Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy by David M. Freidenreich (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy by David M. Freidenreich William Chester Jordan David M. Freidenreich. Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. x + 301 pp. David M. Freidenreich, the author of the book under review here, acknowledges that "rhetoric alleging that Muslims are Jewish" is "relatively uncommon." Nevertheless, he insists that this rhetoric "offers especially valuable insights into the premodern discourse of Islamophobia" (6). It is certainly true that for nearly two millennia, Christians (Catholics and non-Catholics alike) regularly made analogies between the earliest adversaries of their faith (Jews who denied the messiahship and/or divinity of Jesus) and later adversaries, like pagans and Muslims. Freidenreich, who identifies the originating binary with Paul's allegorical exegesis of Sarah and Hagar—us and them—in the Epistle to the Galatians, notes two other processes at work in the long wake of the apostle's interpretation. The first of these processes was a kind of slippage from analogies to conflation. Muslims, to limit the analysis to the subject of Freidenreich's study, came to be assimilated to Jews in popular sentiment; they literally became Jews, a fact—if it is a fact—that he calls "shockingly scandalous" or just "shocking." Second, those who formulated the analogies and facilitated their "preposterous" transformation into the identification of the two groups were deliberately misleading their "audience," ordinary people, whose "ignorance of Islam" they exploited with "wildly inaccurate" rhetoric (11). For, soon after the irruption of the Arabian followers of Muhammad, the leaders of the Christian communities became well aware that Muslims were neither pagans nor Christian heretics, despite what "prior generations of scholars assumed" (6). Rather, the architects of the "propaganda" and its enthusiastic purveyors "intentionally misrepresented Muslims as Jewish because they believed that such rhetoric would spur their audiences to become better Christians" (7). Or, at least to remain Christians. End Page 223 Let me point out only two examples of the intentional misrepresentation that Freidenreich attributes to Christian elites. The first concerns the contention that Muslims accepted the Hebrew Bible. Repeatedly, the author dismisses this claim as utterly false and a deliberate lie (see especially pp. 46, 88–93, 98–100, 119–22). He knows that Christians were aware of certain allusions to the Hebrew Bible in Islamic texts. However, he does not seem to countenance very strongly that they could have mistakenly—that is, without intentional prevarication—concluded from this that Muslims accepted the Hebrew Bible. He also argues that Christian propagandists maligned Islam with "slurs." Indeed, Freidenreich regularly employs this term and similar judgmental language, most prominently in the title of chapter 7, "Muhammad the Jew, and Other Moralizing Slurs." His "shockingly scandalous" example is the assertion by Christian propagandists that Muslims were enemies of Jesus, when in fact they venerated him. Yet, what did this veneration entail, in the mental universe of Christians, if it accompanied the rejection of the crucifixion and Jesus's divinity? Surely, Christians may have construed these "lapses" as a rejection/hatred of their Jesus and prima facie evidence of Muslim animosity. Irrespective of the caveats that I would introduce, the consequence of all of these developments, according to the author, has been a pervasive popular hatred of Islam in the caricatured version that the leaders of the premodern Christian faith communities constructed. Their calumnies were prominent in their theological polemics and apologetics, their quips and fables about Islam in general, their disapproval of what they took to be Muslim attitudes toward sex and paradise in particular, and their elaborate literary productions, like the medieval romances that incorporated invented scurrilous scenes from Muhammad's life. Freidenreich guides his readers through a selection of authors, mostly Roman Catholic, but also Martin Luther, where he finds evidence of the continued employment of these tropes and therefore of the persistence of this strain of Islamophobia into modernity. The material amassed in Jewish Muslims is impressive in its geographical scope and temporal sweep and testifies wonderfully to the author's erudition. His writing also reveals his moral indignation—again and again. His central claim, however, that premodern Christian literate elites knowingly fabricated a false case...