In the Jewish world whose annual cycle of Torah readings recommenced last month, these are the weeks of Abraham. Last week was the reading of Lekh-L’kha, which tells of Abraham’s peregrinations after God’s summons to him to set out for “the land that I will show you.” This week it’s Vayera, which culminates in the trial of the near-sacrifice of Isaac.

And in the world of interfaith discourse with its books, programs, lectures, conferences, convocations, and proclamations, these have been the years of Abraham. The phrase “Abrahamic religions,” or “Abrahamic faiths,” rarely heard at the start of this century, can now hardly be avoided. Even U.S. presidents have gotten into the act. Barack Obama was first, followed by Joe Biden at a 2022 White House reception for American Muslim leaders on the occasion of Id-el-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Commenting on its overlapping that year with Easter and Passover, Biden declared: “For the first time in decades, [the] three Abrahamic faiths all celebrate their holy days at the same time. Think about it. That’s a message, guys.”

It’s a message that the 46th president would have phrased differently had he been in office back in the 1990s. Not that interfaith relations weren’t a popular subject in America then, too. On the whole, though, the discussion of them did not include Muslims. It was restricted to Christians and Jews, and its favorite catch phrase was “the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Sic tempora fugit. Although “Judeo-Christian” is no longer an intellectually respectable term, it was as common in the last century as “Abrahamic” is today. Coined in Germany in the 1800s (much of its early use, ironically, was in anti-Semitic critiques of Christianity as being irredeemably tainted by its Jewish origins), it entered American English in the 1930s when it was enlisted in the fight against anti-Semitism as a means of stressing that Christianity and Judaism shared common roots and values, so that an attack on one was an attack on the other. After World War II, revulsion at the Holocaust and growing public acceptance of the Jewish role in American life served to disseminate “Judeo-Christian” still further. The idea of a tradition uniting Jews and Christians in a joint battle on behalf of the spiritual ideals of Western civilization, advanced by prominent Christian theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, was popularized by magazines and newspapers and paid tribute to by another American president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. In an address given in 1952, Eisenhower stated:

Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith. . . . With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion [that holds] that all men are created equal.

There were at the time not many Muslims in the United States, to which immigration from Arab and other Islamic countries had been minimal, and the fact that the “Judeo-Christian concept” left them out in the cold went without protest. (If the notion of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” was protested at all in those days, it was by Jewish and Christian thinkers who argued that crucial differences between the two religions were obscured by the hyphen that now linked them.) Opposition to the phrase only developed gradually as the Muslim population of the U.S. increased due to changed immigration policies; as wars in the Middle East embroiled America in a Jewish-Muslim conflict in which “the Judeo-Christian tradition” was invoked to defend and encourage American support for Israel; as 9/11 and American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan made Americans rethink their relations to the Islamic world, and as the rhetoric of multiculturalism and anticolonialism with their rejection of notions of Western supremacy came to dominate American intellectual discourse.

Ultimately, “Judeo-Christian” fell out of favor for being exclusionist and anti-Muslim. Once associated with liberal values, it was increasingly identified with the illiberal political right. Remarks like those of the evangelical pastor Franklin Graham (the son of famed revivalist preacher Billy Graham), who said in 2002, “The God of Islam is not the same God as the God of the Christian or the Judeo-Christian faith. . . . I believe [Islam to be] a very evil and a very wicked religion,” helped increase the term’s disrepute. Into the space created by the rejection of it stepped “Abrahamic.”

It was a reasonable choice. The belief that Abraham was the world’s first true monotheist is common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike, making him a foundational figure in all three religions, though one occupying a more central place in the Jewish and Muslim narratives than in the Christian one. Nor is “Abrahamic” new as an English word, the phrase “Abrahamic covenant” having first occurred as far back as 1807 in a treatise titled Two Discourses on the Perpetuity and Provision of God’s Gracious Covenant with Abraham and His Seed.

Yet “Abrahamic” rarely appeared again until the second half of the twentieth century, the earliest contemporary use of it having possibly been in James Kritzeck’s 1965 book Sons of Abraham: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Kritzeck, as observed by the University of Rochester professor of religion Aaron Hughes in his article “Abrahamic Religions: A Genealogy,” was a Catholic scholar influenced by Louis Massignon, a French Catholic intellectual who promoted Catholic-Muslim interchange. Massignon’s impact on the Catholic church was reflected in its 1965 promulgation Lumen Gentium, which spoke of a divine “plan of salvation” that included “all those who acknowledge the Creator,” foremost among them “the Mohammedans who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”

Slowly at first and then picking up speed, “Abrahamic” has proliferated. Yet how useful a phrase like “Abrahamic religions” is as a help to achieving mutual understanding between Jews, Christians, and Muslims is questionable. On the one hand, as Jon Levenson observes, “To the extent that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are focused on a belief in [one] God and a proclamation of him to the world, . . . the appeal to Abraham as a source of commonality and kinship among these three groups makes eminent sense.” On the other hand, as Levenson points out in qualifying this judgment, “the connection of Abraham with ongoing [Jewish, Christian, and Muslim] communities and their distinctive practices and beliefs” can become “a point of controversy among them, and not simply, as many would desire today, a node of commonality.”

This is if anything an understatement. True, there is no great controversy over Abraham between Judaism and Christianity, both of which revere the same Hebrew Bible and regard its stories as sacred truth; precisely this underlies the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” This is not the case, however, with Islam, which holds, in accordance with the Quran, that it was Ishmael, the progenitor of the Arabs, not Isaac, the progenitor of the Jews, who was Abraham’s beloved and nearly sacrificed son. Since in the eyes of Islam, Judaism and Christianity’s version of Abraham’s life is based on a fundamental lie, just as Judaism and Christianity regard the lie to be Islam’s, what is to be gained by calling them all “Abrahamic religions”? Far from uniting them in a shared belief, the story of Abraham divides them sharply.

But is this not what the Bible has been telling us about the sons of Abraham all along? Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau (whom rabbinic tradition identified with Christendom), Joseph and his brothers—like brothers everywhere, their closeness must vie with the envy and rivalry they feel. There is no bond stronger than a fraternal bond; no hatred greater than fraternal hatred; no quarrel more bitter than a quarrel over an inheritance. This is part of the story of Abraham and his descendants, too. It is also Abrahamic.