A reconstructed history of a complex Jewish community in Arabia at a critical juncture in world history.

The Jewish communities of Arabia had a great influence on the attitudes that Muslims hold toward Jews, and yet relatively little has been written about their history. The sources are sparse, and Arabic literary texts from the early period of Islam remain the greatest source of our understanding of Arabian Judaism. Through techniques borrowed from anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, and comparative religion, Gordon Darnell Newby reconstructs the understanding of Jewish life in Arabia before and during the time of Muhammad. In addition this material is used to develop a perspective on the inter-confessional relations between Judaism and Islam during an era when the latter was at one of its most dynamic stages of growth.