Are Jews and Muslims Abrahamic brothers? No.

The Truth about the “Abrahamic” Narrative: Islam’s Rewriting of Jewish History

It is an indisputable fact that Judaism predates both Islam (and Christianity) by thousands of years. The Jewish people and their scriptures existed long before Muhammad, long before the rise of Islam and long before Arab tribes attempted to insert themselves into the biblical narrative. By the time Muhammad began preaching in the 7th century CE, Jewish communities had already existed in the Middle East for more than 2000 years, with deeply established religious texts, legal traditions and a national identity centered around Israel. These Jewish communities were literate, scholarly, wealthy and had extensive oral and written traditions. Muhammad, however, came from an illiterate, polytheistic Arabian tribal society in Mecca. When he encountered the well-established Jewish and Christian populations of the region, he did not bring a new revelation so much as he repurposed and rebranded existing Jewish and Christian scriptures, inserting himself and the Arab tribes into a story that had never included them.

Islam did not develop in a vacuum—it emerged in direct contact with Judaism and Christianity, stealing heavily from both while modifying them to serve its own expansionist goals. There is no historical, genetic or archaeological evidence that the people who today identify as Arabs, which comprise nearly 500 million people spanning a vast expanse of diverse regions, cultures and histories from the Arabian Peninsula to the Maghreb and beyond, are all descended from Abraham or Ishmael. The idea that Ishmael is the progenitor of today’s Arab people is not found anywhere in history before the rise of Islam. The earliest Arab tribes were distinct, polytheistic groups inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula, with no known claim to Abrahamic descent.

So where did this idea come from? The answer is simple: it was manufactured as a tool of religious and political legitimacy. Muhammad needed to establish his authority among both his own people and the Jews and Christians he sought to convert (or subjugate). By claiming that the Arab tribes, who had no previous connection to each other beyond language, were divinely connected to Abraham—one of the most revered figures in Jewish history—he positioned himself and his followers as rightful inheritors of monotheism. This was not a historical fact. It was a strategic move for conquest and power.

Muhammad took advantage of the Jewish belief that Abraham had a son named Ishmael, who was born to Sarah’s Egyptian maidservant Hagar and that his descendants had settled in the Arabian Peninsula. He claimed a direct genetic link between himself and Ishmael, positioning the Arabic-speaking tribes as the rightful heirs to Abraham’s legacy and the continuation of God’s covenant. There is no historical, cultural or national link between Ishmael and his descendants and the tribes of Arabia for thousands of years—not until the advent of Islam. By the time Muhammad came along, the Arabian Peninsula had seen centuries of migration, conquests and cultural mixing, with peoples from all over the Middle East and North Africa moving through and settling in the region. When Muhammad expanded his empire, millions of people who weren’t Arab, didn’t speak Arabic, and had no ethnic connection to the original Arab tribes were conquered, "Arabized" and eventually identified with their Arab oppressors. The idea that these vastly diverse populations, who were absorbed over centuries of conquest and cultural fusion, are somehow descendants of Ishmael is not just far-fetched, it’s absurd. To claim such a direct link to Abraham or Ishmael after centuries of intermingling, migration and empire-building is as random as it is historically unfounded.

Islam did not simply claim to be a new monotheistic faith—it positioned itself as the final and superior version of Judaism and Christianity, asserting that Jews and Christians had “corrupted” their own scriptures. This tactic allowed Islam to absorb Jewish history while simultaneously subjugating Jewish and Christian people. The story of the Binding of Isaac—one of the most central narratives in Jewish tradition—was retroactively altered in Islamic teachings to claim that it was actually Ishmael who was bound, not his half-brother, Isaac. But this claim appeared only after Islam emerged, with no prior historical or textual basis. For over 2,000 years before Islam, the story of Isaac’s binding had been universally recognized in Jewish tradition. The sudden rewriting of this foundational narrative, millennia after the fact, is nothing short of an attempted erasure of Jewish history to serve Islamic supremacy.

Islam is not the first religion to appropriate Jewish scripture and claim ownership over Jewish history. Christianity did it first. By declaring that Jesus was the Messiah, and later that Christians were the “New Israel,” Christian theology sought to replace the Jewish covenant with a new, universalist doctrine. However, Christianity at least acknowledged the Jewish origins of its faith, even as it diverged from them. Islam, on the other hand, went even further—not only did it attempt to replace Judaism, but it sought to reframe Jews as inferior, misguided and cursed for rejecting Muhammad’s authority. Unlike Christianity, which preserved the Torah and the Hebrew Bible (even if it reinterpreted them), Islam outright rewrote Jewish history to place itself at the center of the story.

Similarly, other groups, such as the Black Hebrew Israelites, have attempted to claim the legacy of the Jewish people. Just because a group claims to be part of the Jewish story doesn’t mean Jews have to accept them for the sake of peace, especially when their version distorts Jewish history, erases Jewish identity, or fuels violence against Jews. Should Jews accept groups like the Black Hebrew Israelites, who claim to be the “true Jews” and regularly harass actual Jews across America despite having no historical or scriptural basis for their claim? They, like Islam, have stolen Jewish scripture and adopted it as their own with no legitimate foundation. If we reject such distortions of Jewish heritage (and we should), why should we accept aspects of the Islamic version, which emerged thousands of years after Jewish scriptures were established and rewrites their most sacred stories to serve their political and religious agenda?

Today, many people—especially those pushing for interfaith dialogue or peace—blindly repeat the Islamic myth that “Jews and Muslims are Abrahamic brothers” or that “Jews and Arabs are cousins.” It sounds nice. But as you now know, Jews and Muslims are not Abrahamic brothers. And Jews and the people who identify today as “Arab” are no more cousins than Jews are with any other Mediterranean, Levantine or Middle Eastern population. Peace does not require lies. In fact, accepting these fabricated narratives only strengthens the ideological foundation of those who have long sought to erase Jewish history and identity.

The truth is this: Islam’s relationship to Judaism is not that of a sibling faith, but of an empire that co-opted Jewish tradition for its own expansion. Muhammad encountered Jewish tribes, stole from their scriptures, raped and slaughtered them and inserted himself into their history not because it was true, but because it was useful in helping him gain power and influence. Many Muslim supremacists, Palestinian Arabs and their allies know this to be true, which is why they regularly chant “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, jaish Muhammad soufa ya’oud,” which translates to “Khaybar Khaybar, Oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return,” referencing Muhammad’s massacre of the Jewish community in Khaybar in 628 CE. The Jewish people do not need to accept the Arabization or Islamization of their own sacred history for the sake of a chance at “peace.”

Peace will come when the Jewish people are respected as the rightful keepers of their own history and are no longer expected to validate historical fabrications by those who seek to erase or rewrite their identity. Acknowledging historical fact—that Judaism predates Islam by thousands of years, that Jewish tradition was neither lost nor superseded, and that the Jewish covenant remains intact—is not an attack on anyone. The Torah is not an “early version” of the Quran—the Quran is an edited and repackaged distortion of Jewish scripture, written millennia later to serve the ambitions of an Arabian warlord and his followers. It is simply the truth. And a peace built on truth will always be stronger than one built on lies. Certainly, we do not need all Muslims to believe this, but we do need the millions of Muslim extremists to stop trying to kill Jews (and Christians and every other ethnic/religious minority) for merely believing in their own story, which never had anything to do with them.

The Jewish story does not belong to Islam. The Jewish story does not belong to Christianity. The Jewish story belongs to Jews and no amount of historical revisionism will ever change that.