Jewish scholars’ rabbinic training shaped critical Qur’anic approaches

Evidence

Jewish scholars played an important role in pioneering critical approaches to Islam and the Qur’an – approaches that surely owed something to the rabbinic and Talmudic education that so many of them had received. Abraham Geiger (1810–74) had had a Talmudic education before studying in Bonn with Wilhem Freytag (one of de Sacy’s disciples). In 1833, while still a young man, Geiger had published a prize-winning essay, Was hat Muhammed aus dem Judentum aufgenommen? (‘What did Muhammad adopt from Judaism?’), in which Geiger sought to identify those elements in the Qur’an that he thought the Prophet had deliberately borrowed from the Jews. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 276

Categorization

• QUESTION: Geiger’s approach frames Muhammad as a borrower — worth investigating how later scholars responded to or rebutted this framing.
• XREF: Connects to the history of Islam and comparative religion approaches; the Jewish-German Orientalist genealogy also appears in Said’s critique of Orientalism.

Related

• Geiger was the first to treat Muhammad and Islam with scholarly respect (similarity 0.82)
• Geiger defended Muhammad against a dismissive European scholarly tradition. (similarity 0.78)
• Jewish orientalists subverted individual claims but never escaped the orientalism framework (similarity 0.78)