I will deliver a course to international students at NYU Abu Dhabi, as part of the workshop « Holy Scriptures » (April 7–9, 2025). This event explores the history, religious significance, and cultural impact of scripture in the three Abrahamic traditions. Beyond providing instruction, it encourages students to develop their own research projects, examining the connections between these texts and their mutual influence across different traditions.
My teaching session will be devoted to the evolution of the Jewish engagement with the Qur’an and Islam by focusing on modern Jewish translations of the Islamic Scriptures (19th-20th centuries). I will discuss the many dimensions through which Islam and the Qur’an were approached by the Jewish translators (theological, literary, historical-critical, political), and highlight the role of the Qur’anic translations in shaping the modern Jewish identity, often in a wider relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
I will present a paper at the conference “What is the European Qur’ān? Definitions, Descriptions, Representations (12th–19th c.)” that will be held in Nantes on 11–12 May 2023. My talk, “Qur’anic Concepts through European Translations and Retranslations of the Qur’an: A Case Study,” explores how European translations shaped understandings of the Qur’an and contributed to changing representations of the Islamic scripture across different cultural and linguistic settings.
The Masāʾil ʿAbdallāh ibn Salām (Abdallāh ibn Salām’s Questions) is a fictional dialogue between a learned Jew who converted to Islam and the prophet Muḥammad. Originally written in Arabic, it enjoyed a great popularity in the West. The text was translated into Latin as part of the Corpus Toletanum in the 12th century under the title Liber de doctrina Mahumet and then served as the basis of several translations in European vernaculars. In this online seminar we will discuss the transfer and wide European reception of this work, and assess how it influenced European knowledge of Muḥammad and Islam over centuries.