Berkeley Conference Whitewashes History in Positing a 'Judeo-Muslim Civilization'

by Winfield Myers  •  May 14, 2010 at 11:15 am

http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2010/05/berkeley-conference-whitewashes-history-in

When scholars speak of a "Judeo-Muslim civilization," what do they have in mind? Does the construction make sense given the relationship between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East over the past 1,400 years? In the latest Campus Watch research, Rima Greene reports on a conference at UC-Berkeley at which scholars twisted history to fit their preferred interpretation; her article appears today at FrontPage Magazine:

A conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 28-29, 2010 (and continued at UC Davis on April 30), "Muslims and Jews Together: Seeing From Without; Seeing From Within," was billed as a major international symposium for "the inauguration of the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at UC Berkeley and the establishment of a UC-wide and West Coast working group for the study of Muslim-Jewish relations ."

The conference was a collaborative effort between the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at UC Berkeley and the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis. Its stated purpose was to use the frameworks of traditional Middle East studies and Jewish studies to develop a new academic field focused on the historical interaction between Muslims and the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who once lived among them. Most of the participants were historians or anthropologists specializing in North African Jewry, particularly Morocco.

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