David Freidenreich is a leading scholar of medieval history who has crafted ground-breaking work on the formation and tenor of Western canon law on subjects pertaining to the relations between Christians (a term Western sources used specifically for the papal flock) and others. In the intriguingly titled and exceptionally well-written Jewish Muslims, Freidenreich takes the reader on a rewarding journey through a broad range of material to explain how and why medieval Christians portrayed Muslims as Jewish. The author does well to emphasize that the book is not about Jews or Muslims but about what Christians wrote about Jews and Muslims in works aimed at fellow Christians. There is no work that completely exhausts the possibilities it raises, of course, and therefore it is worth highlighting both some of Jewish Muslims’ salient accomplishments and areas worthy of further exploration.

Freidenreich has produced a comprehensive, yet clear and concise introduction that offers accurate summaries of each chapter: this makes an extended overview of content and arguments unnecessary. The Introduction explains the book's key concepts, including “antisemitism” and “anti-Judaism,” through clear and accessible prose. When it comes to “Jewish Muslims,” the point is that discourses pretend to describe, but in reality construct, their object in ways that establish differences, belonging, and stairsteps of power and authority. Why did medieval Western Christians frequently and authoritatively portray Muslims as Jewish? “1) to explain Muslims in biblical terms; 2) to justify military and political assaults against Muslims on theological grounds; and, especially, 3) to motivate self-differentiation through the cultivation of proper Christian characteristics” (p. 6). How rhetorical analogies work is something Jewish Muslims explains time and again in a minimalist but effective manner that greatly enhances the book's suitability for the classroom (frequent restatements of main points that are kept short and to the point, so they never feel overdriven).

The author's description of what each of the book's three parts accomplishes is accurate and each part truly delivers on the promises made in the Introduction. Part 1 shows that “the criteria by which Christians compare Muslims with Jews derive from the Bible and the discourse of anti-Judaism that crystallized during the first Christian centuries” (p. 9). Beginning with Paul, Christians deployed identity-constructing binaries originating in their attempts to define themselves against Jews, hence the centrality of discursive/model Jews to Christian identity perceptions thereafter. This binary subsequently marked Christian writings about Muslims, which had nothing to do with any interest in Muslims or attempts to understand Islam and everything to do with the erection and maintenance of clear-cut boundaries around the community of Christians. In the process, the hermeneutical Muslim was constructed from the same material as the hermeneutical Jew. Part 2 outlines the different ways in which educated Eastern and Western Christians spoke about Muslims, while sharing the fundamental presupposition that what was said reinforced the speakers’ own position within their social context. This section considers sources as diverse as a (fictional) dialogue between a Miaphysite patriarch and a Muslim emir; a letter by Timothy I, patriarch of the Church of the East in the late eighth to early ninth century; the early ninth-century monk Theophanes; the converted Jew Petrus Alfonsi (12th century); and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, one of the Catholic world's premier monasteries. The section offers a similarly representative coverage of later medieval and early modern sources. Apologetic Eastern Christian works “motivate Christians” knowledgeable of the basics of Islam “to differentiate themselves from the dominant members of their own society”; by contrast, the polemical works of Western Christians used “wildly inaccurate rhetoric … to reinforce specific notions about what it means for a society to be Christian” to an audience with little (if any) factual knowledge about Islam (p. 11). Finally, Part 3 shows that “by misrepresenting Muslims as Jews, Christians gain the ability to ascribe theological significance to their political conflicts with Muslims”; moreover, “the ability to derive actionable lessons about contemporary Muslims from the Bible itself, generates explosive rhetorical energy that powerfully advanced the objective of promoting proper Christian beliefs and practices” (p. 11). The seamless blend of qualitative and quantitative study of Luther's writings in Chapter 12 is a resounding methodological success. Perhaps the one less successful piece is the Afterword: while it makes a strong case for why people need to study the distant past, it also dates a book destined to have a long shelf life.

Before turning to some of the possibilities for further research that Jewish Muslims raises, this review must highlight the rhetorical prowess of the book. This is no small matter to anyone who teaches medieval history because the majority of innovative history work remains inaccessible to all but the most committed undergraduate students. There is a good reason for this: pioneering work on any subject typically propels its main arguments through the author's own work with sources, which necessitates much supporting material and discussions of obscure points. Thus, even when such works adopt accessible diction and clear syntax, they typically overwhelm the non-specialist. Jewish Muslims straddles the divide between analytical and synthetic scholarship. Freidenreich has balanced the amount of information presented within and between chapters and subchapters in an exemplary manner. The book offers a great deal of information and food for thought to the specialist, yet it will not overwhelm any interested reader.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Jewish Muslims practically succeeds at disarming the prospective critic. Playing devil's advocate, however, one might say that the specialist is left to ask for a sequel. There is always a compromise between pushing boundaries and producing an accessible work. One reason for this book's accessibility is its gentle, light-touch consideration of conceptual issues that appear briefly at various places in the book. This results in elegant prose that comes at the expense of direct engagement with a Foucauldian conception of discourse, in which a discourse is all the more powerful because authors and their intentions are secondary to the functions of the resulting broader, amorphous discourse, one larger in its relevance than the sum of its parts. There are two sides to this problematic. Jewish Muslims makes a concerted effort to link texts and social life, but by necessity it carries out limited work in this direction. This is an inherent and fundamental limitation not of Jewish Muslims, but rather of the single-author approach that has defined the writing of history ever since the latter emerged as an academic discipline in the 19th century. The other side of the same problematic, however, is addressable within the ambit of traditional history writing. The chief question is how the discourse about the Jewishness of Muslims links to other discourses, such as those discussed in the author's own work on commensality, or Mark Pegg's on heresy, Nancy Caciola's on gender, Benjamin Weber's on later crusades, this reviewer's work on trade embargoes, or James Muldoon's on the linkages between high medieval discourses and early modern practices beyond the confines of Europe. To be clear, publication realities make the approach adopted by David Freidenreich in Jewish Muslims unassailable. It would be unfair to ask an author to complicate their work in a manner that would appeal to a handful of colleagues but that publishers—and even some reviewers—are likely to oppose rather than embrace. Nevertheless, the specialist is left to hope that Freidenreich and fellow medievalists will continue to work in this direction and tackle head-on the role that interlocking discourses stemming from Western religious thought played in shaping medieval and early modern Western European history, and thereby also world history in the early modern period.

In short, David Freidenreich's Jewish Muslims is an extremely well-researched and wellwritten book that should make the short list of all students of medieval history as it offers a definitive treatment of its subject while stimulating further research.