Jews, Gentiles, and Muslims: Theoretical Reflections on Interreligious Boundaries, Ethical Interaction, and Public Responsibility

Abstract

The comparative study of religion shows that religious communities rarely define themselves in isolation. They are shaped through revelation, law, ritual discipline, moral imagination, historical struggle, and encounter with religious others. This article offers a theoretical and comparative reflection on Jewish conceptions of Gentiles and Islamic conceptions of non-Muslims. It argues that Judaism and Islam both maintain meaningful boundaries, but these boundaries are not reducible to hostility, ethnic superiority, or social prejudice. Rather, they function as theological, ethical, legal, and communal frameworks through which believers understand covenant, revelation, moral responsibility, and public order. Drawing on the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic tradition, the Qur’an, Hadith, classical Islamic legal categories, and contemporary scholarship, the article examines how Jews, Gentiles, Muslims, and non-Muslims have been imagined within sacred and social worlds. It uses theoretical insights from Mary Douglas, Talal Asad, Robert Bellah, Daniel Boyarin, Rene Girard, Joshua Sabih, Magnus Zetterholm, Christine Hayes, Mark Cohen, and other scholars to interpret boundaries as identity-forming structures that can become either protective disciplines or exclusionary instruments. In keeping with the structure and scholarly pattern of a recently published article on faithful and responsible public ethics, this study also connects interreligious boundaries with contemporary concerns such as plural citizenship, minority rights, interfaith harmony, social unity, human dignity, and public responsibility. The article concludes that the religious other is not merely outside the community. The other often becomes the mirror through which the community clarifies its own identity, tests its ethical maturity, and discovers the universal implications of its particular faith.