Conclusion

The chapter revisits the main theoretical premises and conclusions of the book and reflects on their applicability to contexts that go beyond South Asia. In doing so, it points out how the very blueprints of anti-Muslim discrimination in India trace their genealogy back to European anti-Jewish prejudice and proposes that anti-Muslim discourses and practices have in their turn been read back at Indian Jews. The chapter also summarizes the way the book has interrogated both those accounts that inscribe Jews and Muslims as each other’s enemies and those that imagine them as “brothers” linked by a commonality of theologies, rituals, and narratives, and suggested that rather than being considered as a category of analysis, Jewish-Muslim relations would be best thematized as a construct produced by the very processes of minoritization, stigmatization, and othering that have been applied to Jews and Muslims in Europe and then globalized at the turn of the twenty-first century.