The final meeting of the six-year ERC Synergy Grant project The European Qur’an (EuQu) will take place at the Escuela de Estudios Árabes (EEA-CSIC) in Granada on 27–28 October 2025. On this occasion, I will share the outcomes of my research on premodern Hebrew translations of the Qur’an.
Focusing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translations produced from Italian and Dutch Christian versions, my work examines their circulation across religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. It highlights the role of a diverse network of actors (Italian, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Oriental, crypto-Jews, and converts) who copied, translated, read, and recontextualized these texts.
By combining digital humanities tools with philology and historical criticism, this project fills a major historiographical gap. It offers new insights into pre-nineteenth-century Jewish history and the early development of Oriental studies among Central European Ashkenazim, and demonstrates that the history of the Qur’an in Europe is deeply intertwined with the broader inner-Jewish diversity.
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.