“Forging the Monotheistic Triangle: Jews, Arabs, Christians and the Promises of European Modernity”

2026 CSWR List Lecture with Susannah Heschel Both Jews and Arabs were initially optimistic about the promises of European modernity. During the nineteenth century, Jewish thinkers imagined a monotheistic triangle, redefining Judaism as the foundation of the West, with Islam and Christianity as its two daughter religions. Arab intellectuals of the Nahda, the Arab renaissance, similarly embraced European science, rationalism, and universalism, and called for political and religious reform. Yet just as some Christians were anxious about the religious identity of baptized Jews, Europeans hesitated to accept Jews and Arabs as members of the universal subject touted by the Enlightenment. By the end of the century, Arabs and Jews shared disappointment as Europe increasingly displayed its xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. Moving beyond conventional historical narratives of European Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-Judaism, my talk asks how we might understand the underlying desire motivating Jews, Arabs, and Christians as they imagined themselves in a new modern world. SUSANNAH HESCHEL, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, chair of the Jewish Studies Program, and a Religion Department faculty member, focuses on Jewish and Protestant thought (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the history of biblical scholarship, and antisemitism. Her publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), and The Woman Question in Jewish Studies, with Sarah Imhoff (Princeton Univ. Press, 2025). She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center fellowship, and a Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellowship; the Moses Mendelssohn Prize from the Leo Baeck Institute; personal grants from the Ford Foundation; and five honorary doctorates. She has been a visiting professor at several universities worldwide. For more on CSWR Annual Lectures: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/research... For more on the CSWR: https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/