The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction

each party insists, “Dad always loved me best.”

Islam, by this reckoning, is not an Abrahamic religion but the religion of Abraham—its oldest, truest manifestation—and the umma are the people “worthiest” of him (Qur. 3:68). Confounding truth with error, the “People of the Book” see only through a dark glass.

Adherents of the Abrahamic religions ordinarily pursue God through mediated means such as worship, prayer, or scripture reading, but their literatures also report instances of unitive mysticism—the practice in which a believer enters into a transcendent union with the divine. Individuals have recounted such experiences in terms of communicating with, cleaving to, or dissolving into God while apprehending unfathomable wisdom or sublime love. Unitive mysticism can take distinctive forms in each religion, among them Kabbalistic practice in Judaism, individual visionary quests in Western Christianity, contemplative prayer in Eastern Orthodoxy, and Sufi disciplines in Islam. Yet, at the same time, the yearning for mystical union can blur doctrinal, legal, and sectarian boundaries, a condition that the Sufi Jalal ad-Din Rumi—whose death is said to have been lamented by Jews and Christians along with Muslims—celebrated:

I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr [Magian], nor Moslem.…

My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless;

’Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.

Such an exercise suggests that Abraham might in fact be a problematic figure for bringing Jews, Christians, and Muslims together. Ironically, they may come closer to inhabiting common spiritual ground when they seek God directly, shrugging off their ingrained religious identities, than when they define themselves as Abraham’s kith and kin.

Yet Jews, Christians, and Muslims still strove to improve their relationships, despite—or, perhaps, because of—their seemingly unrelenting enmities. The Holocaust’s enormity triggered a crisis of conscience among churches contemplating Christianity’s complicity in genocide. The most fateful reaction was the Second Vatican Council’s promulgation in 1965 of Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”), which asserted that “God holds the Jews most dear” and decried all “displays of anti-Semitism.” It further allowed that other religions, including Islam, reflect a ray of truth, urging mutual conversation and cooperation, although it also presumed that the Church had little, if anything, to learn from other faiths. Pope Benedict XVI’s invocation of a Byzantine emperor who accused Muhammad of condoning violence to spread Islam prompted an open letter originally endorsed by 138 prominent Muslims: “A Common Word Between Us and You” (2007). Taking its title from Quran 3:64, which solicits the “People of the Book” to acknowledge that they all worship God, this reply invited a range of Christian church leaders, not just Catholics, “to come together with us,” averring that the world’s future depends on its two largest religious communities fostering peace and justice. The most prominent Jewish response to Nostra Aetate was “Dabru Emet” (“Speak Truth”), a statement authored privately by four university scholars, signed by more than 200 rabbis and intellectuals, and published in two American newspapers. Acknowledging the recent “unprecedented shift in Jewish and Christian relations,” it affirmed that Jews and Christians worship the same God, that they accept the Torah’s moral principles, and, most controversially among Jews, that “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon.”

The modern world may have brought Jews, Christians, and Muslims into repeatedly close contact, but proximity at times bred only contempt. Polemics continued, inflected, as always, by politics. Muslim Jew-hatred had traditionally lacked the virulent imagery found in Christian Adversus Iudeous rhetoric and European folklore, but Arab Christians imported those stereotypes into the Middle East. Customary religious vilifications became widespread after 1840, as Arabs identified Jews with modernism, commercialism, and imperialism; contemporary European anti-Semitism flourished as Zionism took root and the state of Israel materialized.

The diversity and preponderantly foreign origins of American Muslims in the early twenty-first century posed puzzles. They had to learn how to fund mosques without state support and to apply Islamic law to questions raised by their status outside Dar al-Islam while simultaneously adjudicating between different legal schools. The degree of animosity they faced intensified dramatically after 9/11. Fueled more by politics than religious difference, it manifested itself in government surveillance as well as personal attacks. American Muslims faced the same questions about their capacity to be trustworthy American citizens that had earlier confronted Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.

President-elect Dwight Eisenhower called the “Jud[e]o-Christian concept,” which supposed that Judaism shares basic truths with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Although theologically suspect, this notion enlisted Jews as equals with Christian Americans in upholding God and democracy against fascism and communism. The American Jewish community proved distinctive, most importantly because conditions within the American diaspora were unparalleled. Since the Babylonian captivity, diasporic Jews had usually lived as discrete (and subordinate) communities that identified more readily with Jews beyond their own borders than with their non-Jewish neighbors. By the late twentieth century, American Jews could affirm that they belonged fully to both Am Yisrael and the United States.

Some Christian nationalists declared American republican institutions to be consonant with the Bible and the United States, like ancient Israel, to have entered into a covenant with God.

Perhaps the most creative response came from Theodor Herzl, a journalist who dismissed both the Enlightenment’s premise that Jews were a religious community and its promise of equal citizenship. Jews were a nation needing a homeland, he argued, and he founded a movement—Zionism—to establish one. For nearly two millennia, Jews had dreamed of restoring the Temple in Jerusalem, but Zionism was—despite a minor strain exhorting return to the “Holy Land”—fundamentally secular. Zionists disagreed about many things—including, initially, where to locate the homeland—but they soon decided on Palestine.