Page:Judaism and Islam, a prize essay - Geiger - 1898.pdf/35

 INTEBCOUBSE WITH JEWS. 17

Jewish, traditions and history had reached in the mouth of the people, as certain to appeal powerfully to the poetic genius of the prophet ; and so we cannot doubt that, in so far as he had the means to borrow from Judaism, and so long as the Jewish views were not in direct opposition to his own, Muhammad was anxious to incorporate much borrowed from Judaism into his Quran. Whether he had any such means will be discussed in the second section.

SECOND SECTION. Could Muhammad borrow from Judaism? and if so, how was such borrowing possible for him?
The possibility of borrowing from Judaism lay for Muhammad, partly in the knowledge which, might be imparted to him by word of mouth through intercourse with the Jews, and partly in personal knowledge of their Scriptures; while allowing him the first source of information, we must deny him the second.

From passages already quoted to which we might add many others we gather that there must hare been great intimacy between Muhammad and the Jews, leading at times even to mutual discussion of views ; but this is still more clearly shown in a passage in the second Sura, 1 where the Jews are represented as double faced, professing belief when they were with him and his followers, and then when they were alone saying : " Will ye acquaint them, with what God has revealed unto you, that they may\ dispute with you ? " This shows that the Muslims learned the Jewish views from conversation_only. We shall speak later of Muhammad's intimacy with f Abdu'lMh ibn Salam, and with Waraka, the cousin of Khadija, who was for some time a Jew, a learned man and acquainted with the Hebrew

1 Sura II. 71. &>

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