Scholars read Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion through Christianity, erasing Islam’s significance

Evidence

Islam (by now, that most “theological” of names) has remained an unreadable cipher, or a sign for-Christianity. Or, simply, for religion. In Kabbala studies, for example, Moshe Idel recently explained that new explanations concerning Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam are to be framed within “echoes of Christian Kabbalah,” studied “within the context of the two rival religions, Islam and Christianity,” and that, ultimately, the “important case” of Sabbatai Zevi testifies to a “direct influence of christology on Tzevi himsel£” As another scholar summarizes it, Zevi’s “conversion to Islam was interpreted as if it echoed the conversions ofJews oflberia to Catholicism.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 777

Categorization

• XREF: Directly the genealogical claim the reader’s Islamophobia-cluster batch needs: the scholarly erasure of Islam in Jewish history as the mirror of antisemitism-Islamophobia conflation.
• QUESTION: The claim that the Jew-turned-Muslim at Auschwitz (the Muselmann) is the wager demands deeper study of how this connects to the book’s genealogical thesis.