Princeton University Press Jews and the Qur'an

"In this book Meir Bar-Asher shines light on the deeply ambivalent views toward Jews and Judaism in the Qur'an and in post-Qur'anic Islamic writing. On the one hand, these texts clearly recognize the Jews as a people chosen by God - a "people of the Book" deserving of respect and communal protection for their contribution. On the other hand, an undeniably darker view is also on offer and is found, for example, in passages that accuse Jews of falsifying their own Torah to suppress all pronouncements of the advent of Muhammad, the final Prophet whose message is the culmination of the good news brought by all the prophets from Moses to Jesus. Bar-Asher's view is that one must concede the existence of such polemical anti-Jewish passages while keeping in mind that they do not constitute the final word of the Qur'an or Islam on the Jews. Bar-Asher argues that passages concerning Jews and Judaism in the Qur'an need to be examined alongside the post-Qur'anic Islamic literature rather than read in isolation. His book thus concerns not only Islam's holy scripture but also Hadith, the authoritative oral tradition of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, along with other Islamic commentaries on Jews and Judaism. The book begins with a historical overview of the Jewish presence in the Arab peninsula before the time of Muhammad and covers what scholars have uncovered to date about the relationship between Muhammad, his followers, and the Jews of Medina in particular. Then the book turns to the Qur'an and the aforementioned post-Qur'anic traditional materials"--