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Carol Bakhos. Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. viii, 207 pp.

Viewed in light of the perennial tensions and conflicts between Jews and Arabs in our own time, the sages’ vilification of Ishmael, the firstborn son of Abraham and the putative forefather of the Arabs, might seem to some to be perfectly natural. After all, anyone familiar with the midrash knows that the rabbis were not shy about displays of open hostility toward biblical characters considered to be Israel’s enemies. Thus, Ishmael is often found among a roster of villainous wrongdoers that also includes Pharaoh, Haman, and, most nefarious of them all, Esau, who, as is well known, serves as a thinly veiled cipher for the Roman Empire in rabbinic literature. However, upon close inspection of the sources, the rabbinic attitude toward the oft-maligned Ishmael is much more nuanced than we might at first expect. In her monograph Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab, Carol Bakhos charts the development of the rabbinic representation of Ishmael. By doing so, she is able to explore much larger theoretical issues, in particular the responsiveness of midrash as a genre to social, political, and cultural change. Due to the difficulty of dating midrashic compilations, the question of the relationship of midrash to its historical context has long been a thorny one. However, Bakhos is able to show quite clearly here that although the rabbinic attitude toward Ishmael was originally variable, and at times not even particularly unfriendly, this fluidity eventually gave way to almost unremitting hostility, thus producing what is usually understood as the “normative” rabbinic perspective on Ishmael. As this shift was indisputably attributable to the rise of Islam and the rabbis’ close association of the Arab dominion with Ishmael, this provides us with a particularly vivid example of the susceptibility of rabbinic hermeneutics to the influence of “real world” concerns and circumstances. After a concise discussion of theoretical issues in the introduction, Chapter 1 provides a close analysis of the traditions on Ishmael found in Genesis, “a story of marginalization par excellence” (14). Here, Bakhos demonstrates that the portrayal of Ishmael in Genesis is highly ambivalent: While Ishmael is recognized as a legitimate son of Abraham in the biblical narrative, at the same time, the Genesis account clearly emphasizes that it is not the firstborn Ishmael, but rather the second son Isaac, who will inherit Abraham’s legacy. Despite the fact that Ishmael and his mother Hagar are cast out into the wilderness, in the end, the Genesis account foregrounds Ishmael’s marginality without resorting to explicit condemnation or vilification. Ishmael’s destiny of becoming an unencumbered wanderer in the desert, an archer, “a wild ass of a man” (16:12), both reflects the relatively peaceful coexistence of the ancient Israelites with the tribal nomads they identified as “Ishmaelites” and the Genesis narrative’s ultimate goal of portraying Ishmael as a free man who partakes in his father’s destiny and dignity, in stark contrast to the servile origins of his mother. Though it is widely assumed that the rabbis reflexively associated Ishmael with the Arabs, in Chapters 2 and 3, which deal with tannaitic and amoraic Book Reviews