Every year, the University of Tübingen awards the Leopold Lucas Prize to distinguished theologians, historians or philosophers promoting interfaith dialogue and religious tolerance through their work. In 2018 the Leopold Lucas Prize was awarded to Sarah and Guy G. Stroumsa. The book under review is composed of two papers written by them. The papers are followed by Michael Tilly's address at the 2018 award ceremony.

In ‘Convivencia in the medieval Islamic East: al-Raqqa, Mosul, Aleppo’, Sarah Stroumsa examines the interactions between Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities in the medieval Islamic East during the so-called Convivencia. According to Stroumsa, the depiction of Islamic Spain as ‘tolerant’ is ‘highly anachronistic’ (p. 16), and ‘Spain's special place’ could be explained through the region's location in Europe (p. 56). The paper thus focuses on the ‘Oriental Convivencia’ and aims to show how ‘Islamicate’ places such as Baghdad and al-Raqqa were no less ‘tolerant’ than Cordoba and Granada. Stroumsa argues that Spain failed to bring together ‘las tres culturas’ simultaneously, and that the cultural ‘contributions’ of either pre-1085 Christians or post-1085 Muslims were trivial (p. 56). Perhaps the most innovative argument of Stroumsa’s paper is that the legacy of late antique Christian academies in the Middle East offered ‘the possibility of warm philosophical collaboration’ among the scriptural communities (p. 58). Unfortunately, she does not pursue this line of inquire further. Instead, after providing some ‘contemporary snapshots’ of contemporary al-Raqqa, Mosul and Aleppo, Stroumsa presents two texts in the two separate appendixes. The first text is an annotated translation of the Muslim Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 1248)'s entry on the Jewish Joseph Ibn Shim'on: ‘a prime example of such a relationship of parity between philosophers’ (p. 62). Joseph Ibn Shim’on is also the focus of the second appendix, an analysis of a text written by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (d. 1231). According to Stroumsa, these texts exemplify how the ‘Convicencia, in the Levant as elsewhere, was and still is, made or unmade by individuals’ (p. 90). Although Stroumsa is right in claiming that contemporary interfaith dialogues often ‘leave out the third edge of the triangle’ (p. 60), her argument is weakened by a focus on texts which largely ‘leave out’ Christianity.

The essay by Guy G. Stroumsa is titled ‘When the Orient moved East: Judaism and Islam in nineteenth-century scholarship’. It provides an overview of nineteenth-century European scholarship on Judaism and Islam, highlighting the tendency of scientific scholarship to mirror socio-political and cultural developments. Prompted by discussions on immigration from Muslim countries, Stroumsa aims to ‘shed some light on contemporary debates’ by reflecting on past anti-semitic propaganda. Guy Stroumsa emphasises once again how one of the ‘three edges of the triangle’ is often left out in discussions on scriptural traditions. Indeed, Christianity was ‘rarely part of the picture’ (p. 134) and ‘Christian perceptions of Judaism and Islam’ were always fluctuating, in spite of geographic affiliations. The secularisation carried out by the Enlightenment erased the ‘Abrahamic family resemblance’ and changed the Europeans’ perception of Christianity, which emerged as a ‘European religion’ (p. 148) cut off from Middle Eastern Judaism and Islam. It was only with the Indophilia in vogue during Romanticism that the ‘Semitic world’ was re-discovered (p. 158). ‘The Orient would now move East’ (p. 158), as pointed out by Michel Despland in L'Émergence des sciences de la religion (1999). Stroumsa explains that while the ‘new’ ‘Aryan India’ became the ‘good Orient’, the ‘old’ semitic Middle East was identified with the ‘bad Orient’ (p. 158–9). Meanwhile, Christianity remained a non-semitic religion. At the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Max Müller included the Qur’ān among The sacred books of the East but left out the ‘European’ Bible. Meanwhile the Jews, as Stroumsa highlights, ‘were neither here nor there’ (p. 174) and even the Jewish identity of Jesus and Moses came to be disputed (p. 178–80).

Michel Tilly's speech at the end of the book emphasises the benefits of an ‘enlightened idea of tolerance in public discourse’ (p. 214). However, the shaping of European Enlightenment was precisely the condicio sine qua non for the emergence of ‘European’ Christianity which led to Christianity's estrangement from the other two scriptural traditions, and the ‘othering’ of Judaism and Islam. Christianity’s role as a plausible channel of Jewish knowledge to Muḥammad in the Ḥijāz was then forgotten to the convenience of the European elites’ propaganda. None the less, othering can be a communal as much as an individual process. As pointed out by Guy Stroumsa, scholars need to become more conscious of the ‘unconscious of the discipline’ so as to purse the two-fold aim of understanding the past and address the core problems in today's society (p. 190). Indeed, the process of ‘othering’ can be based on either a conscious or unconscious assumption of a ‘threat’. Dismissing the Spanish convivencia to highlight the tolerant milieu of a place like Mosul, could unveil that ‘unconsciousness of the discipline’ Guy Stroumsa warns us about. Although the Jews dwelling in the Caliphate appear to have enjoyed a more tolerant milieu compared to those inhabiting medieval northern Europe (or any part of Europe in modern times), this topos was largely propagated by apologetic works composed by twentieth-century Muslim scholars opposed to the creation of Israel, a project which the Jews deemed necessary on the basis of repeated persecutions from antiquity onwards. According to nationalist Jews adherent to Zionism, medieval Muslim rulers persecuted the Jewish communities in Islamic lands as much as their western counterparts, fuelled by a negative Quranic vision which originated in late antiquity. It would benefit the discipline if scholars comparing and contrasting scriptural traditions focused more on their similarities than on their differences. Scholars researching scriptural communities should do the same, bearing in mind the constant risk of downplaying one milieu in order to shed light on a more neglected other.