This international Academic Workshop is within an overall project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. It follows on from a UK-focused series of seminars held in autumn 2005 and spring of this year, which was supported by the Stone-Ashdown Charitable Trust.

Why this workshop?

A few words about the rationale and context

Jews and Muslims in the West represent two very important minority faith groups, who share many similarities in terms of migration, diaspora and identity.

At various different times, they have been forced to migrate, often as refugees or during periods of political and economic uncertainty, and have subsequently faced the challenge of establishing their communities in new, and sometimes, alien settings.

In the case of Jews, their decision to migrate, whether in the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries, was often forced upon them by political circumstances that frequently transformed them into refugees.

For Muslims, political pressures have also played a part in their becoming migrants.  In some cases, they migrated to the West to escape the upheavals and uncertainties that followed decolonisation and independence.  In others, they were drawn by the economic opportunities on offer.

Alongside these similarities, however, there have also been important differences in terms of experience, linked, for instance, to the broader context in which processes of migration and community formation have taken place.

European and American societies were very different places in the late nineteenth century, when large-scale Jewish immigration started to occur, to what they had become by the late twentieth century which was when Muslim community-formation got underway.

There have also been significant differences in terms of the extent to which Jews and Muslims have been able to integrate themselves into wider society and into political life.  Jews in many cases were able to penetrate these circles while Muslims – perhaps because they are more recent migrants on the whole – have yet to do so with the same level of success.

Factors such as these have influenced the levels and nature of wider social integration that has taken place, as well as perhaps the degree of acceptance of community practices and beliefs.

In addition, while Jewish communities are far from uniform in terms of their composition, there would seem to be far greater diversity, in ethnic and linguistic terms alone, within their Muslim counterparts, again a factor that has important consequence for issues such as community identity.

Better understanding of these kinds of distinctions will place into clearer perspective the range of experiences involved in processes of migration and diaspora-formation.

The workshop should give us an opportunity to bring into sharper focus perceptions that Muslims and Jews have of each other and to what extent these have been adapted from popular stereotypes and images of Muslims and Jews in the West; and, perhaps, also to engage in fruitful discussions about, attitudes and practices that feed into the broader themes of racism, Islamophobia and anti-semitism. Surprisingly, there has been little comparative research in this area, despite the topicality of the subject.  Muslim-Jewish relations are presently complicated by political developments, particularly in the Middle East, something that makes it very timely to conduct a comparative study of the commonalties and differences of Jewish and Muslim experiences as migrants and members of diasporas, and what this has meant as far as identities are concerned.

So, what would we like to achieve?

Objectives:

The primary aim of the activities, including this workshop, is to facilitate improved understanding about the experiences of Muslims and Jews living as members of minority faith groups in western societies, often as part of migrant or diasporic communities. A further aim is to facilitate connections between academics and students working in the field, and practitioners involved in community affairs, whether specifically religious or otherwise.

By organising these activities, the main objective is to achieve a better understanding of contemporary Muslim-Jewish relations, and create a solid basis, or framework, of interaction on which future dialogue can take place.