Jews and Muslims in South Asia

Jews and Muslims in South Asia examines how Jews and Muslims relate to each other in a place where, in contrast to Europe, their perceived attitudes towards one another do not often make headlines. In the European imagination, Jews and Muslims have both been seen as the ultimate "other." At the same time, Western politics and media construct Jews and Muslims in opposition to each other and see their relationship as unavoidably polarized due to the conflictin the Middle East. In this book, Yulia Egorova explores how South Asian Jews and Muslims relate to each other outside of a Western and Christian context, and reveals that despite some important differences this relationship is still intrinsically connected to global narratives about Jews and Muslims. She alsoshows that the Hindu right have turned South Asian Jewish experiences into a rhetorical tool to deny the existence of discrimination against religious minorities, and that this ostensible celebration of Jewishness masks not only anti-Muslim, but also anti-Jewish prejudice. She argues that South Asia inherited these notions of racial and religious difference from the British during the colonial period, which continue to cause stigmatization and oppression to this day. Jews and Muslims inSouth Asia is a fascinating new contribution to the academic discussion on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and their overlapping histories.

This rigorously researched book highlights the common roots of antisemitism and Islamophobia in an ethically nuanced manner while broadening the discussion of Muslim-Jewish relations to areas outside of the Perso-Arabic context. Highly readable and relevant far outside the domains of inquiry with which it engages directly, this volume's impact is sure to be felt both inside and outside of academia., This is a groundbreaking work. As well as being an original ethnographic study of the Jews and Muslims of South Asia, it also illuminates the politics of Muslim-Jewish relations across the globe, while shedding new light on antisemitism and Islamophobia. The descriptions of people and events are absorbing, the analysis clear and compelling - which makes this book as accessible to the general reader as it is indispensable to the specialist., Charting the role of the British period in constructing and sedimenting the boundaries of Jewish and Muslim alterities in South Asia, the author offers an unrivalled insight into interconnected Jewish-Muslim imageries through which we also need to revise European framings., Yulia Egorova's fascinating book on Muslims and Jews in South Asia challenges us to think in new ways about Islamophobia, antisemitism, and Muslim-Jewish relations as a single, deeply enmeshed field.

Yulia Egorova is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, UK.