Children of Abraham

About this book

From the prize-winning author of The Ottomans, a myth-busting history of Muslim-Jewish relations, tracing fourteen centuries of cooperation and conflict. "A revelatory picture of both coexistence and conflict." --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography Today, the dominant narrative of the relationship between Jewish and Muslim peoples assumes a long history of violent hostility. In Children of Abraham, historian Marc David Baer lays this myth to rest, showing how Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East and Europe, more often in cooperation than in conflict, for more than a millennium. When Islam emerged in the seventh century, Muslims and Jews were bound by shared religious tenets and common cultural practices, and for centuries afterward, they were often allies. Baer introduces readers to Muslim warriors fighting for a medieval Turkish Jewish kingdom on the Caspian Sea, Jewish viziers leading the Muslim sultan's troops in Spain, and Jewish literary lights and political party leaders in modern Egypt and Iraq. But Baer resists the alluring fable that Jews and Muslims ever lived in interfaith utopia, and he shows how European colonization and nationalism fed the emergence of modern antisemitism and Islamophobia and helped to drive these two peoples further and further apart. Traversing the full spectrum of Jewish-Muslim relations, this is an urgent, essential history for understanding today's unending conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.