Word: jewish
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...specify which son God tells Abraham to sacrifice. Muslim interpreters a generation after Muhammad concluded that the prophet was descended from the slave woman Hagar's boy, Ishmael. Later scholarly opinion determined that Ishmael was also the son who went under the knife. The decision effectively completed the Jewish disenfranchisement. Not only was their genealogical claim void, but their forefather lost his role in the great drama of surrender...
Things devolved from there. Jews, stung, took steps to cement Abraham's Jewish identity. The Talmud describes him anachronistically as following Mosaic law and speaking Hebrew. And they severely downgraded Ishmael. Initially, says Shaul Magid, professor of Midrash at New York City's Jewish Theological Seminary, Jewish parents named their boys after Abraham's Arab son, but the custom evaporated as they began living under Muslim rule. By the 11th century the great biblical scholar Rashi, citing earlier authorities, described Ishmael as a "thief" whom "everybody hates," an insult that can still be found in his prominently placed commentary...
There is an eerie effortlessness to the way in which fights picked by scriptural revisionists hundreds of years ago feed today's psychology of mutual victimhood. The Jewish Theological Seminary's Magid describes a 1st century tradition in which Ishmael is a bully and Isaac "becomes the persecuted younger brother." That belief has persisted. "The Muslims are very aggressive, like Ishmael," an Israeli settler tells Feiler. "And the Jews are very passive, like Isaac, who nearly allows himself to be killed without talking back. That's why they are killing us, because we don't fight back." Arafat's religious...
...ever to respect and understand one another, a key road leads through Abraham. Says Fisher of the Conference of Catholic Bishops: "We can't not talk to each other about him." But identifying a path does not make it passable. Part of the problem, says Jon Levenson, a Harvard Jewish-studies professor who has examined affinities and conflicts in the Abrahamic traditions, is that even before they went to work on him, his story featured a theme of exclusivity. "If you want a symbol for universal humanity, go to Adam," he says. "Don't go to Abraham, because his whole...
Such rapprochement, especially involving Muslims, has been trickier in the past 12 months. Interfaith advocates say that after the attacks, many plans for Jewish-Muslim conversations fell through. One group that bucked the trend was the Children of Abraham Institute, a Charlottesville, Va., association that organizes intensive three-way scriptural studies modeled on Abraham's hospitality to the strangers at his tent. It has held meetings in Denver and at England's Cambridge University and has sent representatives to lecture in Cape Town, South Africa, and parley with imams in Malaysia. It has the ear of the incoming Archbishop ofCanterbury...