Introduction: Postscript to brown

In his introduction to the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the journal’s editor responds to a review, by the historian Peter Brown, of a Metropolitan Museum exhibit on Jerusalem in the high Middle Ages. Brown’s argument is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews, during the years 1100–1400, shared a single “religious culture.” The editor replies by showing how the three monotheisms share a religious culture even today in Jerusalem and the Holy Land and that they are developing one as well elsewhere in the world. The author describes the progress toward and regress from mutual understanding of Jewish and Muslim undergraduates in a course on Christianity that he teaches at an Israeli university. He offers, in addition, documentary, anecdotal, and personal evidence of Jewish and Christian Islamophilia, Muslim and Christian philo-Semitism, and Jewish and Muslim Christophilia during the years since he immigrated to Israel in 1998.