own ideas about the imminence of the 
eschaton, while “hybrid” or “syncretic” groups such as the Isawiyya seem to have remained 
oriented toward a publicly Jewish identity as they articulated a theology that strongly 
overlapped with emergent forms of early Shiʿism. The Isawiyya apparently combined 
Muslim and Jewish terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to be legible to both 
communities; their theology was Muslim, but their rituals were Jewish (Jewish enough 
that they apparently intermarried with Rabbanites, according to Shahrastānī). As Hughes 
cleverly puts it, the group appears to have operated in that liminal space “on the margins 
of the hyphen in the phrase ‘Jewish-Muslim.’”67 For him, they epitomize (to again invoke his 
terms) the type of the Muslimjew or Jewmuslim that ultimately challenges the conceptual 
stability of the terms Jew and Muslim, which scholars have only artificially naturalized as 
antipodes. As I read them, a crucial difference between Wasserstrom and Hughes seems 

of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), who 
here sees both the Doctrina and the Secrets of Shim’on bar Yoḥai as testifying to Jewish believers (or Believers) 
aligned with Muḥammad’s community (pp. 20–33), though Shoemaker seems rather more cautious about such 
claims in his more recent Apocalypse of Empire.

64.  Muslim and Jew, 27, reiterating “Religion without Religion,” 878.
65.  Shared Identities, 70–75; the reference to “polythetic and inclusive messianic works” (specifically the 

Doctrina and the Secrets of Shim’on bar Yoḥai) is on p. 74. Hughes’s reliance on Wasserstrom is particularly 
strong here.

66.  Hughes here attributes a peculiar claim to Shlomo Pines, stating that Pines argued that the Isawiyya were 
directly “influenced” by apocalyptic sources such as the Doctrina; Hughes critiques this view as reducing the 
complex dynamics that gave rise to the sect to mere “borrowing” facilitated by the circulation of texts (Shared 
Identities, 71–72). The Pines piece cited here is “The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity 
according to a New Source,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2, no. 13 (1966), 
which discusses the then-recently discovered Tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa of Qāḍī ʿ Abd al-Jabbār and advances the 
controversial thesis that this eleventh-century Muʿtazilite text preserves evidence of the endurance of Jewish 
Christianity well into the Islamic period. Pines briefly mentions the founder of the Isawiyya, Abū ʿ Īsā al-Iṣfahānī, 
at 44–45; however, the textualist argument for “influence” of apocalyptic texts on the movement decried by 
Hughes is nowhere to be found in Pines’s long article. Nor is there any reference here to the Doctrina or any 
other apocalyptic text. The gist of Wasserstrom’s critique of Pines is not that the latter overstates processes 
of “influence” in the emergence of the Isawiyya but rather that he mistakenly insists that the group is a late 
survival of an authentically ancient Jewish Christianity and not a reflex of contemporary Islamic phenomena 
(Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, 37–38, and cf. the comparison with the approach of Israel Friedlaender 
at 82).

67.  Shared Identities, 73.



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to lie in how typical each imagines the Isawiyya and other “hybrid” groups to be. For 
Wasserstrom, such groups are provocative because they are so anomalous, compelling us to 
interrogate our theoretical and phenomenological assumptions (particularly the absence of 
Jewish sectarianism between the Second Temple period and the Karaites). For Hughes, by 
contrast, the Isawiyya seem to be exemplary, demonstrating an ambiguity in the distinction 
between Jew and Muslim that he sees as chronic, pervasive, and persistent.68

In Shared Identities, Hughes’s discussion of the Isawiyya segues to the Secrets of Shim’on 
bar Yoḥai, a Jewish apocalyptic text dated to around the mid-eighth century CE; Hughes 
holds that this work is significant for his argument because it “identifies Muhammad as the 
fulfillment of Jewish messianic speculation.”69 Hughes is correct in noting that the work is 
evidence of a kind of feedback loop between Jewish and Muslim communities in this period, 
as the Secrets “recycles Muslim apocalyptic speculation, some of which had already been 
paradoxically recycled from Jewish sources by early Muslims.”70 He elegantly describes the 
creative process that generated the text as an example of “collective world-making in an 
environment wherein ideas moved freely between porous boundaries,” but perplexingly, 
he concludes the paragraph by stating: “The result is that it is impossible to know what 
is ‘Jewish’ and what is ‘Muslim.’”71 This verdict seems farfetched to me, since what this 
source testifies to is the availability of shared symbolic and imaginative resources to diverse 
communities operating in the early Islamic period, a kind of messianic-apocalyptic koine, 
but one whose meaning was clearly contested by the various participants who appropriated 
and deployed this koine for their own ends. 

I imagine that Hughes would likely see this as an oversimplification, but to me it seems 
rather evident that the deployment of this koine to advance an argument for Islam as 
the final prophetic dispensation may simply be called “Muslim,” while its deployment 
as a prophecy of the imminent redemption of Israel may be called “Jewish.” The specific 
origins of particular aspects of the koine may be ambiguous, but as operationalized in 
the Secrets, it is not evidence of blurred boundaries; it is evidence of the articulation of 
a specific communitarian and sectarian orientation through contesting the meaning of 
the aforementioned shared symbolic and imaginative resources. I am not even sure that 
“collective worldmaking” is really an accurate characterization of this dynamic, since this 
“collective worldmaking” was pursued in the service of mutually incompatible worldviews. 
This is abundantly clear in the Secrets, because the text as redacted contains at least two 
strata: an early one that presents the Ishmaelite kingdom as a divine instrument used to 
deliver the Jews from Rome and thus as a harbinger of the redemption—a clear endorsement 

68.  Another significant difference in their approaches is highlighted by Hughes himself: whereas Wasserstrom 
presents the Isawiyya and other contemporary Jewish groups as reacting to Islamicization, Hughes sees them as 
“caught up in” that very process—embedded and participating in larger religious, political, and cultural trends 
that ultimately shaped both traditions (Shared Identities, 77).

69.  Shared Identities, 76. To be fair, this characterization is Shoemaker’s, who uses almost the exact same 
phrasing, “the fulfillment of Jewish messianic expectations” (Death of a Prophet, 24), though he is not cited 
here.

70.  Shared Identities, 77. It is unclear to me why the “paradoxically” should be necessary here.
71.  Ibid.



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of and participation in the imperial eschatology seemingly embraced by the Umayyad 
dominion in the first/seventh century—and a later one that is considerably more negative 
regarding that dominion. But neither stratum should really be understood as presenting 
the Prophet as the “fulfillment of Jewish messianic speculation.”72 At best, the coming of 
Muḥammad is here interpreted as a positive sign of the imminence of the messianic era; 
at worst, it is understood as the beginning of the Messiah’s birth pangs, a time of extreme, 
though portentous, suffering for Jews. As extant, the Secrets testifies to both viewpoints, 
and neither represents Islam as anything but instrumental.

At most, one might argue that the Secrets contains evidence that some Jews in the 
Umayyad period saw the caliphate favorably and even assimilated it into older schemes of 
the imperial succession that would precede the advent of the messianic age, though this 
view would be tempered not long after. It is peculiar that Hughes does not recognize the 
composite nature of the text of the Secrets and thus the disparate perspectives that inform 
it, given that he quotes the text according to a witness from the Cairo Geniza that actually 
refers to Muḥammad disparagingly as “a crazy man possessed by a spirit . . . [who] speaks 
lies about the Holy One”; this is seemingly an emendation of an originally pro-Umayyad 
tradition in the text that brings it into line with the later tradition that is here redacted 
together with it. One would think that all this signals a text that is clearly Jewish in 
outlook—though perhaps complicating our ideas of the boundaries of Judaism—and not by 
any means identifiable as Muslim.73 Overall, Hughes is right to emphasize that messianism 
provides us with a distinctive basis for studying Jewish-Muslim engagements, as messianic 
groups “draw upon sets of decentralized messianic narratives to carve out ontic space for 
themselves”—a clear improvement over prevailing approaches to the traditions as cleanly 
defined binaries.74 But in the end, Hughes overstates the degree to which the messianic 
enthusiasms shared by Jews and Muslims in the early Islamic period really represent some 
kind of collective enterprise. Apocalypticism may have been a common discourse legible to 
different groups, but that discourse was deployed to articulate utterly dichotomous truth-
claims. There was nothing “generic” about its expressions at all.

There are numerous other sources and phenomena from the early Islamic period that 
would have further supported or nuanced Hughes’s argument in both works yet curiously 
remain unmentioned in either book.75 These omissions are sometimes rather perplexing; 

72.  On the Secrets and imperial eschatology, see Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, 98–100; on the redactional 
strata in the text, see the discussion, translation, and commentary of John C. Reeves in Trajectories in Near 
Eastern Apocalyptic: A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 76–89.

73.  Hughes’s source for the text of the Secrets is the classic discussion of Bernard Lewis (“An Apocalyptic 
Vision of Islamic History,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 13 [1950]: 308–38), who actually 
takes note of both the original and the pejorative readings registered in the witnesses, though Hughes oddly 
does not acknowledge the original reading that supports his argument. Compare Reeves, Trajectories, 79, n. 20. 
Hughes’s discussion in Muslim and Jew, 28–29, an abbreviation that makes the same points and cites the same 
source, likewise acknowledges only the pejorative reading.

74.  Shared Identities, 81.
75.  As just one example, Hughes is aware—again following Wasserstrom—that the interface between the 

early Shiʿa and contemporary Jewish movements represents a productive site of inquiry regarding his concerns, 



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for example, though he is concerned with boundary construction and the delineation 
of discourses about the other, Hughes never mentions the word dhimmī and omits any 
reference to the Pact of Umar or the narratives about ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb’s interactions 
with Jews, though these are crucial for understanding the normative discourse surrounding 
social and religious boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims through the premodern 
period.76 Further, the study of Jews and Christians as imperial subalterns in the caliphal 
period into the Middle Ages flourishes in contemporary scholarship, yet Hughes ignores 
much of the recent secondary literature relevant to his arguments. Overall, one gets the 
sense that Hughes overstates his case for the blurriness of categorical distinctions between 
Jews and Muslims in the early period, and that this misprision is exacerbated by his chronic 
misreading of texts and lack of attention to critical debates in the scholarly literature. 
Although social configurations and religious orientations certainly mapped differently in 
the early Islamic period than they would later and were no doubt characterized by some 
fluidity in certain circumstances, the claim that boundaries were totally porous and that 
distinctions did not matter at all in this period seems like a clear exaggeration to me. It is 
especially implausible because of the evident propensity in this period for identity markers 
to be used strategically and ideologically as critical signifiers in apologetic and polemical 
discourse, beginning with the Quran itself. 

 
Was “Islamic Judaism” Invented?77

It is important not to lose sight of Hughes’s wholly admirable agenda of adopting a more 
theoretically sophisticated approach to the Muslim-Jewish relationship and critiquing the 
taxonomies and frameworks typically applied to the study of these communities in their 
formative period, with the ultimate goal of interrogating the nature of religious identity 
itself. Putting aside the various issues of specialist concern that Hughes’s treatment of 
particular bodies of evidence and areas of scholarship raises, we might ask whether his 
work succeeds overall as an exercise in the critical study of religion. That is, does Hughes 
attain a more theoretically nuanced approach to the material, especially one that is of 
probative value for larger questions in the discipline of religious studies per se?

From the outset, one might note that Hughes’s inconsistent approach to historical 
evidence demonstrates why his explicit location of his own work at a supposedly higher 
level of theoretical conjecture and insight is problematic. Aside from that, we might ask 
exactly how such an Archimedean positioning of oneself as a theorist or religionist above 

but this possibility is barely fleshed out in either book, despite the significant research that has been done on 
the early Shiʿa over the last two decades (e.g., Hughes cites Wasserstrom on Ibn Sabaʾ but totally overlooks the 
important study of Sean W. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic: Ibn Sabaʾ and the Origins of Shīʿism [Leiden: 
Brill, 2012]). Hughes’s treatment of Shiʿism is particularly idiosyncratic (if not erroneous) at times, as when he 
refers to the Kharijites as pro-ʿAlid and subsumes them under the rubric of ghulāt (Shared Identities, 71).

76.  See the robust treatments in Lassner, Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam and Milka Levy-Rubin, 
Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Both studies are 
ignored by Hughes. Lassner’s book, in particular, overlaps in many ways with the concerns of Shared Identities.

77.  With apologies to Brian Pennington for the shameless pastiche of his book title: Was Hinduism Invented? 
Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).



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and apart from the narrow details of historical or textual specifics is ideally meant to 
work. What methodology should religionists follow in order to transcend the conventional 
limitations of overly detail-oriented “micro study,” and what are the rules of the game? Can 
such an attempt at achieving a god’s-eye view of the phenomena under discussion actually 
yield cogent insights? 

I agree wholeheartedly with Hughes’s basic diagnosis of the problem: much historical 
and contemporary scholarship on premodern Muslims and Jews still labors under overly 
positivistic and sometimes anachronistic assumptions that project the stable and well-
defined categories of a later age back to the formative period and reify ethnic, religious, 
cultural, national, or even racial essences as the basis of premodern identities. These reified 
essences often come into play when scholars seek to imagine intercommunal relations 
transactively, positing that groups have reciprocally “influenced” one another through 
different phases in which one “loans” elements that the other “borrows.” All of this is 
ripe for reexamination and reevaluation. Adopting a more nuanced perspective, we may 
recognize that it is the phenomenon of engagement and exchange across permeable and 
even purely notional boundaries that is itself definitive for various groups exhibiting highly 
contingent and fluid characteristics profoundly shaped by the particulars of specific social 
and cultural circumstances. Thus, to overcome anachronistic essentialisms, we should 
attempt to understand the posture and attitude of groups as they engage in moments of 
dynamic interaction as the most salient means of apprehending how communities construct 
themselves and their others—or rather, construct themselves by means of constructing 
their others. Hughes foregrounds this perspective when he asserts, in Boyarinesque mode, 
that his goal is to show how Judaism and Islam—like Judaism and Christianity in a previous 
age—“emerged dialectically with and from one another.”78

However, when we scrutinize the specifics of Hughes’s approach to the Muslim-Jewish 
encounter—epitomized by his statement (again strongly echoing Boyarin) that “the ‘history’ 
of the border between Judaism and Islam has primarily been interpretive and that what 
brings it into existence is a set of imaginative acts”79—one wonders whether this perpetual 
insistence on fluidity, blurry boundaries, and lack of clear definitions is perhaps at times 
misplaced.80 Following Wasserstrom, Hughes sees the early Islamic period as characterized 
by an abundance of “manifold and overlapping Muslim and Jewish subcultures that shared 
a common vocabulary and set of taxonomies,” a diversity that supposedly persisted into 
the Middle Ages.81 For Hughes, as for Wasserstrom, this diversity is epitomized by the 
aforementioned sect of the Isawiyya, but—as already noted—one often gets the impression 

78.  Shared Identities, 5.
79.  Ibid., 18.
80.  Hughes’s debt to Boyarin is acknowledged explicitly (e.g., Shared Identities, 4), though perhaps not often 

enough. One detects other theoretical precursors lurking in the background, for example Bruce Lincoln’s work 
on discourse and authority; Lincoln is credited once in this role alongside J. Z. Smith and Russell McCutcheon 
(ibid., 3) but not again. Judith Butler’s germinal thought on the performative nature of identity seems to me 
to be quite relevant here as well, though their work is not cited by Hughes in either book (and only once in 
Boyarin’s Border Lines).

81.  Shared Identities, 19.



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that Hughes sees this diversity, manifest in a plenitude of overlapping social formations, 
as both pervasive and persistent. Thus, the Isawiyya are not an anomalous case that tests 
our assumptions about norms; rather, Hughes sees fluidity itself as the norm, in numerous 
settings, for quite some time. 

I readily admit that such an approach is a refreshing alternative to the prevailing view 
in much of the classic scholarship in the field, in which Judaism and Islam are perceived 
as wholly separate and integral monoliths that are largely unchanging in their historical 
essences, with the occasional moments of interface between them characterized as 
isolated instances of exchange (the transactive movement of some quantum from one 
to the other group), convergence (the metaphorical intersection of two discrete bodies 
moving in parallel courses throughout time), or hybridity (the exceptional grafting of two 
originally discrete species together to make a third entity distinct from both).82 As Hughes 
skillfully demonstrates, this approach, especially common among Jewish historians of the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was particularly motivated by an emphasis on Jewish 
distinctiveness, predicated upon the notion of an unchanging ethical core eternally at the 
heart of Judaism across the centuries, as well as an anxiety about that Jewish core being 
contaminated by external factors, especially aspects of Arab and/or Muslim culture.83 Such 
a conception of the Jewish-Muslim encounter, constructed as an apologetic for Jewish 
distinction, significantly underestimates the dynamism and vitality of both communities, as 
well as effacing the integral role that encounter played in their mutual development.

Scholars of religion have long recognized that boundary construction and maintenance 
not only are traditional obsessions of religious authorities but have often been replicated in 
various ways in the modern field of religious studies itself. Previous generations of scholars 
implied or explicitly asserted that various religious phenomena can be neatly organized 
and cleanly demarcated, in theory and in practice; in directing considerable amounts of 
intellectual labor toward this goal, scholars often inadvertently recapitulated the normative 
and prescriptive discourses indigenous to the very traditions they sought to objectively 
describe. As scholars’ primary means of access to information about traditions, especially 
premodern ones, has been the literature generated through such normative discourses,  
in whatever cultural milieu and historical setting, the field has unfortunately often 
exhibited a characteristic confusion of prescriptive claims with lived religious realities, 
which more often than not tend to be messy, diverse, and inchoate (like most realms of 
human endeavor).

82.  Another familiar metaphor is intertwining, made famous as a metaphor for Jewish-Muslim engagements 
by the influential monograph of Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism 
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Intertwining implies that two separate things have come 
together to make up a single strand, balancing the notion of unity with that of distinctiveness and separability. 
It is the latter aspects that Hughes would likely find objectionable in the metaphor.

83.  This theme is a familiar one in religious studies, the quest for pristine origins of religious traditions 
having been thoroughly exposed by contemporary scholars such as Russell McCutcheon (Manufacturing 
Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1997]) and Tomoko Masuzawa (In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion [Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 1993]), both of whom Hughes cites in Shared Identities.



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The main analytical payoff of work exposing the underlying ideologies and 
unacknowledged blind spots of the field is the insight that the idealizing perspectives 
of religious authorities preserved in canonical texts and other literary sources should 
not be confused with the elusive historical realities of social configurations, quotidian 
practice, and non-elite worldviews. That said, it is ironic that throughout Hughes’s work, 
which emphasizes the fluidity of phenomena and the artificiality of attempts at boundary 
construction, the distinction between lived realities and normative discourse is itself 
blurred. 

In chapter 4 of Shared Identities (“The Manufacture of Orthodoxy”), Hughes transitions 
to a discussion of what he repeatedly terms “Islamic Judaism,” a form or forms of Jewish 
discourse in the high Middle Ages that sought to construct a new Jewish normativity while 
operating in the realm of—and thus being fundamentally shaped by—Islamic (or Islamicate) 
discourse.84 Here Hughes deliberately moves to counter older scholarly approaches and 
biases: thus, he explains “Islamic Judaism” as a mode in which Jews “think Arabically and 
Islamically,” though Goitein and others characterized the work of such figures as Sa’adya 
Gaon and Maimonides as reflecting only a superficial Islamic “influence” on Judaism.85 

One can certainly sympathize with Hughes’s desire to overcome the reified categories 
and essentialism that constrain earlier studies of these major intellectual figures of the 
Islamic Middle Ages. But we might also note a particular tension surrounding notions 
of identity and distinction that emerges here and subsequently recurs throughout both 
of Hughes’s books. One imagines that by the period under discussion, both Judaism and 
Islam had developed enough to be readily distinguishable, at least in theory if not always 
in practice—though the juridical prescriptions enforcing social distinctions would have 
made the boundary between Muslims and Jews real enough. Islam, in particular, was 
culturally, politically, and legally dominant in the Abbasid era, and so the Jews of Muslim 
lands constituted a subculture, but one that was so thoroughly shaped by prevailing Islamic 
patterns, norms, and frameworks that it came to be fundamentally “Islamic” in character, 
orientation, and articulation.86 This would actually seem to imply much less blurriness than 

84.  A condensed summary of Hughes’s perspective on the phenomenon of “Islamic Judaism” that emphasizes 
its emergence out of the dazzling variety of expressions of Jewish identity that prevailed during the geonic 
period is found in his “Messianism and the Shadow of History: Judaism and Islam in a Time of Uncertainty,” 
in Islamic Studies Today: Essays in Honor of Andrew Rippin, ed. Majid Daneshgar and Walid Saleh, 145–63 
(Leiden: Brill, 2017). Here again the familiar leitmotifs of Hughes’s books abide: the importance of normative 
rabbinic Judaism has been overstated, boundaries between Judaism and Islam were blurred or nonexistent in 
the formative period, and many forms of Jewish belief and practice were functionally indistinguishable from 
their Muslim counterparts in the early Islamic milieu. 

85.  Shared Identities, 83. The phrase “Islamic Judaism” appears a number of times in both Shared Identities 
and Muslim and Jew and should be understood as central to Hughes’s thinking on the subject at hand.

86.  Whether minority groups impacted by Islamic cultural patterns may be thought to have performed 
Islam within the contours of their own traditions is a question usefully provoked by Shahab Ahmed’s much-
discussed What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 
where he gives the example of Sikh wrestlers who ritually invoke ʿAlī before competing (pp. 445–46). (Ahmed’s 
conception of Islam as performative itself strongly echoes Butler, who is ignored by Ahmed as well as Hughes.) Of 
the numerous scholars overlooked by Hughes, Ahmed is one of the most conspicuous, as many of his theoretical 



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purportedly prevailed in the earlier period discussed by Hughes, and yet he often discusses 
the major figures of this era—Sa’adya, Maimonides, Abraham ibn Ezra, Bahya ibn Paquda, 
and others—as if they were still dwelling in the earlier era of foggy indeterminacy.87

Whether there was actually anything like an “Islamic Judaism” and whether the 
phantasmal “Jewmuslims” or “Muslimjews” Hughes posits ever actually existed are still, to 
my mind, unanswered questions. But we certainly must acknowledge the reality of potent 
discourses of separation and distinction that operated throughout the history of the Jewish-
Muslim encounter from the very beginning. It was certainly the case, for many if not most 
insiders, that the boundary between Judaism and Islam was very real, regardless of whether 
those constructs corresponded exactly to the doctrinally coherent and largely orthopractic 
varieties that prevailed later on. As we have already seen, a distinction between Judaism 
and Islam is basic to the Quran; that the differences between them had yet to be fleshed out 
dogmatically, institutionally, and otherwise seems to me to be beside the point. Likewise, 
even if the distinctions between the traditions were irrelevant to some in the early centuries 
of Islam—whoever they may have been—many others were certainly keenly aware of them, 
and it is these others who tended to be responsible for the surviving cultural productions of 
the period that allow us our shadowy glimpses of the past. 

I do not think that this point is immaterial, yet it frequently appears to be a blind spot 
in Hughes’s analysis. He often seems to overstate his case in repeatedly asserting that 
boundaries and distinctions were largely artificial and themselves the products of a long, 
drawn-out historical process of engagement between Jews and their Muslim counterparts/
others/doppelgängers—that the entire history of the encounter between “Muslimjews” 
and “Jewmuslims” is a “genealogy of indeterminacy.”88 The problem comes to the fore in 
his approach to the “Islamic Judaism” of the high Middle Ages. He asserts that modern 
scholars largely invented the idea of Judaism and Islam as discrete and autonomous entities, 
noting that narratives of boundaries and distinctions “were manufactured in scholarly 
workshops.”89 But if this were really the case, what should we make of our normativizing 

insights seem quite germane to Hughes’s argument. One might suppose that Ahmed’s book, which was published 
in 2015 and widely discussed in 2016, appeared too close to the publication of Shared Identities for Hughes to 
take it into account, but I observe several books and articles from 2016 cited in Hughes’s bibliography (e.g., the 
aforementioned monograph of Webb, cited a number of times in the book), so the omission is not circumstantial. 
Hughes did address Ahmed’s work in a short review published on the blog of the American Academy of Religion 
on September 8, 2017 (https://readingreligion.org/books/what-islam).

87.  As just one example, see Shared Identities, 134–35, where Hughes evocatively describes the Avicennian 
echoes in a poem by Ibn Ezra as reflecting an attempt at “producing a Judaism that conformed to the intellectual 
and aesthetic sensibilities of Arab-Islamic culture” (p. 135). However, this enterprise was hardly novel in Ibn 
Ezra’s time, by that stage having already been centuries in the making. Further, Hughes’s conclusion simply 
does not follow from the evidence: “This could only be done . . . if Judaism was a lot more unstable than the 
likes of Goitein would have us believe” (ibid.). By this logic, Judaism is perpetually unstable, being redefined at 
every historical moment, in every era. Perhaps this is Hughes’s intention, but if that is the case, there is nothing 
exceptional about the Jewish-Muslim engagements of the Middle Ages, and Hughes’s project in these books 
threatens to collapse. 

88.  Shared Identities, 86.
89.  Shared Identities, 18. It is clear from the context that Hughes here refers to the work of modern 



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sources for the period, which seem quite conspicuously concerned with erecting boundaries 
and enforcing distinctions from early on, virtually from the dawn of Islam? At times—again 
following the Boyarin approach—Hughes recognizes that the work of partition is exactly 
what the communal spokesmen who furnish us with our primary sources for the period are 
doing. That is, we can plainly see that figures such as Sa’adya Gaon and Maimonides seek to 
articulate Jewish orthodoxy in Islamic terms—a project that is novel in their time, though 
not entirely innovative, as Hellenistic Jews had sought to do much the same in seeking to 
define Judaism according to the canons and categories that dominated the philosophical 
discourse of their day.90 Yet the “manufacturing” of orthodoxy is repeatedly asserted to be 
a modern phenomenon.

Hughes’s approach to Sa’adya Gaon epitomizes some of these tensions. He locates 
Sa’adya’s work in the context of the contemporaneous project of hadith collectors, jurists, 
and Quran commentators to define and articulate Islamic norms; thus, Sa’adya usefully 
comes into focus as a Jewish analogue to Muslim peers who formulated the doctrinally 
cogent expressions of identity that eventually produced the mature forms of classical 
Islam.91 But this does not mean that a coherent conception of Judaism did not precede 
Sa’adya, just as a coherent conception of Islam surely preceded al-Ṭabarī.92 Yet Hughes 

scholars, the “genealogies of terms and narratives” (p. 19) that continue to have repercussions in contemporary 
scholarship, though somewhat earlier on he refers to the “workshops” in which the Babylonian rabbis sought to 
develop a normative Judaism in Late Antiquity (p. 14). The metaphor of the scholarly workshop is reminiscent of 
Masuzawa’s discussion of Max Müller in In Search of Dreamtime, which appropriates the metaphor from Müller 
himself: the latter titled his multivolume collection of philological essays Chips from a German Workshop 
(1867–75). As Masuzawa and Hughes depict Müller and various other scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries, the metaphor seems to me to be meant to evoke a kind of idealizing imaginative work divorced from 
reality.

90.  It is one thing to suggest that a broadly imposed rabbinic normativity was still novel in this era and only 
beginning to be widely diffused throughout the Jewish world—this, to me, is the crux of work on rabbinization by 
Seth Schwartz, Hayim Lapin, Talya Fishman, and others. It is entirely another to claim that there was no stable 
sense of Jewish identity prior to the time of Sa’adya at all, which is the impression one gets (albeit somewhat 
inconsistently) from Hughes’s approach.

91.  As with his discussions of the early Islamic period, there are numerous aspects of Hughes’s treatment 
of the Islamic Middle Ages that cry out for elaboration, and many scholars whose work I would consider 
indispensable to consider in this context are almost entirely ignored. The short shrift given to such major 
scholars as Camilla Adang, Haggai Ben-Shammai, Ross Brann, Lassner, Lazarus-Yafeh, and Meira Polliack in both 
books is surprising, but Hughes either mentions these scholars only in passing in notes or includes them in the 
bibliography without comment. Much contemporary work of relevance is simply ignored, which is especially 
surprising given that Shared Identities is a work of historiography directed at the critical evaluation of scholarly 
trends.

92.  In his approach to major thinkers of the Islamic Middle Ages, Hughes is clearly deeply influenced  
(so to speak) by Boyarin’s work on figures such as Justin Martyr, whom Boyarin spotlights as a major architect 
of Christian difference and distinction. Hughes is of course correct in casting Sa’adya as a seminal figure in the 
emergence of a doctrinally and halakhically coherent form of normative Judaism that would have a wide impact 
on Jewish communities throughout the Islamic world, the Mediterranean, and Europe. But Hughes often writes 
as if Sa’adya worked in the religious and social environment of the second century CE, in which the distinctions 
between Jews, Christians, and others were rudimentary (at least according to Boyarin’s model), and not in the 
rather different milieu of the tenth.



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seems to imply exactly this at times, for example in characterizing Sa’adya as the originator 
of a Jewish normativity that was only beginning to be imagined in the high Middle Ages. 
Reimagined, perhaps; but surely Sa’adya did not invent what became normative Judaism  
ex nihilo.

Further, at other times Hughes seems to insinuate that Sa’adya and Maimonides were 
not simply proposing an Islamically inflected conception of Judaism—using Islam as an 
instrument to refine and reorient that prevailing conception—but were in some substantial 
way “doing” Islam and reshaping it into Judaism.93 Is this what Sa’adya and Maimonides 
perceived themselves to be doing? It is one thing to say there is no firm categorical or 
phenomenological difference between their activity and that of their Muslim peers. But 
was it not precisely their intention to impose a distinction between the traditions through 
implementing those very shared discourses that positions them on the boundary between 
Judaism and Islam? They surely did not believe they were inventing Judaism from whole 
cloth; rather, they were using Islam, the well-defined and socially dominant creed and 
culture in their environment, to reshape another creed and culture that they understood 
as distinct, even though Hughes as a critical religionist may insist that the distinctions are 
fuzzy, ephemeral, artificial, or illusory. I myself prefer the formulation that Sa’adya was 
“doing” Judaism by selectively appropriating aspects of Islam, through an instrumental 
engagement with Islam as a primary resource available to him in articulating his vision of 
Judaism.94 We must concede that boundaries and definitions are at least at times emic and 
not etic; if we do not, we adopt the position that spokesmen like Sa’adya and Maimonides 
were wholly alienated from the tradition they sought to uphold and the community whose 
integrity they aspired to defend.

Again, from the outside, it may be productive for us to recognize that Sa’adya was 
functionally a mutakallim or Maimonides a faylasūf, essentially no different from their 
contemporary Muslim counterparts, without any need to impose the adjective “Jewish” 
to make such characterizations cogent or convincing.95 I believe this is the main insight 
Hughes means to express through his treatment of these figures. However, the key point 
as I see it is that these people participated in a common discourse with their Muslim 
peers despite seeing themselves as categorically different; wholly apart from the question 
of whether their work was in any substantial sense distinct from that of their peers, it 
seems obtuse to suggest that they themselves did not conceive of such a difference or 
actually invented it themselves. Objectively speaking, the boundary between Judaism and 

93.  Again, insofar as we might imagine Sa’adya “doing” Islam in his mode as mutakallim (and not a specifically 
Jewish kind of kalām), both Butler and Ahmed seem indispensable to Hughes’s approach here.

94.  I would thus object to the aforementioned account of Ahmed portraying Sikh wrestlers as “doing” Islam. 
It rather seems to me that if we take their intentionality into account—intent and agency being central to 
Ahmed’s understanding of what it means for Muslims to “do” Islam—then these Sikh wrestlers are actually 
“doing” Sikhism through or with Islam, appropriating aspects of Islam in their articulation of their Sikhism.

95.  For example, in introducing the “Islamic Judaism” of Maimonides in Shared Identities (p. 109), Hughes 
emphasizes that the creed of Maimonides “betrays no sense of the hyphen” imposed in such formulations as 
“Jewish-Muslim,” by which I believe he means that it is misleading to think of his Judaism as somehow hybrid 
or syncretic. Is this “Islamic Judaism” then simply a form of Islam? Here Hughes’s meaning is rather unclear. 



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Islam might have been all in their heads, but is it not the case that religious activity is 
commonly, if not exclusively, constituted by imaginative acts? On some level, it is always all 
in our heads, and the perception and intentionality of a Sa’adya or Maimonides—let alone 
of the rank-and-file religious subjects who lived the messy realities we as historians or 
religionists aspire to capture and convey—is surely as significant as any phenomenological 
reconstruction we might generate for the sake of analysis. In seeking to avoid overly reified 
conceptions of Judaism and Islam, we perhaps run the risk of overstating the evanescence 
of categories and distinctions that were entirely real for historical religious subjects. Of 
course their categories and distinctions were different from ours, but likely no less “real” 
from their perspective; even if Sa’adya and Maimonides merely crafted these categories and 
distinctions in their own “scholarly workshops,” they had to have some plausible claim of 
facticity to have any traction for their coreligionists.

Hughes’s constant emphasis on the blurriness of the boundaries between Judaism and 
Islam results in some misrepresentation of the major figures who stood at the interface of 
the traditions, and this seems to me to be the real danger we face in imposing the heuristic 
of the phenomenologist (for whom distinctions seem ephemeral) upon historical subjects 
(for whom distinctions appear conceptually, practically, and affectively real). For example, 
he presents Sa’adya as if he differs from his Muslim mutakallim counterparts simply in 
citing biblical prooftexts for his arguments instead of Quranic ones and even clims that  
“it is difficult to know how ‘Jewish’ someone like Saadia regarded his thinking to be.”96 
But the point, I think, is that kalām was a shared discourse that did not differ substantially 
whether it was a Jew or a Muslim (or a Christian) who employed its techniques, and thus 
that kalām was essentially, for lack of a better term, nondenominational. The point is surely 
not that the mutakallim abandoned any sense of their own or their tradition’s particularism 
by engaging in it. It is hard for me to imagine that Sa’adya regarded his thinking as anything 
but Jewish.

I wholeheartedly agree that Hughes’s approach presents a much-needed corrective 
to a prevalent view of Sa’adya that insulates his religious views—his “essential” Jewish 
identity—from his Islamic milieu, an approach that has historically dominated the study of 
Maimonides as well.97 But Hughes seems to me to go too far in effacing the critical element 
of Sa’adya’s self-perception in the formation of his religious ideas and ideals; he certainly 
did not see himself as a mutakallim first and foremost and as a Jew second, which is the 
impression one might get from Hughes’s presentation. To presume that Jewish authors 
did not operate with a strong sense of the distinction between their tradition and Islam, 
despite the de facto proximity between the traditions, strips them of agency. It should not 

96.  Shared Identities, 100.
97.  A sterling example of this trend is Robert Brody’s biography Sa’adyah Gaon (Oxford: Littman Library 

of Jewish Civilization, 2013), a rich and nuanced treatment of Sa’adya’s background in and contributions to 
contemporary Judaism that almost completely ignores his Islamic cultural and intellectual context. Sa’adya’s 
work is ripe for a revisionist corrective along the lines of what has transpired in the rethinking of Maimonides 
and his significance in the twenty-first century; see, e.g., Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World 
of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008) and Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His 
World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).



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be impossible for us to balance a recognition of the phenomenological similarity, or even 
points of practical identity, between Judaism and Islam in the formative period of both 
with an acknowledgment of these figures’ self-conception and intentional appropriation of 
Islamic ideas in the shaping and reframing of what they considered to be the wholly unique 
reality of Judaism.98 

Time and again Hughes depicts the thought of Islamicate Jews, especially in the Middle 
Ages, as evidence of the persistent lack of a stable core to the Jewish tradition and the 
anxieties this produced—try as they might, they could not find any essential aspect of 
their religion to “fall back on or turn to in solace.”99 I am sympathetic to the work of 
reframing that such a characterization is meant to do, but I remain deeply skeptical that 
it accurately captures the attitude of Sa’adya, or Maimonides, or any of the other figures 
Hughes discusses. The thought of these figures seems to me to reflect medieval Jewish 
acculturation to Islam—the deliberate or inadvertent conforming of a previous assemblage 
of beliefs, practices, and attitudes to that of the dominant, and quite distinct, communal 
formation in the environment. Hughes often seems to be at war with himself on this score: 
sometimes Sa’adya is unprecedented in creating a normative Judaism of the sort we might 
recognize as a distinct religious tradition; at other times, as when Hughes says Sa’adya’s 
accomplishment is his framing Judaism in terms of Islam, or rather “the creation of an Islam 
recast as a Judaism,” he seems to concede that some notion of Judaism must have preceded 
Sa’adya (otherwise, what was it that guided this “recasting”?).100 Would that older heritage 
of Judaism not be exactly what Sa’adyah or others would “fall back on or turn to in solace”? 
And yet Hughes’s overattention to semantics brings us to a point of near-incoherence: 
“Rather than characterize Saadya as a ‘Jewish mutakallim,’ we should envisage him simply 
as a mutakallim who was Jewish. . . . [This] avoids the religio-ethnic signifier and instead 
sees Saadya as but another Arab-speaking mutakallim . . .”101 But what, then, did his Judaism 
consist of? How does this leave us with any trace of his significance for Judaism—or better, 
of the significance of Judaism for him, which was surely considerable?

We can (and should) continue to consider whether and to what degree the twinned 
traditions of Judaism and Islam were really distinct in theory or practice; we might even 
entertain the notion that the Islamicate civilization of this time actually constituted a 

98.  Hughes’s exaggeration of the porousness and indefiniteness of the boundary between Judaism and Islam 
in this period is epitomized by his depiction of the famous Muslim polemicist Ibn Ḥazm, who made use of 
contemporary Jewish writings in his polemics. Astoundingly, what this represents for Hughes is that “Jewish and 
Muslim mutakallimūn do not neatly and simply bifurcate into . . . religious adjectives. The border . . . is not yet 
closed” (Shared Identities, 100). Once again, one senses Boyarin’s approach to Justin Martyr in the background 
here, but it seems unimaginable to me that we can understand the Andalusian context in the eleventh century 
as anything like that of Palestine in the second. The availability of Jewish writings to Ibn Ḥazm by no means 
implies the kind of indeterminacy Hughes eagerly seeks here; social intimacy and intellectual proximity do not 
equate to porous boundaries. In many cases, intimacy and proximity lead to anxiety about boundaries, and so 
to efforts to shore them up.

99.  Muslim and Jew, 65 (a curiously vague passage that implies that medieval Jews were cognizant of the 
historical flux and development that shaped their tradition).

100.  Shared Identities, 99. 
101.  Ibid.



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single shared tradition expressed in two separate idioms, one Jewish and one Muslim.102 But 
it seems exceedingly unlikely to me that Muslims or Jews of the time would have seen it 
that way, and it is dangerously anachronistic to suggest that the distinction between Islam 
and Judaism was only heuristic, or merely a distant convention to premodern members of 
either community.103 Put another way, although we might see the difference between them 
as epiphenomenal, from the inside the perceived difference must have been monumental. 
Otherwise, what would have been the point of all the intellectual work of definition 
and differentiation that these medieval thinkers undertook? And yet somehow Hughes 
concludes that “such towering medieval thinkers did not see a clear boundary between 
Judaism and Islam . . .”104 In insisting on characterizing the situation this way, Hughes seems 
to confuse the persistent permeability between Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages with 
the fluidity he asserts to have been the norm in earlier centuries.105

Modern Politics, Representations, and Realities

As noted above, Hughes adopts a more explicitly political agenda in Muslim and Jew, 
suggesting that the critical study of the dynamics of Jewish-Muslim engagements in the 
past may help to address and somehow ameliorate our contemporary political situation. 
Asserting that the tensions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are “structurally 
similar to that produced by earlier iterations of Muslim-Jewish cohabitation” (p. viii), Hughes 
claims that examining significant aspects of the historical Jewish-Muslim relationship can 
illuminate the current version of the “dialectic of self-definition and other-abnegation”  
(p. ix) that continues to have repercussions today. 

Although this is a perfectly admirable intention, one cannot fail to notice that something 
important appears to have been elided here. Despite the significant infusion of conspicuously 

102.  Or that Jews constituted a Muslim subculture, with all that that implies. I borrow the metaphor of 
Judaism and Islam as dialects or idioms from Boyarin, who applies it (with some reservations) to Judaism and 
Christianity in their formative period; see Border Lines, 17–22. Marshall Hodgson’s widely influential concept of 
the “Islamicate” has been criticized in recent years, particularly for the way in which it segregates “religion” as 
a special category of cultural production and meaning-making (see, e.g., Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 157–75), but it 
remains a salient category for many scholars in Islamic studies.

103.  Admittedly, one might cite the famous Averroist conception of the double truth to support exactly the 
claim that at least some medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophers would have embraced the idea that rationally 
apprehended truth is unitary and the distinctions between creeds are ultimately irrelevant. Without delving 
into this possibility here, I will note only that Hughes himself does not invoke this concept to vindicate his 
claims, so I do not feel obligated to stage a defense on his behalf on this basis either.

104.  Shared Identities, 19.
105.  See also Hughes’s discussion of Bahya ibn Paquda as “but one iteration of how Jews used the dominant 

narrative of Islam to actively create Judaism” (Shared Identities, 138; cf. Muslim and Jew, 52–54)—not recreate? 
Compare the discussion of Ibn Kammuna (Shared Identities, 100–102; Muslim and Jew, 45–46), where Hughes 
avers that labels such as “Jewish” and “Muslim” are anachronistic and unhelpful in characterizing him, though 
it seems equally accurate to represent him as a rationalist Jew who was particularly openminded about Islam 
(and “Jewish” and “Muslim” were surely not anachronistic categories in thirteenth-century Ilkhanid Baghdad). 
Chapter 2 of Muslim and Jew improves on this situation somewhat by concluding with a discussion of the 
Sabbateans, to whom talk of porous boundaries and blurred categories seems rather more applicable. 



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religious ideologies into both the Palestinian resistance and mainstream Zionism since the 
1980s, Arab opposition to Israel is by no means reducible to “Islamic” factors, nor are Zionist 
positions or Israeli state policy simply translations of Jewish outlooks. Hughes is surely 
aware of this, but he sometimes effaces what seem to me to be important distinctions, and 
the continuities he asserts are often left implicit and not carefully explained or justified.

Hughes recognizes, of course, that not all Palestinians are Muslim, but he nevertheless 
holds that significant elements of older Jewish-Muslim dynamics of engagement are 
recapitulated in the modern conflict, in particular the tendency for each group to evoke 
ideas about the antipodal other as a means of shaping conceptions of an ideal self. Echoing 
one of the leitmotifs of Shared Identities, Hughes provocatively suggests that the self-
consciousness and anxiety triggered by social and religious proximity in the past has in the 
modern period been triggered by actual physical proximity instead; thus, contemporary 
struggles are only “the latest attempt on behalf of Jews and Muslims to invoke their religious 
traditions to make sense of an encounter fraught with the nearness and concomitant 
apprehension of the other.”106 But although anyone who teaches Jewish-Muslim relations 
in broad perspective surely has to address the impact of the rise of Zionism and the conflict 
over Palestine on both groups in the modern period, the overly neat way in which Hughes 
dovetails the past into the present here seems too clever by half. The proposition that the 
political conflict between Arabs and Jews in the modern era refracts and reconfigures aspects 
of the tensions between Jews and Muslims in premodern Islamicate societies is intriguing, 
but as executed in the brief chapters of Muslim and Jew (especially chapter 3, dedicated 
to the modern period), Hughes’s argument is barely substantiated and relies on vague and 
at times misleading suggestions. At worst, it rests on a conspicuous misrepresentation of 
the textual evidence, recapitulating some of the problems that recur throughout Shared 
Identities.

It is true that spokesmen on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide have often 
positioned themselves as heirs to a perpetual struggle that long preceded Arab or Jewish 
nationalist ambitions, and so both groups have repeatedly invoked what Hughes terms 
“nostalgic” and “lachrymose” paradigms—Arabs alluding to the glorious heritage of Islamic 
dominion and cultural achievement, Jews to the centuries of oppression, discrimination, 
and violence to which they were perennially subjected under Muslim rule.107 In order to 

106.  Muslim and Jew, 66.
107.  In Muslim and Jew, 3, “lachrymose” is presented as if it is Hughes’s own coinage, though it is not. 

As noted by Mark Cohen, Baron characterized the negative conceptions of Jewish life in Christian Europe 
prevalent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography in this way; in turn, Cohen adapts this 
characterization and applies the term “neo-lachrymose” to the pessimistic view of Jewish history under Islamic 
rule that became popular in certain circles after the Six-Day War in 1967 (Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The 
Jews in the Middle Ages [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994], ch. 1). Hughes acknowledges Cohen’s 
“neo-lachrymose” terminology once in Shared Identities (p. 34). The citational problems are distinctly more 
acute in Muslim and Jew than they are in Shared Identities, but they appear repeatedly in both books. Note, 
e.g., the references to “epistemic space” (Muslim and Jew, 5, 86), which I read as allusions to Neuwirth, who has 
used exactly this terminology in her work (e.g., “Locating the Qurʾān in the Epistemic Space of Late Antiquity,” 
in Books and Written Culture of the Islamic World: Studies Presented to Claude Gilliot on the Occasion of His 
75th Birthday, ed. Andrew Rippin and Roberto Tottoli, 159–79 [Leiden: Brill, 2015]), but who is absent from both 



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substantiate this point in chapter 3, Hughes might have adduced examples of modern 
ideologues from both the Arab and Zionist camps drawing upon particular aspects of 
traditional thinking—nationalist arguments on either side rehearsing the terms of older 
religious polemic—or evoking the ideas and ideals of a previous age to explain modern 
conditions. I infer that this is what Hughes meant to do in the chapter of Muslim and Jew he 
dedicates to the modern period. However, for the most part what he offers us here is a basic 
overview of major political developments from the rise of Zionism to contemporary times. 
This survey is occasionally punctuated by substantial quotations from primary sources 
that are presumably intended to support his contentions but are actually of questionable 
probative value for his argument.

Here the contradiction between the evident significance of texts and the meaning 
Hughes imputes to them—a chronic problem in both books—seems particularly acute. 
Early on in the chapter, Hughes suggests that both sides in the modern conflict invoke 
ancient history as a way of alleviating tensions and anxieties; both Jews and Palestinians 
take recourse to narratives of a sacred past as an explanatory mechanism that endows the 
present struggle with meaning. As an example, he refers to Arafat’s famous 1974 address to 
the United Nations, claiming that it “appeals indirectly to the past, to the shared destiny of 
Jews and Muslims in places like the Arabian Peninsula and Muslim Spain.” However, this 
subtext is wholly absent from the passage Hughes quotes here, which actually speaks to the 
distinction between Judaism and Jewish colonialism and warns of the threat to international 
security posed by Zionist “terrorism.”108 Similarly, a long quotation from Jabotinsky is cited 
as foreshadowing the idea of a transfer of the Palestinian population out of Israel to other 
Arab territories, but the whole point of the quoted passage is that the Arabs would be 
allowed to remain on the land (and might actually become even more numerous) but would 
eventually have to accommodate the reality of becoming a minority with the continuing 
migration of Jews to Palestine. Jabotinsky notes explicitly that forced relocation would 
not be necessary for the future Zionist state (“there is no question of ousting the Arabs”)— 
the opposite of the point Hughes claims the passage makes.109 Still further, one would 
imagine that discussion of Hamas would be especially productive for Hughes, as the group’s 
political discourse explicitly capitalizes on older narratives representing the Jews of 
Muḥammad’s time as subversive, perfidious, and treacherous; this technique would seem to 
epitomize, as Hughes puts it, the use of a past “selectively remembered to make a political 
point in the present.”110 But the texts from Hamas he subsequently quotes simply do not 
demonstrate this.111 Hughes then goes on to mention the importance of an idealized unity 

books, as noted above. Admittedly, Boyarin also refers to the “epistemic” in Border Lines. In any event, Hughes 
is hardly original in applying the Foucauldian notion of the episteme to the exchanges and confrontations 
between Jews, Christians, and the Quranic community in Late Antiquity. 

108.  Muslim and Jew, 79.
109.  Ibid., 75.
110.  Ibid., 82.
111.  The long quotation from article 8 of the Hamas charter (ibid., 82) discusses the Zionist conspiracy 

throughout modern history; the subsequent long quotation from article 28 (ibid., 82–83) discusses Zionist 
infiltration of modern institutions; and the next quotation, from article 31 (ibid., 83), portrays the Hamas vision 



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under the caliphate to modern Muslim ideologues—another apposite theme—but does not 
support this claim in any way.112

The maladroit, partial, and inadequate nature of the evidence Hughes offers in support 
of his argument is rather conspicuous in this chapter. In the end, the arguments he 
proposes to make at the beginning simply do not manifest; at best, we are presented with 
a conspicuously circular logic, in which texts in which Arabs and Zionists express their 
anxieties about the other are cited as proof that Arabs and Zionists experience anxieties 
about the other. There is certainly an important point to be made about the persistence 
of certain ideas about the past and their deployment for ideological and political gain in 
the propaganda of hardline religious groups in both the Jewish and Palestinian camps, 
but Hughes’s continuing misrepresentation of texts and their meaning in this chapter 
impairs and overshadows his discussion. This is to say nothing of the numerous conspicuous 
omissions: as noted previously, Hughes’s argument would have been well served if he had 
addressed the question of the isrāʾīliyyāt in this context, as this would have provided a 
compelling example of a modern Muslim discourse that conflates the distant Islamic past 
and present political realities. Moreover, one cannot fail to notice that two of the most 
important thinkers germane to Hughes’s argument—Sayyid Qutb and Meir Kahane—receive 
no mention here, though the type of ideologically burdened evocations of history that 
Hughes wishes to highlight are central to the intellectual projects of both.

Hughes’s arguments are less effective than they should be in other respects as well.  
In both Shared Identities and Muslim and Jew, the distinction between representation and 
reality is not always evident. At times Hughes seems entirely cognizant that our available 
sources, especially Muslim depictions of Jews, serve an ideological function, each group’s 
portrayal of the other serving to address internal communal issues. (This is exactly the 
argument he purportedly wishes to make in chapter 3 of Muslim and Jew.) Such awareness 
aligns Hughes’s project with a number of important studies from the last decade, particularly 
those of Ze’ev Maghen, David Freidenreich, and most of all David Nirenberg, concerning 
what we might term the imaginative politics of Christian and Muslim representations 
of Jews.113 But at other times Hughes cites his sources as evidence of the blurriness or 

of Islamism as a creed promoting justice and peaceful coexistence. These passages touch on themes familiar 
from traditional sources, such as Jewish corruption and subversion, but none refers to premodern history.

112.  Ibid., 84. On this important topic, see, e.g., Mona Hassan, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional 
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

113.  As noted above, Maghen’s work is overlooked by Hughes, while that of Freidenreich is casually dismissed 
in Shared Identities. An older monograph by Nirenberg is briefly cited in Shared Identities, but Hughes does 
not engage with his magnum opus, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013), at all in 
either book, another puzzling omission. Strangely, in Muslim and Jew Hughes coins the term “theology” for 
the primary “prism” framing his analysis, by which he means the various expressions of a religious community 
thinking about itself through representations of the other, providing “the script whereby a group situates itself, 
ideally and theoretically, within a social space” (p. 6). It is unclear to me why “theology” should be the preferred 
term for such strategies of representation. The term is also used according to its more conventional sense (e.g., 
for the discourse of kalām) in this book, and in Shared Identities it is used solely in the conventional sense (e.g., 
“Theology represents the systematic articulation of what are imagined as religious truths—the nature of God, 
the relationship between God and humans, providence . . .”; p. 89).



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fluidity he so frequently seeks to discern in various historical periods, when what those 
sources actually attest to is the proclivity of Jews and Muslims across the centuries to 
invoke the other in constructing an ideal self or promoting myths of communal origins.  
His two arguments thus seem to be unhelpfully conflated.

For example, in chapter 1 of Muslim and Jew, Hughes once again foregrounds the 
question of “decentralized pluralism,” the blurred boundaries he asserts were typical of the 
era in which Islam emerged, but the texts quoted here sometimes seem to attest instead to 
later authors’ concern with solidifying the boundaries between groups and with sanctifying 
and sanitizing Islam’s origins by emphasizing Jewish difference and distinction from the 
followers of Muḥammad.114 This is particularly striking as later in the chapter he explicitly 
recognizes that identities are not only maintained but actually defined at (imagined or 
real) borders as sites of encounter through the negotiation of (imagined or real) difference 
in dialectic with the other. In chapter 2, which focuses on the Middle Ages, Hughes begins 
by claiming that the subject to be discussed is the tendency among both Muslims and Jews 
to deploy portrayals of the other as “literary stand-ins” in discourses of self-reflection. 
Here he will supposedly focus on the use of a fictive Jew as a foil by Muslim authors to 
construct an image of the ideal Muslim, marginalize certain varieties of Islam as illegitimate  
(by reclassifying them as Jewish), and enforce the boundary between Islam and Judaism.115  
I agree wholeheartedly that this is exactly what many Muslim depictions of Jews and Judaism 
throughout the centuries, especially in classical and medieval Islamic texts, are intended to 
do. However, this agenda quickly recedes into the background in the chapter and is never 
directly discussed again. Instead, most of the chapter actually discusses the impact of Islam 
on Jewish thinkers and movements, first addressing major medieval figures and then groups 
such as the Sabbateans. Despite this, at the end of the chapter, Hughes emphasizes that in 
this era, when Muslims talked about Jews, they were really talking about Islamic orthodoxy. 
One can readily agree with this contention, which has been established in a number of 
other studies published over the last decade, but not on the strength of the foregoing 
discussion by Hughes himself. This incongruity is paralleled in Shared Identities. In the 
final chapter of that book (chapter 6, “Re-Frame”) Hughes initially seems acutely aware 
of the function of literary texts in manipulating representations for various ideological 
ends, as he discusses the antipodes “Muslim” and “Jew” as sites for self-fashioning in each 
community’s discourse.116 But by the end of the chapter he veers back into his favorite 
subject, the persistent blurred boundaries between groups across the centuries, and the 
question of the political and ideological aspects of representation unfortunately recedes 
into the background again.117

114.  E.g., the quotation from the Sīra of Ibn Isḥāq concerning Jewish opposition to Muḥammad and hypocrisy 
(Muslim and Jew, 20).

115.  Ibid., 36.
116.  Once again, this section feels like a reformulation of the insights of other scholars who remain 

unacknowledged in the discussion, such as Rubin and Nirenberg. 
117.  It is difficult to account for the multiple disconnects between Hughes’s framing and summative 

statements in both books and the actual subject matter dealt with in his chapters. Hughes acknowledges that 
the first two chapters of Muslim and Jew rework previously published articles, and much of the material here 



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Conclusion

In sum, Hughes’s recent offerings in the area of Jewish-Muslim exchanges and 
engagements raise numerous important issues, but specialists may find these works to 
be of limited value for advancing the field. As noted, Hughes criticizes Wasserstrom for 
interrogating the construct of “symbiosis” without going far enough in proposing a coherent 
alternative. The same critique may be leveled at Hughes himself; he problematizes many 
aspects of the established scholarship—and rightly so—but falls short of moving the field 
forward substantially in terms of offering a coherent methodology, let alone in achieving 
anything like the paradigm shift at which he aims.

It is certainly true that Hughes has performed a significant service to the field simply 
by raising these issues and indexing the abiding and persistent problems that chronically 
haunt explorations of the intersections between Judaism and Islam. As he himself has 
noted, Jewish studies, in particular, has long been insulated from other fields and so has 
often been quite slow to accommodate new perspectives not anchored in the traditional 
commitments of insiders. This has had an array of implications for the field, not least 
regarding approaches to the study of Jewish-Muslim relations.118 Anyone familiar with 
the discipline, at least in North America, will recognize that however much the field has 
changed over the last decades, there is still considerable work to be done in broadening the 
scope of its scholarly purview. The impact of traditional commitments and orientations on 
the study of the Jews of Late Antiquity, in particular, has long been noted, especially the 
double hegemony that the rabbinic tradition enjoys in many institutional and scholarly 
contexts: first, it is still frequently—and anachronistically—assumed to have been the de 
facto reality for the vast majority of Jews in the Mediterranean and Middle East by the 
time of the emergence of Islam (despite numerous critiques arguing against this position); 
and second, it is all too readily naturalized as the default object of study in conversations 
about Judaism in antiquity after the Greco-Roman period, which is still often assumed to be 
largely synonymous with the Judaism of the Palestinian and Babylonian academies. 

I remain skeptical regarding Hughes’s near-total agnosticism about what we can or 
cannot know about the Judaisms of Late Antiquity and the early Islamic period. However, 
we can readily recognize the corrective value of such a posture in dislodging many of the 
still-regnant axioms and assumptions enshrined in various institutional contexts in the field 
of Jewish studies. 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. That being the 
case, one wonders whether the incongruities and redactional seams are an unfortunate result of the author’s 
compositional process.

118.  Aaron W. Hughes, “Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2014. For a 
recent reevaluation of Hughes’s argument, see Sarah Imhoff, “Jews, Jewish Studies and the Study of Islam,” in 
Sheedy, Identity, Politics and the Study of Islam, 121–37.

119.  As one means of indexing this marginality, one might peruse the conference schedules and archived 



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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.  
Especially given the progress in the field of Jewish-Muslim exchanges and encounters since 
the early 1990s, Hughes’s theoretical intervention is timely, and succeeds in provoking and 
sustaining important questions even if his books fail to deliver in other respects, especially 
in providing a reliable and cogent point of entry to this area of research for students and 
nonspecialists.

abstracts from the past two decades of the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, available 
at https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/2020-annual-conference/past-conferences. Even a cursory 
search of the programs of past meetings demonstrates that only a tiny number of panels and presentations 
have addressed Jewish-Muslim engagements in any period, especially earlier phases.

https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/2020-annual-conference/past-conferences


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