r e v i e w s | 4 47

Holger Zellentin (ed.), The Qur’an’s Reformation of Judaism and Christianity: Return to
the Origins. Routledge, Abingdon, 2019. ix, 358 pp. £96.00. i s b n 978 1 13856 733 7.

Holger Zellentin’s edited volume, The
Qur’an’s Reformulation of Judaism and
Christianity: Return to the Origins, is a
fine illustration of the sophistication
and depth that modern Qur’an–Bible
scholarship has attained. The volume
is divided into four parts: I ‘The
Qur’an, the Bible, and the Islamic
Tradition’; II ‘The Qur’an and the
Bible’; III ‘The Qur’an and Judaism’;
IV ‘The Qur’an and Christianity’.
The chapters are bookended by two
studies that signal the approach to the
Qur’an advocated by the volume as a
whole: the opening chapter to part I
provides reflections by Jon Hoover on
what the famed medieval polymath and
stalwart of Islam’s textualist Hanbalite
school, Ibn Taymiyyah (d.728/1328),
would have made of such a volume;
the final chapter of part IV, by Mary
Cunningham, is an attempt by a scholar
of Byzantine Studies to summarize key
findings in the contributions and place
them in the context of developments in
late antiquity more broadly.
Hoover proposes that, based on Ibn
Taymiyyah’s relatively open attitude
to the isrāʾīliyyāt (biblical and para-
biblical stories that Muslim converts
in the early generations brought with
them into the community, and that
profoundly shaped the exegesis of
the Qur’an, i.e. the tafsīr), he would
have no reason not to read and
consider carefully the chapters in the
volume, though Hoover concedes
that ultimately he would judge them
on the basis of established doctrine
(p. 28). The chapter signals that reading
the Qur’an in light of the biblical
tradition is nothing new – Muslims
have been doing it from the earliest
stages of tafsīr – and that such an
approach need not be antagonistic,
especially when ‘strongly committed
to Qur’anic agency’ (p. 25). Mary
Cunningham, in the final chapter,
shows that the modern intertextual
study of the Qur’an is wholly aligned
with and can contribute to the study
of other late antique religions (p. 334).
Over these two chapters, the volume’s
hermeneutics are clearly laid out: the
modern study of the Qur’an builds
on traditional Muslim studies of the
text, insists on its autonomous creative
agency, aligns with the parallel study of
other late antique religious traditions,
and is both illuminated by and can
illuminate the study of those traditions;
all academically sound points of
departure.
I will offer some brief observations
on the chapters that for one reason
or another I believe merit particular
attention, reserving my comments on
the contributions in part I to the end,
as they are perhaps the most critical.
Part II opens with a lengthy study by
Holger Zellentin on sexual impurity
in the Qur’an. This is a continuation
of Zellentin’s work both on Qur’anic
law (e.g. The Qur’ān’s Legal Culture:
The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of
Departure [Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen,
2013]). The present chapter develops
many of the themes Zellentin has
introduced elsewhere, in particular
the importance of the Christian and

journal of jewish studies | vol. lxxi  no. 2 | autumn 2020 | pp. 447–51 | issn 0022-2097 |
https://doi.org/10.18647/3473/jjs-2020 | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8563-5918 |
copyright © Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 2020.
4 48 | jou r na l of j ew ish stu di es
rabbinic reception of the gerim laws in
Lev. 17; and the Apostolic Decree (in
Acts 15), the Apostolic Constitutions,
the Didascalia Apostolorum and the
Clementine Homilies as key documents
for understanding the most pertinent
aspects of the Christian attitude to law
in late antiquity. He begins by very
carefully distinguishing rabbinic and
Christian attitudes to which laws are
applicable to Gentiles, in the course
of which he demonstrates that sexual
purity laws were practised by many, if
not most, Christians throughout late
antiquity, at least up to the seventh
century (p. 152). He is thus able to place
the Qur’an’s sexual purity laws squarely
in line with and as a continuation
of biblical purity laws, especially as
interpreted by Christians.
In part III, Sinai takes up the
passage in Q Yūnus 10:92, in which
God addresses Pharaoh as he is
drowning in pursuit of Moses and the
Israelites: ‘Today We shall save you in
your body that you might be a sign
unto those who come after you. Yet
many among mankind are heedless of
Our signs.’ As Sinai notes, the verse had
been connected by Abraham Geiger to
a passage from Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer
(PRE) that tells the story of Pharaoh’s
repentance in extremis (pp. 238–9).
The issue, however, is the dating of
this rabbinic text. While it reached its
closure after the eighth century, and
therefore well into the Islamic era,
and so may have taken up stories from
the Qur’an and its exegesis, parts of it
are certainly much older (p. 241). The
first challenge, therefore, is to separate
pre- from post-Qur’anic material in
the PRE. Sinai proposes a convincing
scenario whereby the well-attested
pre-Qur’anic rabbinic notion that
Pharaoh survived the drowning, along
with the general rabbinic discourse on
repentance, is likely to have resulted
in a pre-Qur’anic Midrashic account
of Pharaoh’s repentance and salvation,
which was then taken up by both the
Qur’an and the PRE independently.
Having thus established a theoretical
antecedent to the Qur’an’s repentant
Pharaoh, Sinai devotes just as much
energy to understanding why the
Qur’an includes the story at all; why it
changes the crucial detail of Pharaoh’s
repentance resulting in his salvation in
the postulated pre-Qur’anic account to
it being ‘too little, too late’ (p. 239) in
the Qur’anic version; and how the story
fits into the theological concerns of the
sūrah in which it is located. As he notes,
‘When asking any question about what
the Qur’anic corpus might have meant
in its original context of origin, we
must be sure to exploit the full range
of historically legitimate hermeneutical
resources that are available to us.
An appropriate combination of both
intertextual and literary ways of
reading the Qur’an seems particularly
crucial’ (p. 251).
In the opening chapter to part III,
Joseph Witztum builds on work that
he had previously set out in ‘Variant
Traditions, Relative Chronology, and
the Study of Intra-Quranic Parallels’
(in Behnam Sadeghi et al. [eds], Islamic
Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in
Honor of Professor Patricia Crone [Brill,
Leiden, 2015], pp. 1–50.) In the latter,
he had examined various strategies for
solving what he called the Qur’an’s
‘synoptic problem’, whereby the same

story is repeated with some degree of
variation in different parts of the text.
In the present volume, he explores one
particular strategy, which he had called
‘Adaptation to Context’ (ibid., pp.
8–10). Taking the story of Abraham’s
guests as a case study, he puts forward
an argument for not reading the three
instances of the story in the Qur’anic
corpus in a harmonizing manner,
but rather allowing the tensions to
stand. He proposes a model whereby
key elements in synoptic Qur’anic
stories, such as when exactly Abraham
notices that his guests were foreign/
strange (when he first sees them in Q
al-Dhāriyāt 51:25, or after he notices
them not eating in Q Hūd 11:70), could
freely float around in the story. It is a
wonderfully erudite piece, though it is
a shame that Witztum does not explore
what literary or theological concern
in each sūrah may have occasioned
the variations of detail, an issue that
he did examine in his earlier ‘Variant
Traditions’ essay, and which would
certainly fit the ethos of the present
volume. It occurs to me, for instance,
that the use of munkarūn (‘foreign’,
‘strange’) to describe the guests
immediately upon their appearance
in Q al-Dhāriyāt 51:25, with its
overtones of inauspiciousness, presents
an immediate contrast with their being
described as mukramīn (‘honoured’) in
the previous verse. This in turn fits the
overarching motif of the sūrah that a
single event, namely the final hour, will
bring salvation to some and perdition
to others, just as the same set of angelic
visitors are both honoured and strange,
bringing good news to Abraham
and destruction to the people of Lot
r ev i ews | 4 49
(ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Farāhī, Tafsīr niẓām
al-Qurʾān wa-taʾwīl al-furqān bi-l-furqān
[Dāʾirah Ḥamīdiyyah, Azamgarh,
2008], pp. 119–78).
Gerald Hawting’s chapter,
‘ “Killing the prophets and stoning
the messengers”: Two Themes in the
Qur’an and Their Background’, as
he acknowledges, revisits much of
the material Gabriel Reynolds has
already published (‘On the Qur’ān
and the Theme of Jews as “Killers
of the Prophets” ’, Al-Bayan 10
[2012], pp. 9–32). Both argue that the
Qur’anic accusation that the Jews were
responsible for killing prophets that
God had sent develops a motif already
in evidence in the Hebrew Bible (as
pious self-criticism) and taken up in
the New Testament (as an accusation
of impiety). Rabbinic and patristic
writings develop these respective
traditions. An interesting difference
between the analyses emerges regarding
the Qur’an’s immediate source for the
accusation. While Reynolds concluded
that it was the Syriac Christian
tradition, Hawting notes several
differences between the Qur’an and the
Syriac sources (p. 312). In the latter,
the references seem to be primarily
to warn Christians of an ongoing
threat, whereas the Qur’an puts the
theme to an altogether different use:
to show why Jews have lost favour
with God. Given this discrepancy,
Hawting remains undecided as to
what the immediate inspiration for the
Qur’an’s polemic might be. The issue
demonstrates very well the sometimes
intractable problem of identifying the
appropriate intertext, and thus the
inherent pitfalls of intertextual analysis.
450 | j o u r n a l o f j e w i s h s t u d i e s
Finally, in ‘On the Qur’an and
Christian Heresies’, Gabriel Reynolds
traces and dismisses the frequently
encountered trope of the Prophet
having received his understanding of
Christianity from heretical groups.
The Qur’anic evidence often cited in
support of such hypotheses (such as the
apparent reference to Mariolatry in
Q al-Māʾidah 5:116) should instead be
understood, as Reynolds aptly shows,
as the product of the Qur’an’s rhetorical
style, which includes ‘hyperbole,
sarcasm, or diatribe’ (p. 326). There is
simply no escape into the uncharted
wilderness of ancient Arabia from
contextualizing the Qur’an as a
definitively late antique text.
Let us return, finally, to the first
section of the volume. Angelika
Neuwirth traces how the figure of
Abraham was utilized by the Qur’an
to gradually replace the centrality
of genealogical ancestry in the
pagan world-view with the spiritual
ancestry of Abraham. I remain
somewhat sceptical of Neuwirth’s
downplaying of the Qur’an’s claim of
genealogical descent from Abraham
for its Messenger and his community
(as opposed to just spiritual descent); I
do not have much to add beyond the
critique to this thesis already made
by Mohsen Goudarzi (‘The Ascent of
Ishmael: Genealogy, Covenant, and
Identity in Early Islam’, Arabica 66
[2019], pp. 415–84, 428–9). However,
it bears mentioning that the essay,
which is a slightly expanded version
of an earlier publication (‘From Tribal
Genealogy to Divine Covenant:
Qur’anic Re-figurations of Pagan
Arab Ideals Based on Biblical Models’,
in Scripture, Poetry, and the Making of a
Community [Oxford University Press,
Oxford, in association with the Institute
of Ismaili Studies, 2014], pp. 53–75), has
a particularly welcome addition in the
inclusion of more pre-Islamic poetry to
illustrate the state of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Indeed, I would have liked to have
seen yet more. The underutilization of
this corpus remains a glaring lacuna in
modern Qur’anic studies.
In ‘Meccan Gods, Jesus’ Divinity:
An analysis of Q 43 Sūrat al-Zukhruf’,
Walid Saleh provides both a close
reading of the Jesus pericope in Q
al-Zukhruf 43 and an analysis of the
manner in which the pericope was
understood by tafsīr scholars. Central
to his discussion is the retort by the
Prophet’s Meccan opponents regarding
Jesus: ‘Are our gods better, or is he?’
(v. 58). Saleh insists that what is at stake
in the rhetorical question is not a claim
that the Meccan gods are superior
to Jesus, but rather that ‘there is no
difference and as such they are not going
to replace their gods with any new
God’ (p. 107). I cannot convince myself
that this is the import of the question.
More problematically, Saleh constructs
a narrative whereby the tafsīr scholars
deliberately obfuscated the meaning of
the verse in question in order to deflect
from the cutting argument produced by
the Prophet’s opponents, namely that
if it is fair game for Christians, whom
the Qur’an accepts as a monotheistic
community, to worship Jesus (this
not yet having been denounced in
the Qur’an’s proclamations), it should
also be acceptable for the Meccans
to worship their own gods. As he
recognizes, however, several tafsīr
 r e v i e w s | 451

scholars (e.g. al-Zamakhsarī and al-Rāzī)
did offer a plausible reading of the verse
close to his own, albeit set alongside
fanciful historical narratives.
Islam Dayeh’s contribution,
‘Prophecy and Writing in the Qur’an,
or Why Muhammad Was Not a Scribe’,
makes a case for why the term ummiyy
in the Qur’an, applied variously to the
Prophet, non-Scripturalists and once
even to Jews, means more than simply
‘Gentile’, or even ‘unscriptured’ (i.e. not
having received a Scripture), as Western
scholarship generally understands it.
Rather, he argues that it should be seen
in light of New Testament polemics
against the authority of the scribes.
So far, so good. But his claim that the
tafsīr works can illuminate the correct
sense of the term (pp. 44, 54) cannot
be maintained – their consistent gloss
of ummiyy as ‘illiterate’ seems to be
theologically motivated and supremely
unhelpful in determining the correct
meaning of the word.
The problematic aspects of Saleh’s
and Dayeh’s essays demonstrate to me
that we have much work before us to
effectively integrate the indigenous
Arabic literary corpus – both pre-
Islamic poetry and works on the
Qur’an itself – into Western Qur’anic
studies in a way that illuminates
the text. Although this remains a
desideratum, it is to the volume’s credit
that it devotes an entire section to the
Qur’an and the Islamic tradition, and
thus recognizes the importance of
engaging with that material. But, to
be clear, the criticisms I have voiced
should in no way detract from the
very serious scholarship that permeates
this volume, including in the chapters
I have taken issue with. Two of the
primary contributions of Western
scholarship to the study of the Qur’an,
namely (1) placing it in its historical and
particularly biblical/Jewish/Christian
context, while (2) at the same time
reading the text, particularly individual
sūrahs, as literarily coherent units,
and insisting on the Qur’an’s creative
agency, are both abundantly evident
throughout.
saqib hussain
wolfson college, oxford, uk

Robert Chazan (ed.), The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 6: The Middle Ages:
The Christian World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018. viii, 922 pp.
£175.00. i s b n 978 0 52151 724 9.

This sixth volume (of eight) of the
Cambridge History of Judaism is divided
into three distinct but interconnected
parts. The first relates to the presence
of Jews in the medieval Christian
world, focusing on the role and impact
of the Christian Church on Jewish life,
mutual Jewish–Christian perceptions,
and the Jews’ Diaspora throughout,
and eventual expulsion from, Western
Christendom. The second part of the
book relates to the social, economic
and cultural aspects of medieval Jewish
life within Western Christendom,
while the third part relates to the
spiritual and intellectual aspects of

journal of jewish studies | vol. lxxi  no. 2 | autumn 2020 | pp. 451–4 | issn 0022-2097 |
https://doi.org/10.18647/3474/jjs-2020 | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7304-4843 |
copyright © Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 2020.