Why, Indeed, History Should Sometimes Repeat Itself: a Review of History as a Prelude

Can Jews and Muslims live together harmoniously? In History as a Prelude (Lexington Books), Editor Joseph Montville offers his approach to such questions:

I became convinced that apparently intractable ethnic conflict was a form of human pathology and it required a strategy created by political analysts working with psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, historians, and regional and cultural affairs experts to essentially take a history of the conflict the way a physician takes a history of a patient's illness (pg vii).

Borrowing from his analogy, Montville has masterfully played the role of lead physician in pulling together an interdisciplinary team reminiscent of Cleveland Clinic’s Multispecialty Group Practice. Montville has assembled scholars of international repute who authoritatively discredit one of the most damaging – and pernicious – fallacies in international relations today: that Arabs and Jews have never coexisted peacefully and prosperously. This is a second opinion that should be taken seriously.

By scouring source materials gathered from the Cairo Geniza and bringing together perspectives on these historic writings from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the true history of Muslims and Jews and Christians is revealed. Thinkers such as Mark Cohen of Princeton and Ahmad Dallal of the American University of Beirut exhume the history of intermixed and thriving communities of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the medieval Mediterranean. Montville’s keen eye for the multiple facets of conflict brings to History as a Prelude a surprising mix of perspectives, including Thomas Glick’s chapter on Jewish-Muslim scientific collaboration (“the common Aristotelian framework created a space for intellectual discourse that was neutral with respect to religious ideology,” pg 29) and Raymond Scheindlin’s careful study of the unexpected influence Jews wielded in the courts of Muslim rulers, delivered through the prism of an eleventh century poem (…form and genre derive from a conscious mixing of Jewish and Arabic models,” pg 57).

Montville and his colleagues have curated a collection of incontrovertible proof that harmonious relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians existed and flourished in the Middle Ages. I agree with Montville when he says this edited volume “is a major contribution to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process because it undermines—in fact blows away—the efforts of propagandists serving governments or political movements to negate the reality of the Arab-Jewish relationship in the medieval Mediterranean” (pg ix). No words could be trusted more than those finely curated from the documents of the historical figures themselves. This book lays the foundation for a future built together on the promise of past collective successes, not torn asunder by a narrow focus on past grievances. It challenges the simple story of constant discord employed by conflict entrepreneurs to take advantage of our pitiable human penchant for tidy, uncomplicated stories.

History as a Prelude is compulsory reading for the current and the next generation of Jews, Muslims, and Christians wading into the heavy water of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It interrupts the usual narrative and, in doing so, opens the possibility of repeating a better past.