Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World

231 Pages·2011·5.56 MB·English

by  David M. Freidenreich

Beyond Religious Borders
Jewish CultuRe and Contexts
Published in association with the herbert d. Katz Center
for advanced Judaic studies of the university of Pennsylvania
Series Editor
david B. Ruderman
Advisory Board
Richard i. Cohen
Moshe idel
alan Mintz
deborah dash Moore
ada Rapoport-albert
Michael d. swartz
a complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
Beyond
Religious Borders
interaction and intellectual exchange
in the Medieval islamic world
edited by
david M. Freidenreich
and Miriam Goldstein
University of Pennsylvania Press
PhiladelPhia
Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the
Martin d. Gruss endowment Fund of the herbert d. Katz
Center for advanced Judaic studies of the university of
Pennsylvania Press.
Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press
all rights reserved. except for brief quotations used for pur-
poses of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may
be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
university of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the united states of america on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Beyond religious borders : interaction and intellectual ex-
change in the medieval islamic world / edited by david M.
Freidenreich and Miriam Goldstein. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts)
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4374-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Jews—Islamic Empire—Civilization. 2. Islamic Em-
pire—Civilization. 3. Islamic Empire—Ethnic relations. I.
Freidenreich, David M., 1977– II. Goldstein, Miriam Bayla.
iii. series: Jewish culture and contexts.
DS135.L4B49 2012
305.60956'0902—dc23
2011023217
Contents
Introduction 1
Miriam Goldstein
PaRt i. Contexts oF inteRReliGious inteRaCtion
Chapter 1. Observations on the Beginnings
of Judeo-Arabic Civilization 13
haggai Ben-shammai
Chapter 2. Shurūṭ ʿumar: From early harbingers
to Systematic Enforcement 30
Milka levy-Rubin
Chapter 3. Thinkers of “This Peninsula”: Toward an
Integrative Approach to the Study of Philosophy in al-Andalus 44
sarah stroumsa
PaRt ii. adoPtinG and aCCoMModatinG the FoReiGn
Chapter 4. Translations in Contact: Early Judeo-Arabic and
Syriac Biblical Translations 57
sagit Butbul
Chapter 5. Claims About the Mishna in the Epistle of sherira
Gaon: Islamic Theology and Jewish History 65
talya Fishman
Chapter 6. Maimonides and the Arabic Aristotelian Tradition
of Epistemology 78
Charles h. Manekin
Chapter 7. Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Fakhkhār al-Yahūdī: An Arabic Poet and
Diplomat in Castile and the Maghrib 96
Jonathan P. decter
PaRt iii. CRossinG BoRdeRs: aGents oF inteRaCtion
and exChanGe
Chapter 8. The Impact of Interreligious Polemic
on Medieval Philosophy 115
daniel J. lasker
Chapter 9. Arabic into Hebrew: The Emergence of the Translation
Movement in Twelfth-Century Provence and Jewish-Christian Polemic 124
Gad Freudenthal
Chapter 10. Fusion Cooking in an Islamic Milieu: Jewish and
Christian Jurists on Food Associated with Foreigners 144
david M. Freidenreich
Notes 161
Index 215
Acknowledgments 223
Introduction
MiriaM Goldstein
The individuals and communities that lived in the Arabo-Islamic world speak
through their many and diverse literary creations with a variety of voices. Dis-
tinguishing among these voices and evaluating their interaction is a challenging
and often elusive task. For this reason, students of this interaction have con-
ceived of it in various ways, in terms that reveal their differing perspectives and
approaches. Terms like “influence” and “reception” emphasize the agency of the
“donor culture”; “appropriation” and “accommodation” emphasize the agency of
the “adoptive” group or culture; biological metaphors such as “cross-pollination”
and “symbiosis” emphasize mutual aspects of exchange; and terms like “diffu-
sion” avoid specifying the means of transfer.1
All of these concepts, as well as the phrase “beyond religious borders,”
assume the existence of virtual “border lines” that establish the boundaries of
identity between communities—their members, their compositions, and
their ideas. In his book Border Lines, Daniel Boyarin compares cross-cultural
exchange to a border patrolled by customs inspectors, who monitor and selec-
tively control the crossing of merchandise. Boyarin explains how the border
space serves as “a crossing point for people and religious practices,” despite
the control mechanisms set up by definitions of identity and belonging. He
cites an anecdote about a man who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border daily
with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Despite assiduous searches by a customs in-
spector in the dirt being transported, nothing illegal could be unearthed
until on the day of the inspector’s retirement it was revealed that the man had
spent his life successfully smuggling wheelbarrows. Boyarin’s anecdote is an
example of the contrived and even humorous nature of such imposed parti-
tionings. The anecdote further demonstrates that cultural goods crossed bor-
ders, and did so in unexpected ways, despite the efforts of customs inspectors
or other such guards to create sealed boundaries based on considerations of
2 MiriaM Goldstein
identity. Indeed, Boyarin goes on to claim that the inspectors themselves in
certain cases became prominent and unwitting agents of this interchange.2
Boyarin’s work focuses on the border between Judaism and Christianity
in the early centuries of their coexistence, when lines of identity were vague
and unclear—and heresiographers were hell-bent on defining them once and
for all. In contrast, during the period of Islamic rule, there is little question of
who is a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim, a Zoroastrian, a Manichaean, and so on.3
The borders of group identity, at least between religions, are significantly
clearer and for the most part not subject to debate.
Yet despite the relatively clear-cut nature of the individual’s religious
identity during the Islamic period, the religious identity of ideas and customs
remained far from clear. Cultural boundaries were somewhere between semi-
permeable and nonexistent; for this reason, the analysis of religious borders is
yet relevant in analyzing the relationships between religious groups living
under Islamic rule. Numerous lines of affinity linked these groups. The reli-
gions of the Near East draw on a lengthy and complex common past and,
furthermore, communities of a variety of religions dwelled side by side in
various periods. This combination of diachronic kinship and synchronic con-
tiguity led to a complex interrelationship, one in which it is quite difficult to
identify and describe the interactions between religions, let alone trace the
origins of particular institutions, customs, or scholarly approaches.
Many of the specific questions raised by Boyarin’s discussion of identity in
the early centuries of the Christian era remain relevant in the Islamic milieu.
One area of inquiry relates to the nature of the goods transferred and the refor-
mulation of ideas, customs, or institutions as they traveled along and through
communal borders. In what ways were boundaries permeable, and in what ways
were they impermeable? In what ways did locally or temporally specific factors
affect the nature of such interactions? Other questions relate to the individuals
involved in the transfer: To what extent was the process of cultural exchange
across communal boundaries conscious? That is, to what extent were members
of communities aware that such exchange was taking place, and what was their
evaluation of that activity? Furthermore, how did individuals involved in these
interactions understand or choose to represent their own identity and that of
ideas or institutions that originated on the foreign side of the border?
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, implicitly responding to such questions of
identity, proposed a view of the history of the civilization marked by Islamic
rule that effectively removes such cultural borders or communal boundaries
from consideration.4 Hodgson explained that non-Muslim groups formed an
Introduction 3
integral part of the social and intellectual systems that developed in areas of
Islamic rule, and he coined the adjective “Islamicate” to replace “Islamic” or
“Muslim” in describing these groups and systems. The word “Islamicate”
could describe the creations of both orthodox Muslims and non-Muslims in
addition to—as Hodgson put it—the decidedly “un-Islamic” creations of cer-
tain Muslims. This term, Hodgson argued, could more accurately character-
ize the variety of elements that contributed to the common civilization of the
Near East and Mediterranean during the medieval period.
It was Hodgson’s broad perspective—geographic, religious, and chrono-
logical—that led him to remove the border lines between religious and ethnic
groups alike by speaking instead of an Islamicate civilization. Hodgson
viewed this civilization as an Irano-Semitic one dating as far back as Sume-
rian times yet evolving and developing thanks to overlays from later cultures.
For this reason, Hodgson opposed labeling ideas as belonging to one religion
or another; he saw them as part of the shared framework native to some de-
gree or another to all the religions of the East and the Mediterranean.
Hodgson’s perspective leads to important conclusions regarding interactions
across community lines. According to Hodgson’s model, parallel ideas proposed
by thinkers of different religions are a natural and even predictable occurrence.
This predictability, however, does not preclude examination of the parallels. Even
while acknowledging a common source for ideas and institutions, the student of
such concepts may nevertheless examine their differing contexts and evaluate
their transformation in each one, as did Hodgson in his work. Hodgson’s model
of interreligious relations was part of his more comprehensive aspiration to con-
textualize Islamic history in the broader framework of world history, and despite
criticism of some of his terminological innovations,5 his broad vision of Islamic
civilization was adopted and employed by many later historians.6
Shlomo D. Goitein, the great historian of the Cairo Genizah, affirmed like
Hodgson that the religions of the Near East were shaped by a common origin,
including a shared regional culture and intellectual tradition. Indeed, he called
his study of the Jewish society that produced and preserved the documents of
the Genizah A Mediterranean Society, emphasizing the organic establishment of
these Jewish communities in surrounding cultures.7 In his studies of religious
communities, however, Goitein nonetheless portrayed the impact of longstand-
ing and internally transmitted tradition as more significant than that of ad-
opted concepts or institutions.8 For him, the common origin of distinct religious
communities was part of a distant and secondarily relevant past that could ac-
count only for a limited and definable number of similarities. Goitein viewed