Somewhere Between Islam and Judaism - Critical Reflections - Aaron W. Hughes
3. Destabilizing "Judaism" in Late Antiquity
Somewhere Between Islam and Judaism - Critical Reflections - Aaron W. Hughes
Aaron W. Hughes [+]
University of Rochester
Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
Description
The third chapter, Destabilizing “Judaism” in Late Antiquity, was originally delivered as a seminar paper for a workshop on New Trends in Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. The paper argues that, in order to avoid its apologetic and ethnocentric excesses, the field of Jewish studies needs to jettison its basic narrative that reifies something called Judaism and that tries to articulate Jewish continuity between biblical times and the modern day. Problems in that narrative, are either thinly papered over or largely ignored, as an examination of the Jews on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad clearly reveals.