Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam.

• Author: Brinner, William M.

During the past two decades great changes have taken place in the comparative scholarly study of very similar genres of what might be called "popular religious" literature in both the Jewish and Islamic traditions. One may interpret these changes as due to increased scholarly sensitivity to questions of originality and borrowing, as well as to new approaches to literary criticism in general, including the role of gender in our understanding of the development of cultural traditions. What had become a moribund and rather sterile field of study, one that seemed to have been completely examined and exhausted by scholars from many countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has taken on new life. It has become a fertile field in which scholars are finding new meaning not only in the texts themselves, but in the process by which materials from different religious civilizations interact and are altered by religious ideology, different cultural contact, and the impact of different times. We no longer tend to see a simple straight-line borrowing from one tradition to another, but a highly complex and more challenging picture. Islam, as the last of the three revealed religions to arise in the Near East, and Judaism, the earliest of the three, seem to have had the closest such intertextual relationship.

In the volume under review we are dealing with the genre known in Islamic literature as qisas al-anbiya, or "tales of the prophets," the latter term, "prophets," referring to all of the figures from biblical, pre-Islamic Arabian, and ancient Near Eastern traditions who are regarded as such in Islam. I refer to these tales, found in special collections and in works of Qur anic exegesis, as Islamic literature not only because of their essentially didactic, religious source and approach, but also because they exist in all the major languages of the Islamic world: Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, Swahili, and Hausa, among others. The Jewish genre, once again found in all the major Jewish languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Ladino, and Yiddish, is contained in the collections of ma asiyot, literally "tales," based on midrash and found in both the Talmud and in post-Talmudic texts. Both of these groups of tales elaborate and embellish the much terser biblical and Qur anic accounts of the lives of certain figures: patriarchs, matriarchs, judges, kings and prophets in the Jewish tradition, such as Adam, Noah...