Quibbling Cohen

Here is where I will proffer errata / corrigenda to Mark Cohen's Under Crescent & Cross. Overall keep in mind that Cohen has, overall, convinced me of this particular thesis of his; as surely as Kevin MacDonald has convinced me that the Byzantine Empire had a few antiSemites out and about, whatever each author's minor errors. To what degree I disagree with Cohen, or with MacDonald for that matter, on philosophy: I can deal with that elsewhere.

I have already quibbled Cohen's reading of 'Abd al-Razzâq (or is it Ibn Jurayj?). We absolutely must bring Milka Levy-RubinLuke Yarbrough and lately Sarah Mirza into the Pact of 'Umar; p. 164 on Mutawakkil is just plain wrong. For some of this Cohen was writing in 1994 and, honestly, as of 2008's edition there wasn't much more added to our body of knowledge.

As I look around the innertubes for other critiques, I think Shatzmiller's apologia for Christian tolerance amounts to quibbling given that Cohen does, indeed, speak of European tolerance... sporadic tolerance. Although, sure, more evidence is better evidence.

I excoriate this man Cohen for not including a Bibliography for ease of reference. You want PDF pirates? This is how you get PDF pirates.

Cohen p. 171 falls into the same mistake about Gregory of Nyssa that our own antiSemites do. Chrysostom would have served his case better - or, at all. I'll allow that Cohen's point goes more to Catholic acceptance of this pseudepigraphon.

Cohen notes what historians of Islamic-era Jewry lament: the lack of Jewish historiography within the Orient. Cf. Hoyland, 238: woeful. Although, the Letter of Sherira does exist. Sherira, I propose, based his Letter upon such minor chronicles in Jewish Aramaic as Andrew Palmer relayed to us 1993 in the "West-Syrian" Christendom. We are simply not as fortunate in our Jewish studies; we do not (yet?) own a Jewish Zuqnin-Chronicle.

Hunting further around, I find Daniel Pi[e]pes, basically agreeing with this book. He thinks that Islam's approach to Judaism and to Jews hardened from the thirteenth century on, in parallel with the northern Christians'. He wanted a more diachronic organisation to Cohen's project as a result. I am skeptical that Pipes read this book closely enough.

I'll help Pipes out here, albeit for an earlier time: Cohen's definitions of "Islam" and "Christianity" aren't static, despite what Muslims and Christians themselves will often tell us. Islam on the face of it looks easy: as Cohen points out, normative Sunnism. But al-Andalus / the Maghreb swapped legal theories: they had Awza'ism inherited from the Umayyads, then the Malikiya from the Hijaz. Out in Iraq, it's again caliph-centred Mu'tazilism by way of Sufyan al-Thawri, swapped here for Shi'a-friendly Hanifism. Cohen doesn't quite take these changes into account, exactly legal (with some ideology of the Islamic state). I find Cohen better on Christianity, although Justinian aside he's mostly looking to the Latins. Here, I see a difference between "The Church" as local bishops largely independent of the contemptible Dark-Age Roman episcopacy, before the AD mid-eleventh century; and the muscular Papacy of Leo IX, Gregory VII and beyond. Cohen seems aware of this himself; noting the long tail of Theodosius II and then Burchard bishop of Worms issuing his own canon-law before these Popes, in AD 1012.