When Muhammad Meets Abarbanel: Punishment, Kingship, and Forbidden Foods

One of the ideas Muhammad develops during the Al-Medina period is that the laws God gave the Jews, especially the dietary laws, were imposed as a punishment for their defiance. Islam, he argues, came and annulled all of those laws, save for very few. God did not forbid Muslims any foods that are naturally palatable to the Arab taste. Those Jewish laws are nothing but burdens and shackles that God placed upon the Children of Israel (Sura 2, 286, Sura 4, 158 or 160, Sura 7, 156 or 157).

On the face of it this is a classic interfaith critique, however it is striking to discover that within Judaism itself there is room for a similar conception, for example:

The Jewish leadership model underwent many turns across its own historiography. It begins with a centralized leadership in the figure of a prophet, redeemer, judge, lawgiver, and supreme national leader, namely Moses, who takes the Israelites out of Egypt. At his side, unsurprisingly, stands the head of the cultic institution, the “High Priest,” his brother Aaron and his descendants. Later, on the advice of his father-in-law Jethro, Moses decentralizes power and builds a hierarchical structure of captains of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens to judge the people. Later come princes over the twelve tribes, and even a council of seventy elders to assist him in leading the nation. Moses even decentralizes prophecy itself and allows younger prophets, Eldad and Medad, to prophesy independently. After Moses’s death the supreme leadership passes to the military commander, Joshua bin Nun, who conquers the land, alongside a still present council of elders. After him begins the model of the Judges. In short, according to the biblical ethos, for close to 400 years of peoplehood and even sovereignty, Israel did not champion monarchy. Then the system of Judges erodes, leadership shifts to the High Priesthood, and from there back to the prophet, Samuel. At that point the people approach Samuel and demand a stable governance like that of the surrounding ancient Near Eastern nations, they want a king. Here the story becomes interesting. In fact, already in the wilderness Moses commands Israel to appoint a king once they conquer the land, a command that for some reason is not carried out for centuries. Moreover, Samuel does not view the people’s request as fulfilling that old command. On the contrary, he is furious. He turns to God, who tells him in so many words, give them what they want, they are already uninterested in bearing My kingship.

The dissonance between the biblical divine command and the reaction of Samuel and of God to the late desire to implement it mobilized the greatest Jewish commentators and theologians to reconcile the contradiction. A distinctive position is taken by Don Isaac Abarbanel, a leading medieval Jewish biblical exegete, statesman, and philosopher. In his view, appointing a king is not desirable at all. Abarbanel details the dangers of concentrating power in the hands of a single person, notes that many biblical kings of Israel led the nation into sin, and contrasts this with the example of the Italian city-states, such as Venice, which show that polities can succeed without a king. In his reading, the Torah does not command the nation to appoint a king, rather it forecasts that they will request one after entering the land, a request the Torah does not favor. Hence it warns that when they do come to appoint a king, they must choose a king “whom your God will choose,” not a king purely of their own preference.

Between the lines of Abarbanel’s words we hear an echo of punishment. The directive to appoint a king, on his account, is given to Israel in some sense as a penalty. In the ideal state God would not have commanded it at all, which recalls Muhammad’s view that certain commandments were imposed on the Jews as punishments rather than because they are the chosen people.

There is also a Jewish analogue to Muhammad’s claim that God does not forbid Muslims the foods that are naturally palatable. The Talmud states that a person will one day be held to account for the permissible delights his eyes saw and he did not eat. At first glance this appears to contradict the elaborate Jewish dietary laws, and many Talmudic commentators labored to resolve the tension. What is striking is that the sages of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, treated this statement as a foundational principle. In their view there is nothing in God’s creation that is absolutely evil. The divine pervades all, nothing is cut off from God, therefore nothing is cut off from divine goodness. The prohibition on certain foods is viewed as temporary. In the future, when divine presence is fully manifest and suffuses everything, all will be permitted.

Sometimes what seems like interfaith polemic turns out, on closer inspection, to be a complexity already alive within the religious tradition itself.