The Mad Twin: How Islam Globalized the Jewish God

The more one studies the origins of Islam, the more one begins to see a reflection—not of Christianity—but of Judaism. Not the gentle prophetic Judaism of Micah or Amos, but the rigid, legalistic, tribal, and exclusivist Yahweh cult that defined ancient Israel. Islam is not a new revelation; it is Judaism without its introspection, without its irony, without its capacity for guilt. It is Judaism that has escaped its borders, slipped its leash, and decided to conquer the world. It is, to put it bluntly, Judaism gone mad—militarized, universalized, and globalized.

Both Islam and Judaism emerge from the same Semitic womb: the desert mind, suspicious of pluralism, obsessed with purity, allergic to idols, and terrified of female divinity. Both imagine a jealous God who brooks no rivals, who divides humanity into believers and unbelievers, chosen and cursed. Both sacralize law—halakha and sharia—as the divine software through which society must run. Both reduce ethics to obedience, virtue to conformity, and salvation to submission. The Hebrew Shema—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”—mutates in Islam into its Arabic echo: “There is no god but Allah.” Both are incantations of the same metaphysical totalitarianism: one truth, one law, one God.

The genius of Judaism was its capacity to survive without empire. It learned to live in exile, to preserve its law and memory in diaspora, to endure as a minority. Islam, on the other hand, is Judaism that refused to stay in exile. It burst out of Arabia, sword in hand, to enforce its covenant upon the world. Where Judaism fenced itself in, Islam blew the fences apart. Yet the theology remained the same: God as legislator, prophet as lawgiver, and humanity divided into those who obey and those who must be conquered or converted. Islam universalized what was meant to be local. The covenant that once bound a single tribe now sought to bind the entire human race.

Muhammad was, in every serious sense, a Jewish prophet who came too late. He admired the Jews of Arabia, borrowed their stories, their dietary codes, their circumcision, their monotheism, even their apocalyptic imagination. The Qur’an reads at times like a fevered commentary on the Torah and Talmud, a running argument with the rabbis. He saw himself as the final restorer of Abrahamic truth, the last in the prophetic line. But when the Jews of Medina refused to accept him as their messiah, his admiration turned to rage. The episode of the Banu Qurayza—the massacre of hundreds of Jewish men, the enslavement of their women—was not an aberration. It was the theological fury of a man who felt betrayed by the very tradition he had imitated. Islam was born not only from Jewish inspiration, but from Jewish rejection. It is the angry younger twin that killed its older brother.

This shared psychological pattern—admiration turned resentment—runs deep in both traditions. Each sees itself as chosen by God, each sees the other as having betrayed the covenant. To the Jews, the Muslims are impostors; to the Muslims, the Jews are hypocrites who knew the truth but denied it. Yet both are mirror images: each projects onto the other its own secret pathology. When Islam calls Jews “apes and pigs,” it is projecting the image of what it fears to become: a people reduced to mere survival, stripped of conquest, living by memory. And when Judaism looks upon Islam with horror, it sees its own ancient aggression magnified and globalized. The crusader and the jihadi both spring from the same Semitic desert, but the Christian at least mixed his wine with Greek reason and Roman law. Islam remained pure—pure in the most dangerous sense of the word.

Every structure of Islam—the daily prayers, the dietary laws, the obsession with ritual purity, the scribal literalism—comes directly out of Jewish religious culture. What the Talmud was to the rabbis, the hadith became to the ulema: an endless codification of minutiae, sanctified trivia masquerading as divine law. Both traditions share the bureaucratic mind: a clerical obsession with regulating the minutest aspects of human behavior, from how to wash one’s hands to how to slaughter an animal to how to have sex. Where the Greeks gave us philosophy, and the Indians gave us metaphysics, the Semites gave us paperwork. Religion became administration.

The central figure in both is not the mystic or the philosopher, but the lawyer. Moses and Muhammad are not sages; they are legislators. They come not with insight but with statutes, not with wonder but with commandments. They build not temples of reason but systems of compliance. The West’s tragedy was that Christianity inherited this Semitic legalism and spread it across the globe under the banner of faith. But Islam remains its purest form: the total subjugation of the human will to divine decree. To the Jewish mind, submission was limited to a covenantal people. To the Muslim mind, submission is demanded of all mankind.

Yet, paradoxically, this legalistic monotheism gave both peoples extraordinary resilience. The Jew and the Muslim both inhabit a mental fortress. Their God is their ideology, their armor, their identity. But where the Jew internalized it, the Muslim externalized it. The Jew prays, debates, and litigates; the Muslim prays, fights, and conquers. The Jew builds his ghetto; the Muslim builds his caliphate. The difference is tactical, not theological.

Islam, in this sense, is the globalization of Jewish particularism. It took the Yahweh idea—the idea of one jealous, law-giving God who demands obedience—and stripped it of its local and historical modesty. It fused it with the Arab tribal code of honor and vengeance. The result was an ideological explosion: a monotheism with a sword. The desert God who once haunted the hills of Judea now ruled from Spain to Samarkand. What began as an inward law became an outward empire.

This is why Islam’s conflict with modernity is so intractable. Judaism long ago learned to coexist with secularism by shrinking into a cultural identity. Islam, however, cannot shrink. Its theology forbids retreat. Its God is still legislator, its prophet still the model for politics, its scripture still the constitution. To secularize Islam is to amputate it. And yet, without secularization, it cannot live peacefully in a plural world. The crisis of Islam is the crisis of Judaism unleashed from the ghetto—Judaism that refuses to stop being a state.

Both religions share the same underlying anxiety: that without divine law, morality collapses. Both distrust human reason. Both view doubt as sin and questioning as rebellion. The Enlightenment was born only when Europe rejected both these Semitic certainties. The Greek asked why; the Jew and the Muslim asked who commands? Between those two questions lies the whole difference between Athens and Mecca, between philosophy and theology, between civilization and theocracy.

If Judaism was a closed system of divine law within a single tribe, Islam was the jailbreak. Muhammad shattered the ethnic wall that had kept Yahweh confined to the children of Israel. He universalized the covenant. What had been “Hear, O Israel” became “Submit, O humanity.” The Jewish God had been a parochial deity, jealous of neighboring tribes; Muhammad turned him into a world emperor. Islam is the globalization of the Jewish neurosis—the fusion of Jewish exclusivism with Arab ambition. Where the Jew said, “We are the chosen,” the Muslim said, “We are the chosen—and so must you be.” The result was the first totalitarian theology, centuries before the word “totalitarian” was coined.

In this sense, Islam is Judaism that discovered politics. Muhammad’s genius, if one dares call it that, was to weaponize revelation. He turned prophecy into governance, faith into an instrument of war. The synagogue became a barracks, the sermon a battle cry, the covenant a constitution. He took the ancient Hebrew dream of divine kingship and built it in real time. The caliphate was nothing but the restoration of the theocracy of ancient Israel—scaled up to imperial proportions. Yahweh had demanded Canaan; Allah demanded the world.

Both traditions share a contempt for the secular, the human, the autonomous. Both deny the moral sufficiency of reason. The idea that morality could arise from human sympathy or empirical observation would strike both as blasphemy. “Fear of God” is their ethics; obedience, their virtue. In both systems, goodness is not intrinsic but decreed. You are not moral because you reason well or feel compassion, but because you obey. Thus, both systems create infantilized populations—believers perpetually dependent on divine approval, incapable of moral adulthood. The Enlightenment’s assertion that reason is sufficient for ethics is not just alien to these traditions; it is an existential threat to them. It dethrones their God by rendering Him unnecessary.

The Jewish prophets, at least, injected moral tension into this machinery of law. Amos, Isaiah, Micah—these men questioned ritual and law in the name of justice and mercy. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” says Hosea. Muhammad had no Hosea. He had no tradition of dissent. His revelation was perfect, unalterable, eternal. Thus Islam lacks the tragic depth that makes parts of Judaism self-reflective. It knows no inner rebellion. It has no Book of Job. When Muslims ask why evil happens, they are told not to ask. When Jews ask, they argue. When Westerners ask, they investigate. That is the hierarchy of civilizations: obedience, argument, inquiry.

The madness of Islam lies not in its difference from Judaism, but in its refusal to evolve as Judaism did. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews became philosophers of survival. They turned inward, moralized their faith, spiritualized their God. Islam, by contrast, retained the desert warrior’s mentality. It is the younger brother who never outgrew adolescence. It boasts, it avenges, it conquers, it remembers every insult. The Jews developed Freud to analyze their trauma; the Muslims developed jihad to act it out. One produced psychoanalysis; the other produced terrorism. Both are responses to humiliation—but one is internal, the other external.

This is why Islamic history reads like a long oscillation between grandeur and grievance. Every defeat—be it at Vienna, in Andalusia, or in modern Palestine—is a wound not just political but theological. Because God must always be victorious, His people cannot lose except by betrayal. Thus the Muslim world cannot admit error; it must find traitors. Apostates, secularists, heretics—these become the scapegoats of divine failure. Islam’s fury at Israel is therefore not geopolitical but psychological: a displaced rage against its own reflection. The Jew, a few million in number, stands as the mirror of Islam’s unfulfilled dream. The existence of a successful Jewish state within the heart of the Arab world is a daily theological humiliation—a reminder that the elder brother, once despised, still lives and thrives.

Even linguistically, the resemblance between the two religions is uncanny. The Arabic salaam and Hebrew shalom—peace through submission. The Hebrew shalach (to send) echoes in the Arabic rasul (messenger). The Quranic narrative is essentially a retelling of the Hebrew Bible—Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David—all repurposed as Muslims avant la lettre. Islam retroactively Islamized Jewish history. Every Hebrew prophet becomes an Arabized precursor to Muhammad. It is not just imitation; it is annexation. Islam colonized Jewish memory and made it its own. It’s as though Judaism’s mythology had been stolen, repackaged, and rebranded for global consumption. The God of Sinai became the God of Mecca; the covenant of Israel became the ummah of Islam. Judaism’s God was kidnapped, renamed, and armed.

And yet, in their shared pathology, both religions have given the modern world a lesson in survival through obstinacy. Both outlasted empires. Both endured exile and persecution. Both refused to dissolve into the secular. But while Judaism now survives largely through intellect, Islam survives through force. One defends itself through books, the other through bombs. One produces the Nobel laureates; the other produces martyrs. The distinction is not racial—it is civilizational. It is the difference between sublimation and aggression, between transformation and repetition.

The tragedy is that Islam could have taken a different path. The Qur’an contains mystical and ethical strands that, had they been cultivated, might have led to a tolerant, rational civilization. The Sufis tried. The philosophers—al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Averroes—tried. But like Spinoza among the Jews, they were excommunicated, silenced, erased. The clerical mind triumphed over the philosophical. The law strangled reason. And thus Islam froze in time, eternally seventh-century Arabia. Judaism produced Spinoza and Freud; Islam produced al-Ghazali and Khomeini. Both are children of the same God—but one learned to rebel, the other doubled down on obedience.

Western liberals, in their sentimental ignorance, keep imagining that Islam can undergo a “Reformation” like Christianity. They forget that Islam never had a Renaissance or an Enlightenment because it never had a Middle Ages. It is still in the Mosaic phase—its entire theology is Mosaic law with Arabic grammar. Its promise of “submission” is precisely what the Enlightenment rejected. Islam cannot be reformed until it ceases to be Islam. To reform it is to destroy it. That is the theological trap at its core.

Meanwhile, modern Judaism—particularly in its secular Israeli form—has become what it once feared: a mirror of its militant twin. Zionism, for all its heroic origins, now behaves like a smaller version of the Islamic state it fights. The God who once commanded “Thou shalt not kill” now watches drones over Gaza. The prophetic tradition that once condemned kings now blesses them. The Jew has become what he fled: the monotheist with an army. The circle is complete.

It is thus not anti-Semitic to say that Islam is Judaism unrestrained—it is historically accurate. Islam is the universalization of the Yahweh complex. The difference is that the Jews, through exile, learned irony; the Muslims learned vengeance. One internalized power, the other externalized it. One turned its neurosis into psychoanalysis, the other into jihad. Both worship the same invisible monarch; only the scale of ambition differs.

And therein lies the deeper lesson for the world. Every time humanity absolutizes truth, it becomes a desert religion. Every time it replaces curiosity with obedience, it becomes a synagogue or a mosque. The salvation of humanity lies in escaping this desert. The true God is not the jealous legislator of Sinai or the autocrat of Mecca; it is Reason itself—the universal Logos that asks questions, doubts, and learns. Until that realization dawns, the twins of monotheism will continue their bloody inheritance, dragging civilization back into the sand.

The idea of the “chosen” and the “submitted” is the axis around which both religions spin. Judaism’s chosen people and Islam’s community of submission are the same theological species: both insist that humanity’s highest purpose is not self-realization but obedience. Both despise the autonomous mind. Both look at reason as a threat to revelation. Their god does not invite exploration—He demands surrender. This is why Jewish and Islamic civilizations, for all their brilliance in law, poetry, and mysticism, never produced a Socrates or a Galileo. They produced prophets and jurists, never philosophers of freedom. The desert cannot bear the flower of doubt; it withers in such heat.

To be chosen is to be enslaved by divine privilege; to submit is to be enslaved by divine terror. The psychology is identical—one internal, one external. The Jew bears his chosenness as a badge of isolation; the Muslim proclaims his submission as a badge of supremacy. Both produce pride disguised as humility. The chosen and the submitted both secretly believe they are morally superior to the rest of humankind. That’s the essence of monotheism as practiced by both: the moral monopolization of God. The rest of humanity becomes, at best, potential converts or, at worst, infidels. It is the metaphysical apartheid of history.

When Judaism confined this theology within its own small population, it remained a private obsession. When Islam globalized it, the pathology became contagious. The difference between a neurosis and a psychosis, Freud said, is scale. Judaism is the neurosis of one tribe; Islam is the psychosis of a civilization. Both hear the same voice commanding obedience; only Islam insists the entire planet must hear it too. And when that voice is armed with oil wealth, petrodollars, and modern weaponry, the result is not merely religion—it is ideological imperialism.

But history is not kind to totalities. Every closed system eventually cracks. Judaism cracked under the weight of its own intellectualism; Islam is cracking under the pressure of modernity. The Jewish thinkers who broke the chains—Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein—were precisely those who stepped outside their religious boundaries. They universalized reason, not revelation. They are the anti-Moseses of modernity, leading humanity not into a promised land but out of the desert altogether. Islam has yet to produce its Spinoza, its Freud, its Einstein. Until it does, it remains trapped in the 7th century, recycling its grievances and calling them piety.

The deeper tragedy is that both faiths, by absolutizing God, trivialized man. By making divine law supreme, they made the human mind subordinate. By worshiping revelation, they suffocated discovery. Every mosque and synagogue that teaches obedience before inquiry, purity before compassion, is another brick in the wall that separates humanity from itself. The Enlightenment tore that wall down, and the reaction of both religions has been the same: fear. Fear of reason, fear of freedom, fear of a world without a divine parent. The God of the desert is the psychological projection of the terrified child who cannot face moral adulthood.

Yet modern Jews, through secularization, have partially escaped this paternal tyranny. They reinvented identity as cultural, ethical, or intellectual rather than theological. The Muslim world has not yet made that leap. Its clerics still live in the illusion that divine command supersedes human judgment. Its politicians still invoke God to justify power. Its people are still told that doubt is treason. The result is paralysis—a civilization that cannot think its way out of its own sanctity. Where Judaism internalized guilt, Islam externalized rage. The former built therapy; the latter built martyrdom.

What unites them today, ironically, is the fear of the same enemy: secular humanism. The rationalist, the atheist, the empiricist—these are the new Amalekites, the new infidels. The Talmudic scholar and the Islamic jurist alike dread the laboratory and the microscope. The rationalist asks for evidence; they offer verses. The scientist falsifies; they canonize. The humanist argues that morality arises from empathy, evolution, and social necessity; they insist it is decreed by divine law. But the evidence of history is overwhelming: humanity progresses only when it rebels against heaven.

The age of reason began when the West renounced the Semitic conception of God. It rediscovered the Greek idea that truth is not commanded but discovered. The scientific method is the antithesis of revelation. It begins with ignorance and ends with knowledge; revelation begins with certainty and ends with dogma. The Enlightenment replaced Yahweh and Allah with hypotheses and experiments. It made curiosity the new prayer, and the telescope the new scripture. For the first time since Athens, man was no longer kneeling. He was standing upright again.

That is what terrifies both Islamists and fundamentalist Jews alike. A free mind has no synagogue, no mosque, no need for intermediaries. It consults evidence, not imams. It revises its beliefs when proven wrong. It does not kill for its opinions. It doubts even itself. This is not arrogance—it is maturity. Rational humanism is the adulthood of the species. It does not destroy God; it outgrows Him.

The future, therefore, belongs neither to Jerusalem nor to Mecca but to the mind that questions both. The true successor to Abraham is not Muhammad or Moses, but Socrates—the man who asked questions and paid with his life. He died not in obedience to a god but in fidelity to reason. That is the moral courage the modern world needs: the courage to think without divine permission.

Judaism and Islam, these theological twins, once provided the world with moral discipline. But what the world needs now is intellectual liberation. We no longer need divine law; we need empirical ethics. We no longer need revelation; we need verification. We no longer need prophets; we need philosophers. The age of obedience must end. The age of reason must begin.

Humanity’s destiny is not in the desert but in the cosmos. The same curiosity that split the atom and mapped the genome will, in time, make both Sinai and Mecca seem like early chapters in a long, primitive story—a story about how frightened humans mistook authority for truth. The true faith of the future will not begin with “There is no god but Allah” or “Hear, O Israel.” It will begin with something far simpler, far nobler: “Let us find out.”

Citations

1. The Hebrew Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4); the Islamic Shahada (Qur’an 3:18, 37:35).
2. The laws of halakha and sharia in comparative analysis: M. Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles (Jewish Publication Society, 1994); Wael Hallaq, Shari‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
3. On Muhammad’s adoption and later rejection of Jewish traditions: W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 170–187.
4. The massacre of the Banu Qurayza: Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah (trans. A. Guillaume, Oxford, 1955), pp. 461–469.
5. On Jewish prophetic criticism of ritual law: Amos 5:21–24; Hosea 6:6; Isaiah 1:11–17.
6. On Islam’s legal and clerical codification: Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law (Princeton University Press, 1981).
7. On the Enlightenment’s philosophical revolt: Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784); Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (1945).
8. On the psychological transformation of monotheism: Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939).
9. On the relationship between Islam, Judaism, and modern secularism: Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984); Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (2003).
10. On Spinoza’s excommunication and the birth of modern reason: Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge University Press, 1999).