The panel presents three exemplary approaches to the field of historical encounters of religious cultures by Sabine Schmidtke, David Nirenberg (both Institute for Advanced Study Princeton) and Volker Leppin (Yale Divinity School). Contributors ans contributions are related to the newly founded journal Historical Interactions of Religious Cultures (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany) which will present respective studies with reference to the three major monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the pre-modern period, from the seventh to the eighteenth century.In view of the growing societal interest in interreligious exchange, conflict processes, and intercultural osmoses, scholarly efforts to "liquefy" the study of religions have intensified, conceiving of them as dynamic phenomena that constituted, configured, and evolved in permanent processes of interaction with other religions.
This paper views historical interactions of religions from the perspective of a Christian theologian. It focuses on how historical and theological approaches have been changed, in particular, by growing interest in the field of Jewish-Christian relations. The paper asks if singling out a special field of encounters as though they were just a part of the history of Christianity can be sufficient, not only in terms of the fullness of the historical account, but also in terms of theological understanding. Christian theology always included concepts and images of other religions; in particular it has always related itself to Jewish ideas which undeniably stood at the beginning of Christianity, and always continued to be of interest to Christian thinkers. The paper examines how this view can inform historical approaches and change the place of Christianity within the history of religions. even as it changes the theological appraisal of Christianity.
This paper deals with the last and mostly forgotten generation of students, who were trained by representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in Germany, but contributed primarily to Islamic and Arabic studies. In the course of the nineteenth century, Semitic (including Arabic) studies evolved as a discipline of its own, primarily involving scholars who identified as Christians. However Jewish scholars too began to develop a critical historical approach to Jewish sources that became known as Wissenschaft des Judentums. Although many of the leading Jewish scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (who were equally trained in Jewish and Arabic/Islamic studies) did not occupy the type of academic positions they deserved, they were instrumental in developing the disciplines of Arabic/Islamic/Judaic studies. This later generation often replaced the ideals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums with those of Zionism, and were far more interested in Islamic and Arabic studies than Jewish studies
This paper will present work on the project "Co-produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (carried out by the present author in collaboration with Katharina Heyden). By introducing the term “co-production” to indicate a methodological inclination, my co-author and collaborators emphasize an ongoing process: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have continuously formed, re-formed, and transformed themselves by interacting with or thinking about one another. Co-production, in all the ambivalence it entails, has shaped not only the rituals and teachings of these traditions, but also some of our most enduring forms of prejudice, and has shaped as well the conceptual tools (such as history, philology, and theology) with which we undertake the study of these religions. In this talk I will first offer a definition of co-production and then develop one example—that of the Golden Calf—that illustrates some of the historical and theological insights we think this methodology can yield.