Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam.

• Author: Lazarus-Yafeh, Hava

By STEVEN M. WASSERSTROM. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995. Pp. viii + 300. $45.

Steven Wasserstrom's book is a very important contribution to the large number of studies of Jewish-Muslim symbiosis in the Middle Ages. He offers many new insights and additional information about some aspects of this symbiosis and makes us look at it from different and new angles. This erudite book, however, makes for no easy reading even for those who know the subject well enough, and it must be extremely difficult for those readers (students!) who have no intimate knowledge of the historical scene and of the vast scholarly achievements in the field.

The first part of the book, entitled "Trajectories," deals with the social setting. Who were the Jews of early Islam, what were their professions and their class structure, who constituted their leadership and their sectarian groups and what was their relationship to Muslim authorities? It is the author's contention that too much has been made of the "bourgeois revolution" (S. D. Goitein's term) in Islam which brought prosperity to Muslims and other communities, including some well-known Jews. According to Wasserstrom, the majority of Jews remained "silent and apparently degraded" well into the tenth century and after. He also supposes that with regard to its religious development Jewish society under early Islam was an as-yet-undefined pluralistic society, with rabbinic Judaism being only one trend among others. In this part of the book, the author also deals with Jewish Messianism at that time and gives a very rich account especially of the Isawiyya sect, which he has already studied in detail. He then turns to Jewish sectarian influence on Muslim, especially Shi ite, ideas of the Mahdi. Here is one of the many instances in which the author expresses his aversion to the term "cultural borrowing" (he uses the expression "creative symbiosis" which actually denotes the same process, the latter term undoubtedly being a much nicer one to use!). Thus, for example, Wasserstrom says: " . . . early Muslims did not borrow their Messiah from Judaism, nor was Jewish Messianic imagery lent by a Jew to a Muslim in the sense that a lender lends to a debtor. Rather, Muslims consciously and creatively reimagined the Messiah" (p. 57). To my mind, this is exactly what cultural borrowing is all about. It is never like lending money, but always includes conscious or unconscious reshaping, reinterpreting, or rewriting of...