Sopher, a Cambridge-educated banker who is 66, has a longstanding involvement in interfaith – he is a trustee of the Woolf Institute in Cambridge for the study of Jewish, Muslim and Christian relations. What paved the way for the book, he said, was when the institute “allowed me to convene an online group of professors and scholars in this field, which is trypically referred to as intertextuality, comparing texts. There are a small number of professors dotted around the world, mainly in California but also in Oxford, Cambridge and other places.”
It happened around the time of Covid when virtual communication began to take off. “I could feed this group questions that were on my mind about the connections between the Qur’an and the Torah and they would debate it in front of me.”
When the idea for the book came to him, two people in particular encouraged him. “One was the late Rabbi Sacks, who thought it was a must. The other was the doyen of academics in this field, Rabbi Reuven Firestone [professor of medieval Judaism and Islam at the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles].”
It was Firestone who recommended Galadari’s name for the online group. The two co-editors met face to face for the first time on a Woolf Institute tour of Istanbul, where Sopher invited him to do the book.
But Sopher believes deep down the driving motivation was his own personal history. “Our family was probably in Iraq for more than 2000 years and then all of a sudden between 1930 and 1971 – the last of my family to leave was in 1971 when our uncles escaped – it came to an end. So my question has been was this ending something theologically based, something in the scripture… or were there other reasons?”
And as he pursued his intellectual quest, he was surprised by what he found. “I had not realised the Qur’an talks so much either about the material that is in the Torah or allusions to material in the Torah,” he said.
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While some attempt to trace tensions between Jews and Muslims today to sentiments within the Qur’an, he stresses: “Much of the anti-Jewish polemic coming from Muslim sources is not found in the Qur’an. So if you take the Hamas 1988 charter which has that nasty quote, if there is a Jew behind a tree or a stone, come and kill him, that is not in the Qur’an.”
While the Qur’an does criticise some Jews, mostly for not upholding the Torah, he points out “there are verses that are nasty about some Jews in our own Tanach. And if you put them side by side, my view is that our Tanach has nastier verses about some Jews than the Qur’an.”
Furthermore, educated readers will understand the historic background to a religious text and the religious climate at the time it emerged. But if you strip extracts out of that context and shout them in the street, he said “it can be much more aggressive”.
The idea that Jews had distorted the words of the Torah was not part of early Islam but a later development, he argues. “My co-author and I believe that there was a timeline of the understanding of tahrif, a concept much debated in Islamic history and understood to mean either misinterpretation or falsification.
“Our understanding is that for at least the first several hundred years of Islam, Jews were considered to have misinterpreted the Torah – a bit like when you get a new rabbi at the synagogue and you say I don’t like his opinion on that particular thing. But only later did it come to be understood as falsification of the text of the Torah.”
Along with that came a growing trend to differentiate between Jewish and Muslim tradition. The Qur’an, for example, does not name which of Abraham’s sons is nearly sacrificed. Early Islamic exegetes accepted it was Isaac but only later was it said to be Ishmael.
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It may be “very little mentioned” in Islamic circles today, Sopher says, but the Qur’an does not contest the biblical notion of a Jewish homeland. “The Qur’an’s reference to Al-ard al-muqaddasah, the Holy Land is, I think, the first time the phrase was used prominently.”
Quoting one verse in Arabic, he translates, “‘O my people, enter the Holy Land that God has ordained for you.’ And there is no counterclaim in the whole of the Qur’an.”
At one point, he asked the online academic group to give a yes or no answer to the question of whether the Qur’an actually contradicted anything fundamental in the Torah. “Being academics, they all threw their arms up initially and said we refuse to answer yes or no questions, I cajoled them a bit and in the end they all basically agreed that the Qur’an did not contradict anything fundamental contained in the Torah,” he said.
On the other side, he observes, there has been a long tradition in Western academia, beginning with Rabbi Abraham Geiger in Germany in the 1830s, that viewed any deviation in the Qur’an from the Torah as a mistake or a garbled version.
But the book exemplifies “a new wave of academic study of intertextuality which considers that each book could have been revealed separately and does not claim that one is the derivative of the other. To my mind, that approach both makes some sense and is much more conducive to good interfaith relations.”
Illuminating Scriptural Connections – a Qur’anic Commentary on the Torah, JPS, is out now
