Hughes/Somewhere, 3. Destabilizing "Judaism" in Late Antiquity

The third chapter, Destabilizing “Judaism” in Late Antiquity, was originally delivered as a seminar paper for a workshop on New Trends in Jewish Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. The paper argues that, in order to avoid its apologetic and ethnocentric excesses, the field of Jewish studies needs to jettison its basic narrative that reifies something called Judaism and that tries to articulate Jewish continuity between biblical times and the modern day. Problems in that narrative, are either thinly papered over or largely ignored, as an examination of the Jews on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad clearly reveals.