Fateful Encounter: Relations between Jews and Muslims in the Medieval, and the modern, Islamic World

This course focuses on how Jews and Muslims have thought about each other and lived together, both in medieval and in modern times.  Along the way the course also offers an introduction to Islamic texts, covers a variety of Islamic views of Jews and Judaism, analyzes stories of Muslims and Jews interacting in different times and places, looks at the lives of Jewish women under Islam, and explores the modern period in some detail.  In the modern period we examine the roots of the distinctively nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon of “radical Islamism” and its unfortunate perspective on Jews.  We also study Jewish-Muslim relations in the context of the Zionist settlement of the land of Israel/Palestine.
The course will answer questions like these: What was it like to be a Jew living under Islam in the medieval period?  How did this vary in different eras and in different locations?  How was this experience different for Jewish men and for Jewish women?  How did the history of Islam, its theologies, its religious laws, and its social and political institutions shape the overall context within which Jews found themselves?  What are some of the enduring consequences and questions that Jews and Muslims today have inherited from this fateful period of coexistence?
This 10-session class begins on October 18 and meets Wednesdays, 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. Members of Temple B’nai Abraham, Temple Ner Tamind and Temple Tiferet Shalom receive a discount on the course.

For more information and to register: http://www.hebrewcollege.edu/meahselect-fall-2017#Beverly or contact Sara Riedner Brown, associate director of Me’ah at 617-559-8708 or meah@hebrewcollege.edu.