From the Media: a Pan-Abrahamic Conversation
Tel Aviv and Cambridge universities share a bold plan to reshape the study of — and understanding between — the three great monotheistic faiths
From Austria and Argentina to Israel and Indonesia, adherents of the Abrahamic faiths account for over half of the world’s population. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are three faiths with uneasy pasts, conflicting versions of history and paradigms of truth, revelation and redemption. Amid this complex, millennia-old interaction, Tel Aviv University’s Professor Menachem Fisch discusses the evolution of the new field of Interreligious Studies, his strategic partnership with the University of Cambridge, and how greater insight into and respect for each other’s traditions can be achieved through a pioneering new approach to the study of religion itself.
Q. How would you encapsulate the field of Interreligious Studies?
The idea is to study the three great religions not separately, but as interconnected traditions that exist amongst and influence each other. Interreligious Studies is being built on the understanding that to properly understand the three Abrahamic faiths, one has to take into account the dialogue that each is conducting with the other two traditions. We didn’t evolve separately, and we don’t exist independently. We are all part of the same, interconnected Abrahamic tapestry.
This dialogue is a complicated one. It’s conscious and sub-conscious, inclusive and exclusive, explicit and implicit. The three faith traditions — in the complexity of their thought, liturgy, social structure, codes of dress, ways of thinking and artistically expressing their religiosity — were and remain in intimate dialogue with each other. It’s therefore essential that they be studied and taught within the same institutional framework, not as three separate fields of study.
Q. Does that mean to say that the traditional field of Religious Studies is becoming redundant?
Not at all — the TAU-Cambridge interreligious approach is intended to enrich, not undermine, the role of Jewish or Islamic or Christian Studies as separate disciplines. The idea is rather to create two centers, one at Tel Aviv and one at Cambridge, in which researchers from these departments will study and teach the faiths shoulder-to-shoulder. This approach is unique to TAU and Cambridge.
Nor is our initiative intended to undermine the valuable work done in departments of comparative religion worldwide. To study the religions interreligiously is to better understand those particular formations by not only comparing how the three faiths conducted themselves separately, but by attending carefully to the way in which they engaged and interacted with each other at every level.
Take, for example, the role of mediating languages and translations in the migration of ideas, methods and modes of reading across religious and cultural boundaries. TAU faculty are conducting pioneering research into the way Islamic texts were translated into Hebrew, Hebrew texts were translated into Latin and so on at crucial moments in history. Conversion is also an important area of study in this regard — people who actually move between religions and talk back and forth across interreligious boundaries.
Q. Is it scholarship for scholarship’s sake, or to serve a higher purpose?
Both. One is to pioneer a new academic field through innovative research and teaching, and the other is to strengthen and foster interreligious dialogue and understanding. Interreligious Studies is the methodology for studying the religions in an integrative, collaborative manner, and interreligious dialogue is the relationship between practitioners themselves. They are at once separate but also interconnected.
What sets the Cambridge-Tel Aviv initiative apart is the creation of platforms for interreligious dialogue for practitioners to meet and engage one another with the understanding gained of the importance of the other two religions to the formation of their own. Thanks to our unique academic approach, clergy, teachers, and lay leaders will meet each other as partners in a rich, millennia-old dialogue of differences, part of it painful and violent, yet much of it instructive and mutually formative.
This creates a dynamic that is lacking in much interfaith dialogue around the world, whereby the idea is to achieve solidarity by emphasising our superficial “sameness” — us all being “the children of Abraham” and “created in the image of god” — a forced universalism that ignores everything that makes each religion special. We don’t need to abandon our individual faith traditions to become closer.
Q. How did the partnership with Cambridge evolve?
Our coming together was initiated by Mrs Emilia Mosseri, an Israel-based international businesswoman who has an ongoing relationship with Cambridge and who was working hard to nurture relations between it and a Jewish Studies center in Israel. After preliminary meetings between TAU and Cambridge representatives, with the intention of collaborating at the level of MA studies, it soon became clear that we were talking about something exceedingly larger than two graduate programs with a student and faculty exchange, something far more ambitious.
Q. What’s the vision, and how will it come to fruition?
We resolved to establish centers at each university that would spearhead a new approach to the study of religion. TAU’s Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies (CRIS) will bring together the expertise of our Hebrew Culture, Islamic and Middle Eastern departments, supplemented by new faculty appointments in Christianity and Islam. The Cambridge University Project for Religion in the Humanities (CUPRiH) will supplement its considerable assets in the study of Christianity and Islam with new appointments in Jewish Studies. These two centers will act as the interfacing partners of the Cambridge-TAU initiative, placing religious studies on a new collaborative and integrative footing.
Specifically, TAU’s CRIS has a tripartite structure, consisting of research and teaching centers and a strong public outreach unit. Our annual upcoming joint international conference, entitled “With God on Our Side: Holy War and Sacred Struggle in Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” will bring together experts from around the world to discuss some of the most pressing and fascinating dimensions of religious violence.
Each university is committed to making four new appointments over the next five years. Here at TAU, CRIS will recruit two scholars in Islamic Religiosity, and two in Christian Religiosity, one of whom we have already recruited — Dr. Barbara Meyer, a German-born Protestant theologian who has made Israel her home. In addition, we plan to initially offer 18 fellowships to graduate, doctoral and post-graduate students in the field.
We have also committed ourselves to teaching at least 50% of the MA courses in English, so that non-Israeli students can attend, and Cambridge was insistent that its students would study Hebrew while here. So the student exchange program will be robust, diverse and multi-faceted. Here in Israel, amid the intensity of religiously-driven conflicts, establishing such an MA program is both timely and pressing — its relevancy and implications are enormous.
This leads us into the final sphere of CRIS’s activity — public outreach. The Center will establish a unit devoted to promoting dialogue and mutual understanding among leaders and community representatives of each of the three religions. We’ll host seminars, symposia, lectures and public forums in which participants will have the opportunity to engage in open and candid debate regarding key issues of shared importance.
Q. Who heads the Cambridge side?
As the director of Cambridge’s interdisciplinary Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities – the extensive activities and research groups of which are designed to challenge existing disciplinary boundaries — Prof. Goldhill is CRIS’s ideal partner.He is a Professor of Greek Literature and Culture who has written widely on the complex reception of the classics in modernity at all levels – religion, politics, sex, education and so on. He also has a keen interest in the influence of classical Judaism on the present – he’s written about the temples and a wonderful book about Jerusalem, entitled City of Longing.
Q. As an observant Jew, how important has your personal faith been to your involvement in the field of Interreligious Studies?
I’m both a researcher and practitioner of Rabbinic Judaism and, yes, my personal faith was pivotal in leading me to my understanding of the field. My main vocation is the history and philosophy of science, and as an outgrowth of this, I’ve also written on Talmudic literature.
What fascinates me about these texts is their profound dialogical form. The Babylonian Talmud is an enormous, multi-volume protocol of an intense discussion of every aspect of religious life, rite and thought. It’s a canon that invites its readers not to learn the truth from it, but to join the discussion and engage in it. The Talmudic literature’s dialogues of faith extend to profound framework disputes between rabbinic houses representative of decidedly different religious approaches, and even further to matrons and prostitutes, soldiers and peasants, Roman legislators and Roman Emperors and dignitaries and many more. Talmudic critical exchange is combative but not defensive. Talmudic religiosity, one could say, thrives on the challenges of the very otherness of the civilized other.
Q. Who and where are your Muslim partners? Are there plans to expand the TAU—Cambridge partnership to include a university in a Muslim country?
It’s a tricky subject. First of all, you have to differentiate between experts in Islam and Muslim partners. There are leading experts in Jewish studies who are not Jewish, such as the head of the Jewish Studies department at Princeton. One’s own religious commitment or ethnic background is not what we’re talking about, at least not primarily. And in that respect, TAU boasts substantial forces in the study of Islamic studies.
In addition, TAU has forged a strong working relationship with the renowned Institute for the Study of Islam in Berlin. There are Muslim researchers, at this institute and at others, who are interested in what we’re doing, some of them are deeply religious.
The tricky aspect has to do with the prospect of forging ties with Islamic researchers in the Arab world. In view of the current political situation in the Middle East, such ties remain indirect via our European partners. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute harbors complex religious undertones — undertones which our upcoming conference’s public forum will bravely attempt to explore and combat, featuring the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of Religious Affairs, Dr. Mahmoud Habash, former Israeli minister Rabbi Michael Melchior, and the Greek Melkite Archbishop of Akko, Most Rev. Elias Chacour.
Q. Which of the three faiths is plagued most by fundamentalism, and what of the term “Judeo-Christian” values?
Firstly, all three faith traditions contain hard core fundamentalist communities that will not engage in interreligious dialogue, and certainly wouldn’t view it as having religious value. Islam by no means stands alone in this respect. It has proven exceedingly difficult to enlist Orthodox Israeli rabbis in studying the sacred texts of Christianity and Islam. Their reluctance stems from more than politics. Christianity’s sacred texts are still considered “Avodah Zarah” (in its biblical context, idol worship) by many, and the thought of sitting down to study the Quran with Muslims as a religiously meaningful experience is unfathomable.
Christianity also boasts its share of exclusivists, although the Roman Catholic Church stands alone in having taken a massive and impressively doctrinal step in the opposite direction. One of the most extraordinary reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s was the declaration entitled Nostra Aetate, a religiously-motivated call to engage in religious dialogue with all other religions, with special emphasis on Judaism, Christianity’s “older brother.”
As for talk of “Judeo-Christian” values, we must remember that the Golden Age of Jewish law, philosophy and study started in Muslim Spain in the Middle Ages. During this formative period, Judaism enjoyed far more meaningful interplay with Muslim thought and culture than with Christianity, even though Judaism and Christianity share a canon, which they have and still read intriguingly differently. So the term Judeo-Christian values is more of a loose catchword than a serious historical depiction of the two religions’ shared commitments.
Q. The upcoming international interreligious conference has a foreboding title that evokes jihad. Is that the focus?
We’ll be focusing on more than holy war — a dark concept shared by all three faith traditions that will be discussed in only one of the five sessions. The conference is about religion and violence in general, and will discuss all forms of sacred struggle. What we’re trying to get at are the main sites of religious struggle within the three religions. Yes, jihad is associated with Islam, but what we need to understand is that each of the three religions harbors areas of deep religious combat, ranging from the notions of sacrifice, martyrdom, and a person’s inner struggle. And the public forum will bring together three leaders deeply involved in the here and the now of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who are seeking to use religion as a force for solving, not perpetuating, the conflict.
Q. What about the Baha’i faith? Surely they should be included in the conversation as an Abrahamic and deeply universalist faith?
The Baha’i faith is certainly a very interesting religious tradition, with interreligious aspirations. However we feel that our first priority at this stage is to establish ourselves with respect to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Needless to say, once we’ve established the center, there is ample room for extending its research, teaching and public outreach efforts to other world religions. There is a very interesting Asian Studies program at TAU, which provides an ideal opportunity for adding new layers to the dialogue. The opportunities for collaboration and gaining deeper understandings between the world’s religions are endless, and the unique approach that we are pioneering with our Cambridge partners is sure to take us to higher levels of insight and interaction.
