Did a medieval rabbi recognize Muhammad as a true prophet? In the twelfth century, in Yemen, a Jewish scholar wrote what may be the most theologically audacious sentence in the history of Jewish-Muslim relations: God sends a prophet to every nation according to its own language — and Muhammad was sent to the Arabs. Nathanael ibn al-Fayyūmī was not a marginal figure. He was the head of Yemenite Jewry, writing for his own community, in Judeo-Arabic, with no Muslim reader in mind and nothing to prove to anyone outside it. What he wrote, he believed. And what he believed was…

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