Faith-fueled fractures

Marc David Baer, professor at the London School of Economics, has written an ambitious, sweeping history of Jewish-Muslim relations spanning 14 centuries. Children of Abraham (Basic Books, 496 pp.) draws on primary and secondary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, Spanish, and German, moving across vastly different historical periods and geographies—from seventh-century Arabia to contemporary Paris, from medieval Córdoba to postwar Baghdad. For readers curious about the complex history binding and dividing Islam and Judaism, this book offers an important, if imperfect, guide.

Baer’s central argument challenges two competing myths. The first is the myth of interfaith utopia—the romantic notion, popular among those sympathetic to the so-called Palestinian cause, that Jews and Muslims lived in perpetual harmony until Zionism spoiled everything. The second is the myth of perennial enmity—that Jews in Muslim-majority societies were always systematically persecuted and needed rescue. Against both distortions, Baer insists on complexity, arguing that the relationship has been shaped above all by power—who holds it, over whom, and under what circumstances. This is a genuinely useful insight, applied with discipline throughout.

The book’s chronological sweep is impressive. Baer’s treatment of the modern period is especially strong. The chapters on 19th-century colonialism’s fracturing of Jewish-Muslim social worlds, the Nazi era, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent disappearance of Jewish communities across the Arab-Muslim world are well researched and plausibly argued. Baer’s critique of Turkey’s self-serving propaganda about its historic tolerance of Jews is convincing and well supported. These sections alone make the book worth reading. There are, however, areas where the critical reader will want to push back—and for Christian readers in particular, a couple of concerns run deeper than the others.

First, the invocation of the so-called “Abrahamic faiths” assumes more textual and historical support than is warranted. The label is a modern construct that can obscure significant theological and historical differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although Islamic tradition alleges a connection between Muhammad and Abraham through Ishmael, the historical reliability of this claim is doubtful. In fact, some Muslim traditions emphatically deny any such connection. The emphasis on a shared “Abrahamic” identity appears to be a later development, serving cultural and political purposes rather than functioning as a firmly demonstrable historical claim.

Second, Christian readers will notice—and rightly question—Baer’s recurring argument that Christianity functions as the primary external variable worsening Jewish-Muslim relations. Whenever Christians enter the scene, says Baer, things deteriorate. This can only be accepted as the broadest of observations. Muslim traditions claim Muhammad expelled two Jewish tribes from Medina, massacred the men of a third, enslaved their women and children, and launched attacks on neighboring Jewish settlements—all with no Christian intervention whatsoever. In the same vein, Eastern Christianity had arguably played a fundamentally different role than Western Latin Christianity. The Ethiopian Church, the Coptic societies, the Orthodox communities of the Levant—none of these fit neatly into Baer’s framing. Christian readers deserve a more nuanced account of their own tradition’s complexity.

The deeper concern, however, is this: In his admirable effort to challenge the myth of perennial enmity, Baer at times dilutes a well-documented theological dimension of the Jewish-Muslim relationship—namely, that Islam’s own scripture and classical prophetic traditions contain significant polemics against Jews and Judaism. The Quran describes Jews as incurring Allah’s wrath and corrupting their scriptures; it even stigmatizes them as having been transformed into monkeys and pigs for their transgressions. Classical Muhammadan literature contains accounts explicitly hostile to Jews, some exhorting Muslims to kill them to hasten the last hour. Medieval Islamic jurisprudence institutionalized Jewish subordination through the dhimma system not merely as political convenience but as theological imperative. For Muslims, these are not marginal texts; they are “sacred” ones, and generations of Muslims have read them as such.

Baer is aware of this material—he discusses the dhimma system and its theological roots—but his framing consistently gravitates toward the sociopolitical and economic rather than the doctrinal. He treats theological enmity as something marginal, exploited by external powers, rather than as a force with its own internal momentum. The result is an account that, however sophisticated in sociopolitical analysis, feels as though it is painting over a canvas whose darker hues keep showing through. The sporadic coexistence Baer documents was real, but it occurred within a worldview that assigned Jews a permanently subordinate role—not merely out of political necessity, but out of religious conviction. A fully honest history must hold both truths simultaneously, and this book does not always do so.

None of this diminishes what Baer has achieved. Children of Abraham is accessible to a general reader while firmly grounded in the latest scholarship. Given the intensity of Jewish-Muslim tensions in the wake of the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023—the unspoken backdrop to the whole enterprise—it is not merely an academic exercise but an urgent intervention, calling the world to value human beings above the hostile “sacred” texts that encourage otherwise.