Review: Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism
Abstract
enemies of the Christians. This comes as a surprise in a book which is otherwise extremely attentive to the contemporary political and military context. This omission may have contributed to the authorâs rather forced reading of a pair of extraordinarily vivid images from the Bavarian manuscript Antichrist, c. 1440â50, which is introduced both at the beginning and the end of the book. Although the author's reading of the three kings depicted in one image, from left to right, as an Ethiopian, a Saracen and a Jew respectively supports her key arguments â namely that all three disparate groups were condemned altogether as the followers of Antichrist, and that they were all linked to the Monstrous Races as attested by the second image representing three Blemmyai on a horseback and a group of dark skinned foot-soldiers â unfortunately, such a contrived reading not only undermines the authorâs own goal of disentangling ethnic stereotypes and claiming complexity for medieval imagery but also functions as a prolongation of those ideas. Perhaps it is not all that useful to read all one's claims into a single image, particularly if that image is already saturated with the symbols of religious dogma and cultural