At first it might appear to be a mere accident that many of the same contemporary Jewish scholars who studied medieval Jewish thought also studied medieval Islamic thought. It is not sufficient to account for the interest of the same scholars in medieval Judaism and Islam, however, by observing that so many of the towering figures of medieval Judaism, such as Saadya Gaon, Judah Halevi, and Maimonides, wrote in Arabic. The thesis of this chapter is that other special affinities between Judaism and Islam led to the special interest of Jewish scholars in Islam. Yet in much of the scholarship by early twentieth-century Jewish scholars of Islamic and Jewish thought, it became tempting to ignore those affinities and lump Islamic and Jewish thought together with Christian thought under the broad rubric of monotheism. And because Christian Scholasticism had been so extensively studied, it became tempting to draw paradigms and methods of interpretation from Christian scholarship on Scholasticism.

The question then arises whether contemporary scholars should study medieval Jewish and Islamic thought under the large shadow cast by Scholasticism. In Persecution Strauss insisted that scholars should cease regarding Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy “as counterparts of Christian scholasticism” (PAW, 8). Although he does not openly criticize specific colleagues, Strauss was engaged, however diplomatically, in a dispute with most of his contemporaries over how to read medieval Jewish and Islamic thought—contemporaries who tended to read Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy in the light of Christian Scholasticism. He was critical of contemporaries such as E. I. J. Rosenthal and Richard Walzer, and to a lesser extent Franz Rosenthal and Harry Austryn Wolfson. Perhaps the most eloquent and loquacious spokesman for the view that Strauss opposed, Harry A. Wolfson argues that all three of the medieval traditions are Philonic—by which he seems to mean not only that they follow a paradigm set by Philo but also, and more important for us, that they all somehow attempt to synthesize or harmonize philosophy and religion or reason and revelation—thus, Wolfson speaks of “religious philosophy.”4 In contrast, Strauss argues that although Christian