Between Menorah and Minaret

The menorah and the minaret are each important religious symbols to Judaism and Islam, respectively, playing important ritual rolesand serving as symbols ofthe religion as awhole. A rudimentary sense of the etymology and morphology of these terms will indicate that they have identical morphological form. Given these similarities and parallels, in what ways have these related symbols and terms intersected with one another throughout the many centuries of Jewish and Islamic history? This paper explores the shifting visual and linguistic representations of these two parallel phenomena as ritual and religious symbols, spanning Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and beyond, from ancient to contemporary iterations, and ranging across the terms menorah, manara, and menarta in Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. In tracing the trajectory of each of these terms, this article will apply methodologies beyond the influence paradigm in aiming to discern connections that might be lost on that approach.