Abstract:
The study of the interrelatedness of Islamic and Jewish intellectual history relies
largely on the manuscript materials preserved in the various Genizah collections. The Firkovitch
manuscripts in particular provide ample material for an analysis of the different patterns
of reception/transmission/cross-pollination between Jewish and Muslim scholars, though the
bulk of the relevant material still needs to be cataloged and studied. This essay discusses four
cases, each exemplifying a different pattern, namely, Muʿtazilī kalām and its reception among
the Karaites, the case of David ben Joshua Maimonides (d. 1415), the thirteenth-century Jewish
philosopher Ibn Kammūna and his reception among Jews and Muslims, and an anonymous
refutation by a Rabbanite Jew against the anti-Jewish polemical work Ifḥām al-yahūd by the
twelfth-century Jewish convert to Islam Samawʾal al-Maghribī.
