Celebrating a Forgotten Life: The Story of Gerda Philipsborn

Muslims and Jews have been considered proverbial enemies. Yet, in the context of South Asian history, the two have often been invoked together. Historian Faisal Devji has provocatively called the idea of Pakistan a Muslim Zion. Aamir Mufti, on the other hand, invoked what he termed the ‘Jewish question’ with regard to the minoritization of Muslims in India and the Hindu-Muslim conflict. Unlike these invocations, Pernau’s book sets out to trace an extraordinary story of Muslim-Jew solidarity, in which a Jewish woman in Germany struck a life-long friendship with three curious and passionate young Indian Muslim students in Weimar Germany, travelled all the way to India to work with them and made remarkable contributions to the making of the first nationalist Muslim university in India, which was at the forefront of India’s struggle for freedom and embodied Gandhian values.