Overview

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. There have been countless scripture-based studies of the three ""religions of the book,"" but Nirenberg goes beyond those to pay close attention to how the three religious neighbors loved, tolerated, massacred, and expelled each other-all in the name of God-in periods and places both long ago and far away. Nirenberg argues that the three religions need to be studied in terms of how each affected the development of the others over time, their proximity of religious and philosophical thought as well as their overlapping geographies, and how the three ""neighbors"" define-and continue to define-themselves and their place in terms of one another. From dangerous attractions leading to interfaith marriage; to interreligious conflicts leading to segregation, violence, and sometimes extermination; to strategies for bridging the interfaith gap through language, vocabulary, and poetry, Nirenberg aims to understand the intertwined past of the three faiths as a way for their heirs to produce the future-together.

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Reviews

Nirenberg succeeds in cultivating a sensibility that allows us to discover in the past a stimulus to critical awareness about the workings of our own assumptions about the relations among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and habits of thought. Among those habits is the conviction that our religious traditions are independent of one another, that they are stable, and that one contains truth and tolerance while the others do not. Conversely, this book proposes the interdependence of these religions, a process in which they are constantly transforming themselves by thinking about one another in a fundamentally ambivalent form of neighborliness. --Mercedes Garc a-Arenal Rodr guez, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient fica

"""Cogent and powerful.... There are no books presently in print that even approach Nirenberg's in terms of its themes, thoroughness, or interpretive thrust."" (Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles)"""

Neighboring Faiths provides a cogent and powerful intervention into one of the most debated topics and thorniest issues in the history of the late medieval West: How did Christians, Muslims, and Jews live with each other and think about each other? The book will be of extraordinary importance not only for specialist in the field but also for general readers and anyone interested in the relations among the three religions and in the enduring discussion on 'the clash of civilizations, ' an argument Nirenberg demolishes in an elegant but forceful manner. There are no books presently in print that even approach Nirenberg's in terms of its themes, thoroughness, or interpretive thrust. --Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles

""Cogent and powerful.... There are no books presently in print that even approach Nirenberg's in terms of its themes, thoroughness, or interpretive thrust."" (Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles)""

Cogent and powerful.... There are no books presently in print that even approach Nirenberg's in terms of its themes, thoroughness, or interpretive thrust. (Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles)

Author Information

David Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, both at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. He lives in Chicago.

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