Suspended in 2025/26
HY344      One Unit
Muslim-Jewish Relations: History and Memory in the Middle East and Europe

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most discussions of Muslim-Jewish relations focus on the period after 1948. Muslims and Jews, however, have engaged one another for over 1,400 years. Just as at the beginning, when Muhammad first met Jewish Arabs in Medina in 622, Jewish and Muslim relations have spanned the spectrum of human interaction, for better and for worse. What approaches have historians taken to understand the connected histories of Jews and Muslims in Middle Eastern and European history, from their earliest relations in seventh-century Arabia to mid-twentieth-century Europe? Through attention to historical events and personalities as well to religious texts, language, law, ritual, sacred spaces, intellectual and spiritual movements, art, architecture, and literature we will explore different approaches to the history and memory of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Middle East and Europe, evenly divided between the pre modern and the modern period. Students are advised that this is not a history of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be expected to read essential primary and secondary material for each weekly meeting and to participate in the seminar discussions.

Students will be required to write one formative 3,000 word essay during the AT.

Our main narrative reader is A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, From Their Origins to the Present Day, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), BP173.J8 H67, referred to as “Meddeb.” The LSE library has an e-book version of this text.

Presentation (15%)

Essay (50%, 3000 words)

Essay (35%, 3000 words)