What is it about?
Medieval Iberians of all three religions participated in a common culture of retellings of material from the Hebrew Bible that fused the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity with the vernacular languages and cultures common to all three groups. This article shows how the use of a vernacular language common to all three religious groups shapes the creation of a shared 'storyworld' (an envisioning of the world evoked by the stories shared by the Bible and the Qur'an) that brings together Jewish, Muslim, and Christian audiences.
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Why is it important?
We often talk about how Christians, Jews, and Muslims are in conflict with one another, but we talk less about what these traditions have in common. These Spanish and Catalan retellings of stories from the Bible show us how the three groups held some ideas in common, and how this commonality was reinforced by a shared language and popular culture.
Perspectives
I had always been interested in modern retellings of Biblical stories such as Hollywood films (The Ten Commandments, more recently Darren Aronofsky's 'Noah'), cartoons (The Simpsons episode on Adam and Eve), and graphic novels (R. Crumb's illustration of Genesis). I thought it would be interesting to go back and see what medieval retellings of Biblical stories could tell us about relations between Iberian Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
David Wacks
University of Oregon
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Shared Storyworlds in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia, December 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004726840_017.
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