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This chapter reviews the book The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (2015), by Ethan B. Katz. In The Burdens of Brotherhood, Katz explores Jewish-Muslim relations in twentieth-century France, challenging conceptions of these relations as fixed and necessarily hostile. Katz chronicles the development of sociocultural spaces that were shared by North African Jews and Muslims in urban France from the Great War until the end of the twentieth century. He questions the notion that the two groups necessarily comprehended their interactions as those between “Jews” and “Muslims,” arguing that, in certain situations, Jews and Muslims perceived each other as members of a shared North African community.

This chapter studies the cultural encounter between Israel and Ishmael, how it has played a powerful role in shaping Judaism, and how it led the medieval rabbis and Jewish thinkers to oscillate between rejection and reception of Islam. Much of this dialectical attitude is played out through the ambivalent interpretations of the biblical Ishmael and in the polemical histories of Jews and Muslims. The chapter shows the Islamic impact on Judaism in halakhic, kabbalistic, messianic, and even hasidic texts. It is pessimistic about the enduring value of the Jewish–Muslim heritage, in view of how contemporary political circumstances have redefined Jewish–Muslim relations. Nevertheless, theological advances by Jews and Muslims are both necessary and possible. Through a process of inversion (teshuvah) of previous interpretative models regarding each other, Jews and Muslims can pave the way to mutual recognition and acceptance on theological and political levels.

This chapter introduces Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam. It makes the case that the study of Muslim and Jewish relations is ultimately an issue of comparison and, as a result, ought to be illumined by the field of religious studies. Despite this, and perhaps paradoxically, there are numerous tensions inherent to the particularism of specific subfields and the generalization demanded by the larger field of religious studies. The chapter then examines the regnant paradigm used to describe Jewish–Muslim relations in the premodern period, that of symbiosis, and signals how the study that follows attempts to undermine said paradigm with an eye to rewriting the history of the early interactions between Jews and Arabs.

This chapter discusses the movement of cultural renovation and marketing of Jewish heritage in Tunisia and Morocco and its ties to the development of a Jewish cultural tourism that targets Israeli tourists of North African and Ashkenazi descent. It also analyzes the political and social debates about Israeli relations with Morocco and Tunisia, and Jewish-Muslim relations that have been generated by this movement of cultural preservation. This chapter argues that this movement has a philo-Semitic dimension given its focus on Jewish capital and tourism revenues rather than on a serious national debate about the place of Jews as citizens in Morocco and Tunisia. While Jews are admired as successful business owners and traders, they are socially and religiously stigmatized because of their direct or indirect links to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Therefore, negative perceptions of Jews are seen largely through debates revolving around the appropriateness of normalizing relations with Israel, especially after the Arab uprisings. Even with the damaging political impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on perceptions of Jews in Morocco and Tunisia, governments are still using their countries’ historical Jewish heritage to market a living Jewish culture in North African cities and villages.

This chapter focuses on literary representations of Jewish women in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco. Contrasting “Sultana Cohén's Lyrical Itinerary,” a text that Luis Antonio de Vega published in 1938 in the Falangist magazine Vértice, Ángel Vázquez's 1976 novel Juanita Narboni's Wretched Life, and Farida Benlyazid's 2005 film version of Vázquez's work, the chapter establishes a dialogue among literary, visual, and historical representations of Jewish women in the Protectorate in order to critique a colonialist narrative that, as Benlyazid's film shows, persists today. The analysis reveals the ways in which constructions of a Muslim and Jewish “other” shifted according to historical contingencies, specifically during the Spanish Civil War, when the discourse of a Spanish-Moroccan “brotherhood” was prominent in Nationalist propaganda; during World War II, when Spanish officials voiced anti-Semitic rhetoric in both the Iberian Peninsula and the Protectorate, during the decolonization of Africa, and in the present day.

Central Asian classical music (broadly called maqom or more specifically, Shashmaqom) is the foremost music of presentation for Bukharian Jews, representing the community on New York's multiculturalist “world music” stages. Maqom is historically the primary space for Bukharians to navigate relationships with their “others,” especially Muslim Central Asians, and the music continues to be a space for intercultural exchange as Bukharians' “others” shift in the new environment. Also, the Shashmaqom in particular was used in the Soviet Union to help define the new Uzbek and Tajik nationalities, and Bukharian Jews in have adopted the nationalistic uses of maqom in New York. To satisfy these representational needs, maqom is increasingly becoming a small heritage repertoire, although musicians are finding ways to adapt the music to the changing needs of the immigrant community.

The problems and paradoxes of French Republican identity in the early 21st century made Jewish Frenchness contingent on reinforcing the distinction between Jewishness and Arabness. Jewish institutional elites and Sephardi day school youth worked to produce this distinction, but in ways that were divergent and internally contradictory, thus compounding the problem of contingent Jewish Frenchness.

A pilgrimage to Jewish cemeteries in Tashkent, Samarkand, Shahrisabz, and Bukhara serves as an opportunity to reconsider the New York immigrant community in terms of the global Bukharian diaspora. The trip reinforces several key points: music and poetry continually express complex ideas of diaspora, Bukharian Jews' adaptation strategies in New York are based in their Central Asian experiences, and professional musicians have a special role in guiding the community and serving as intercultural emissaries.