Reuven Firestone

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion

A History of Anti-Semitism examines the history, culture and literature of antisemitism from antiquity to the present. With contributions from an international team of scholars, whose essays were specially commissioned for this volume, it covers the long history of antisemitism starting with ancient Greece and Egypt, through the anti-Judaism of ear...

F. E. (Francis Edward) Peters, a scholar best known as a historian of religion, died on April 30, 2020 in New York at the age of 93.

According to Islamic religious teachings, some Jews confirmed the authenticity of Muhammad’s prophethood and joined him. Most Jews, however, are condemned for both rejecting the Prophet and failing to live up to their own religious imperatives. Medieval polemics tended to be harsh and belligerent, but while Muslims and Christians produced polemics...

Presidential Keynote Address

This chapter explores a number of critical junctures in biblical history, highlighting the divine initiative and/or support of violent means in ancient Israel’s dealings with other peoples. The author, Reuven Firestone, identifies as a key element the early transition from a sort of revolving henotheism to monotheism, as well as from a tribal to a...

Holy war, defined for this study as war authorized or even commanded by God, is a fundamental part of biblical religion and a core institution of the Hebrew Bible. Jews of antiquity engaged in wars considered to be divinely sanctioned, but after crushing defeats against the Roman Empire this kind of response to communal threat became so self-destru...

Holy war, defined for this study as war authorized or even commanded by God, is a fundamental part of biblical religion and a core institution of the Hebrew Bible. Jews of antiquity engaged in wars considered to be divinely sanctioned, but after crushing defeats against the Roman Empire this kind of response to communal threat became so self-destru...

Holy war, defined for this study as war authorized or even commanded by God, is a fundamental part of biblical religion and a core institution of the Hebrew Bible. Jews of antiquity engaged in wars considered to be divinely sanctioned, but after crushing defeats against the Roman Empire this kind of response to communal threat became so self-destru...

The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation, by S. Leyla Gkan, (Routledge Jewish Studies Series), (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), xiv + 246 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-46607-3, £75 (hardback) (First paragraph) The notion of chosenness, that God has chosen one religious community from among all the peoples of the world, is a cornerston...

From a social science perspective, a major purpose of religion is to organize the behavior of the community of believers in order to maximize its success as a collective. The underlying premise of this lecture is that religious authority will sanction violence and aggression when they are assessed to be an effective means of realizing the goals of...

Muslim-Jewish relations in the United States, Israel, and Europe are tenuous. Jews and Muslims struggle to understand one another and know little about each other's traditions and beliefs. Firestone explains the remarkable similarities and profound differences between Judaism and Islam, the complex history of Jihad, the legal and religious position...

“Holy war,” sanctioned or even commanded by God, is a common and recurring theme in the Hebrew Bible. Rabbinic Judaism largely avoided discussion of holy war for the simple reason that it became dangerous and self-destructive. The failed “holy wars” of the Great Revolt and the Bar Kokhba Rebellion eliminated enthusiasm for it among the survivors en...

This chapter presents a paper given at the international conference titled “Beyond Violence: Religious Sources for Social Transformation.” The paper contends that as a whole, Jews appear to be no less and no more militant religionists than Muslims or Christians. Historically and until only recently, Jews simply could not engage effectively in milit...

s influenence on Islam. Whether such acu ations are fair or not, the Manichaean depiction f the rid as a place of cosmic conflict between th forces of e spirit and those of the flesh doubtlessl as had a pro und influence on Jewish, Christian, d Muslim discus& ns of and attitudes toward waif e. Ti oty M. Renick See also Gre Religions; Indo-Europ an...

YAIGISHI FAI1H — YA'KUB B. -LAYTH dynasty in Ottoman Turkish. However, his compila tion has not survived as an independent work, and the only reference to it is that made by 'Asilprdjazade [q.v.]. The latter records that in 816/1413, while accom panying Mel7emmed I's army on campaign, he fell ill and "remained behind at Geyve, in the house of Yajçh...

ZABUR ZABUR (A.), a term found in pre-Islamic poetry referring to a written text, and in the Iur'ãn referring to divine scripture, in some contexts specifically to a scripture of David [see DAWUD], prob ably the Psalms, The Arabic root z-b-r is associated with "stone" (hidjara), and verbal forms from it convey such mean ings as stoning, lining a we...

While there is no evidence to date that the indigenous inhabitants of Arabia knew of holy war prior to Islam, holy war ideas and behaviors appear already among Muslims during the first generation. This book focuses on why and how such a seemingly radical development took place. Basing the hypothesis on evidence from the Qur'ān and early Islamic lit...

L'A. propose sur le monde comparatif, une analyse des liaisons des traditions juive, chretienne et sunnite avec le sacrifice d'Abraham tel qu'il se presente dans la tradition musulmane shiite. Les differences d'appreciation de ce sacrifice proviennent de la contextualisation du role du narrateur, de la relation et du dialogue entre le pere et le fi...

The Qur'an contains a number of enigmatic references to Jews. One such reference in 4:46 accuses the Jews of twisting the well-known biblical declaration of Israel, "We hear and obey" to "We hear and disobey." This, along with a number of other citations of alleged Jewish statements directed to Muhammad and the early Muslim community of Medina, cle...

L'A. analyse neuf versets du Coran en rapport avec le theme du combat et de la guerre pour la religion. Ces versets suggerent une evolution historique. Au cours d'une premiere periode qui suit la revelation, le combat contre les ennemis de l'islam est prohibe. Dans une periode plus tardive, ce meme combat est activement encourage. Les versets coran...

Scholars have studied the concept of holy war in the Bible for well over a century. Both traditional Muslim and modern Western scholars have likewise studied the qur'anic view of war, but little has been done to examine scriptural justification for holy war as a cross-cultural phenomenon. A comparison of biblical (primarily deuteronomic) with qur'a...

The story of Abraham hiding his marital relationship with Sarah from a threatening authority in a foreign land occurs twice in Genesis and is treated in some detail in both Jewish and Islamic exegetical literature, the latter despite the fact that it neither occurs nor is alluded to in the Qur'an. The biblical renditions of the story raise question...

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and the integration of forces between Arab countries and the West has further increased American curiosity about Islam. One result of these developments has been an increase in dialogue groups seeking Muslim participants. This essay will examine several aspects of the Jewish and Islamic Abraham stories which will shed light on issues associated wit...

Abraham travels from the Biblical Holy Land to the location of Mecca in Arabia to build the sacred Ka`ba. This article analyses the many stories in Islamic traditional literature that bring Abraham from a Biblical to a Qur'anic geographical context and considers Biblical and pre-Islamic subtexts.

The sharing of similar traditions between Judaism and Islam has long been recognized, but there has been little agreement about the historical and textual nature of the relationship between Jewish and Islamic tradition. By focusing on the contextual meanings of a legend found repeatedly in Jewish and Islamic sources, this study offers a reconstruct...

The character known from the Bible as Sarah, the wife of Abraham, is never mentioned by name in the Quran. It is clear, however, that Sarah is the in-tended personage in the Quranic renditions of the three visitors to Abraham, a story that can be found also in Genesis 18:1-16. 2 The exegetical comments treating these Quranic passages and the variou...

The earliest Qur'anic exegetes understood the text of Qur'an 37:99-113 to refer to Isaac as the unnamed son of Abraham offered as sacrifice in response to God's message. By the ninth century, that view changed to Ishmael.

"Holy war," sanctioned or even commanded by God, is a common and recurring theme in the Hebrew Bible. Rabbinic Judaism largely avoided discussion of holy war for the simple reason that it became dangerous and self-destructive. The failed "holy wars" of the Great Revolt and the Bar Kokhba Rebellion eliminated enthusiasm for it among the survivors en...

Typescript. Thesis (Rabbinic)--Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, 1982,

This paper seeks to identify and categorize a range of activities initiated to improve relations between Muslims and Jews, to illuminate specific concerns around which these initiatives were organized, and provide a broad analysis of their effectiveness. Data was collected through reviews of popular literature and the media, participant observation...