In the European imaginary Jews and Muslims have shared a common space reserved for the ultimate other and have been constructed in opposition to each other. This book examines the way Jewish and Muslim communities encounter each other in South Asia and interact in ways that do not easily fit conventional Western tropes of Jews-Muslim relations. In doing so, the book explores how, in the history of the subcontinent, globalized discourses about Jewishness and Islam intersect and acquire different dimensions in varying sociopolitical contexts in ways that cast analytical light on the notions of race, religion, and minorities. Moving on to the contemporary period, the book demonstrates how South Asian Jewish experiences have been turned into a rhetorical tool to negate the discrimination of Muslims and argues that the ostensible celebration of Jewishness in the discourse of the Hindu and, analogously, European right masks not only anti-Muslim but also anti-Jewish prejudice. It also interrogates both those accounts that inscribe Jews and Muslims as each other’s enemies and those that imagine them as linked by a commonality of theologies, rituals, and narratives, and suggests that rather than being considered as a category of analysis, Jewish-Muslim relations would be best thematized as a construct produced by the very processes of minoritization, stigmatization, and othering that have been applied to Jews and Muslims in Europe and then globalized at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Jews and Muslims in South Asia
