Jews and Muslims in the Arab World highlights the effects of historical memory on the Arab-Israel conflict, demonstrating that both Jews and Arabs use stories of distant pasts to create their identities and shape their politics. Whether real or imagined, the past filtered through their collective memories has had and will continue to have enormous influence on how Jews and Arabs perceive themselves and each other. Jews and Muslims in the Arab World describes the ways in which the past is absorbed, internalized, and then processed among Jews and Arabs. The book stresses the importance of historical imagination on the current evolving political cultures, but does not claim that explanations from an ancient past shed light on every aspect of contemporary events.

"Eric Wolf has literally set the terms for anthropological thinking about peasantries, culture and power, complex societies, and interactions between noncapitalist societies and capitalism. Every item in this excellent collection has stimulated and influenced both my own thought and that of many others in our field, as well as beyond it. "—Katherine Verdery, University of Michigan "This powerful body of work begins ('Anthropology') and ends ('Concepts') in a rather speculative vein, taking us into the ideas of others and then back to Wolf. In these two sections we get a picture of the development of currents in anthropology (and the social sciences more broadly) from the early fifties to the present and the way in which Wolf's intellectual and political development was threaded through those debates and controversies. In the middle two sections ('Connections' and 'Peasants') we get the pathbreaking pieces that made Wolf the major figure he is. "—Gavin Smith, University of Toronto "There is a large audience, to be found in anthropology and in related fields like history, cultural studies, gender studies, etc., who will receive the writings of Eric Wolf with appreciation. . . . His work is fully in the comparative anthropological tradition . . . [and] demonstrates the power of comparative historical analysis. "—Abraham Rosman, Barnard College, Columbia University