Muslims and Jews

Age-old enemies locked in an eternal cycle of oppression and resentment.

Or so we think. But what if Jews and Muslims are not intractable antagonists,

but estranged relatives?

Mark David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics.

In his new book, Children of Abraham, the story of Jewish-Muslim relations,

he argues that Jewish Muslim history cannot be reduced either to a lost golden age of coexistence

or to a story of eternal hatred.

For more than a thousand years, their relationship was closer, richer and stranger than our present moment allows us to imagine.

From the Prophet Muhammad's Arabia to medieval Spain, from the Ottoman Empire to

colonial North Africa, and from the birth of Zionism to the aftermath of the 7th of October.

Bear shows how modern conflict has hardened memories that were once far more complicated.

I'm Thomas Small. This is my

conflicted conversation with Mark David Bear.

Hello, Mark. Very nice to meet you, sir. Thanks for coming on Conflicted. It's great to

have you on the show.

Hello, Thomas. Thank you for having me.

You've come on the show, Mark, to discuss your excellent new book, Children of Abraham, the story of Jewish-Muslim relations.

At the outset, I'll say, it is excellent. Dear listeners, it is rich, it is packed with information.

It tells an incredible story judiciously, objectively, neither romantic nor ideologically charged.

It's a very balanced history, and it tells a great story. You tell the whole story, Mark, of Jewish-Muslim relations, which really involves kind of telling

the whole history of the world for the last 2,000 years. But you do it kind of largely from the

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