Abraham S Heirs

More than ever before, today's news brings Middle Eastern wars into our homes as the animosity between the Arab world and Israel escalates. "Will they ever have peace?" everyone asks. Attempting to answer that question, "Heirs of Abraham" is a historical family saga stretching over a time span of almost four thousand years. It follows the lives of the Biblical nomad Abraham, who is the foundation of the world's three great religions-Islam, Judaism, and, indirectly, Christianity-and his two sons. There is Ishmael, born of an Egyptian slave whose descendants are today's Arabs. And there is Isaac, son of Abraham's beloved wife and the Jews' patriarch. Set against the backdrops of Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel-of wars and famines, goat-haired tents and kings' palaces-this is a saga of real people whose actions will have an everlasting effect on all future generations and worlds. First, there is Abraham, who struggles with faith, power, love and cowardice. There are his women-Sarah, the wife, and Hagar, the slave-whose jealous love for him and hatred of each other never die. Finally, there are the two brothers who have been pitted against each other for thousands of years in the age-old battle for the land now known as the State of Israel. Yet most of all, "Heirs of Abraham," faithfully following the Holy Bible's accounting in Genesis, is a dramatic reminder of God's love for all people.

Leonard B. Glick recounts the history of the Ashkenazic Jewish experience in medieval western Europe from the fifth to fifteenth centuries, focusing on interaction between Jews and Christians during this vital formative period. He demonstrates that Ashkenazic Jewish culture was profoundly shaped and conditioned by life in an overwhelmingly Christian society. Drawing on diverse Christian documents, he portrays Christian beliefs about medieval Jews and Judaism with a degree of detail seldom found in Jewish histories. Emphasizing social, political, and economic history, but also discussing religious topics, Glick describes the evolution of a complex, inherently unequal relationship. Because the Ashkenazic Jews of medieval Europe were ancestral to almost the entire Jewish population of eastern Europe, their historical experience played a major role in the heritage of most Jewish Americans.

This book is about the Patriarch Abraham and his extended family. The people of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian beliefs all know that they are the children of Abraham. The people of each of these great faiths hold Abraham in extremely high regard, but over time their kinship has eroded due to a number of situations and circumstances. This book strives to show that all mankind has a common beginning and that mankind and those in the three great faiths not only share a great common history but that they are tied together through the acts of Abraham and his descendants including Isaac, Ishmael and Keturah's six sons. For it is through these men and their early descendants that we have the Jewish and Christian (Isaac); Muslim (Ishmael); and the majority of Keturah's descendants are now also Muslim. Herein we provide a fleeting glimpse of mankind from Adam though his early descendants to Noah and his three sons; then we focus on Noah's son Ham so that we can look at his four sons - Cush the father of Ethiopia; Mizraim the father of Egypt; Phut the father of West Egypt and Libya; and also on Canaan whose descendants originated many nations. Here we also take a look at Noah and the famously alleged curse placed not on Ham but one of his sons and we try to discuss this matter from a factual rather than an emotional view. In today's world there are growing tensions and mistrust between these three communities (Jews, Muslims and Christians) but if they would take a close look at not only who they are but from where they came they might accept the fact that they are near kinsmen who have more in common than there are differences between them.

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