German biblical scholarship’s anti-Semitism shaped Jewish views of Islam

Evidence

Geiger’s evaluation of Islam was to a great extent conditioned by his attitude toward Christianity (an attitude that hardened over time) and especially German biblical scholarship, which was replete with anti-Semitism and a belief in Christian supersessionism. In a series of essays from the late 1860s in which he compared the state of Jews under the other two dominant monotheistic faiths, Geiger’s brief against Christianity reads as a indictment: “From the very beginning [it] saw itself as the fulfillment of Judaism’s promise”; thus inherently, it was unable to accommodate itself to peaceful coexistence with Judaism, for its “tenacious longevity was a crushing blow [niederschmetternder Schlag] to Christianity and each individual Jew was an opposing witness to the truth of Christianity.” Thus did Christianity engage Judaism in an eternal struggle, with conversion of the Jews the ultimate goal. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 380

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how scholarship on one religion is instrumentalized as commentary on another — echoes the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece where moral panic is really class signaling.
• SEED: Possible essay: how the ‘othering’ of a third group becomes a displaced expression of conflict between two others — Muslims as proxy in Jewish-Christian theological disputes.