An Instagram Reel has revived a remarkable historical allegation: that Jewish scholars secretly helped create Islam to undermine Christianity. An eLocal investigation has traced the story to genuine medieval writings, including a Byzantine chronicle and manuscripts preserved in the Cairo Geniza. What emerges is a documented history of the allegation itself, stretching back more than a thousand years.
Report by eLocal
For more than a thousand years, surviving Jewish and Christian texts have circulated related allegations that Jewish converts influenced Muhammad, with some Jewish versions explicitly claiming that Jewish sages composed the Quran.
That is the central finding of this investigation.
The allegation is neither a recent invention nor an account newly uncovered by social media. It appears in historical writings produced by different religious communities, preserved in manuscript collections and examined by scholars over the past century.
The documents establish that the story existed, that it circulated, and that it developed across different traditions. They do not, by themselves, establish that the alleged secret operation occurred.
The distinction matters. An investigation into the origins of a historical allegation must begin by establishing what the original sources actually say, when they were written, and whether they independently corroborate one another.
The first surviving trail: a Byzantine Christian chronicle
The earliest clearly dated surviving version of the specific ten-Jewish-converts allegation examined in this investigation appears in the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, a Byzantine historian who died in 818 CE.
Theophanes describes ten Jewish men who supposedly believed Muhammad might be the Messiah. According to his account, they later became disillusioned but remained associated with him and taught him material directed against Christianity.
This is an important historical distinction. Theophanes was not describing a modern theory about the origins of Islam. He was recording an allegation that had entered Christian historical writing by the early ninth century.
His account also establishes that the anti-Christian element of the story has an identifiable historical source.
Yet Theophanes does not explicitly claim that the ten men invented Islam or composed the Quran. His allegation concerns their supposed influence on Muhammad after joining his movement.
That distinction becomes important when we turn to the Jewish manuscripts.
The Cairo Geniza: Where the allegation becomes more explicit
In Old Cairo, the Ben Ezra Synagogue housed an extraordinary collection of discarded and preserved Jewish writings.
For centuries, manuscripts, letters, religious texts, legal documents and other records accumulated in a storage space known as a geniza.
The collection became internationally recognised during the nineteenth century. In 1896 and 1897, Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter examined the material and helped bring a substantial portion to Cambridge University Library.
Today, the Taylor-Schechter Collection contains approximately 193,000 manuscript fragments, providing an extraordinary record of medieval Jewish life across the Mediterranean and Middle East.
Among the wider Cairo Geniza material is a manuscript identified as ENA 2541.1, held by the Jewish Theological Seminary Library and catalogued through the Princeton Geniza Project.
Its title is commonly rendered The Tale of the Jewish Companions of Muhammad.
The story alleges that ten Jewish sages approached Muhammad, outwardly accepted Islam, and secretly sought to influence the Quran's composition.
Unlike Theophanes, this narrative makes an explicit authorship allegation.
It claims that the sages constructed material for Muhammad and inserted concealed messages intended to demonstrate that the Quran had human rather than divine origins.
The manuscript also names alleged participants, including Kaʿb al-Aḥbār, a figure known from Islamic historical traditions.
This does not establish that Kaʿb performed the actions attributed to him. Indeed, Islamic biographical traditions commonly place his conversion after Muhammad's death, creating a chronological problem for the manuscript's account.
Nevertheless, the manuscript is genuine evidence that this particular allegation circulated within medieval Jewish literary culture.
View the original manuscript ENA 2541.1, Princeton Geniza Project
Original manuscript ENA 2541.1, The Tale of the Jewish Companions of Muhammad. Collection: Jewish Theological Seminary Library. Catalogue and manuscript photographs: Princeton Geniza Project.
What the ten sages allegedly concealed
One of the most unusual features of the story is its claim that the sages concealed a Hebrew message within the Quran.
According to the narrative, the supposed hidden message disparaged Muhammad and revealed that Jewish scholars, rather than divine revelation, were responsible for the text.
The Princeton catalogue describes the message and identifies purported Quranic verses intended to produce the concealed Hebrew acrostic.
Professor Reuven Firestone, writing in the academic journal Religions in 2019, examined the manuscript tradition and the alleged verses.
His finding presents a serious difficulty for the story: none of the 21 Arabic lines presented as evidence of the secret message appears in the Quran.
That does not erase the manuscript's historical importance. It establishes a distinction between two questions.
The first is whether medieval Jewish writers circulated an allegation of secret authorship. The answer is yes.
The second is whether their alleged textual evidence demonstrates that the operation occurred. The material examined by Firestone does not establish that conclusion.
A manuscript story known to scholars for a century
The modern documentary trail is also revealing.
In April 1926, scholar Jacob Leveen published Mohammed and His Jewish Companions in The Jewish Quarterly Review, volume 16, pages 399–406.
The article examined the manuscript now identified as ENA 2541.1.
This is important because it establishes that the account was available to modern scholarship a century before the Instagram Reel brought it to a contemporary audience.
Leveen's transcription was subsequently corrected and discussed by other scholars. The Princeton catalogue itself describes the original edition as faulty, making the manuscript photographs and later comparative scholarship essential when examining its precise wording.
In 2019, Firestone revisited the wider tradition and identified ten written versions of the story, including early Hebrew and Arabic material associated with the Cairo Geniza.
He found that the versions were not identical. They differed in names, details and narrative structure while preserving the central allegation of Jewish participation in the Quran's supposed human composition.
The existence of these variants indicates a story transmitted and adapted over time, rather than a single document appearing without any wider literary context.
Why does the number ten keep appearing?
One of the most intriguing connections concerns the number of alleged participants.
Both the Christian account associated with Theophanes and the Jewish ten-sages narrative refer to ten Jewish men.
A further connection appears in Islamic tradition.
Firestone identifies a report attributed to Muhammad stating that, had ten Jewish men followed him, the wider Jewish community would have done likewise.
This raises a historical question that has not been conclusively answered.
Did the Jewish and Christian stories preserve independent memories of a group of ten men? Or did later authors adapt an already familiar religious motif?
The repetition is significant because it offers a possible route through which the allegation developed.
However, repetition alone does not establish independent corroboration. If different writers drew on a shared story, their accounts cannot automatically be counted as separate witnesses to the alleged events.
This is one of the most important unresolved questions in the investigation.
The Ben Ezra Synagogue and the preservation of the evidence
The Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, associated with the discovery of the Cairo Geniza manuscripts. Photograph: Faris Knight, 2011. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Original image.
The survival of the Cairo Geniza material is particularly significant because the collection was not assembled as a modern historical archive.
It accumulated through the ordinary religious and communal practices of Jewish communities over centuries.
Consequently, the collection preserves a mixture of documents, including personal correspondence, financial records, religious writings and polemical literature.
The presence of The Tale of the Jewish Companions of Muhammad within this documentary world establishes that the narrative belonged to a real medieval literary environment.
It does not mean the manuscript was an official Jewish account, or that its allegations were universally accepted by Jewish communities.
Its importance lies in demonstrating that such claims existed, were recorded and survived.
Different religious communities, different versions of the same allegation
The relationship between the Christian and Jewish versions deserves particular attention.
In Theophanes's account, the alleged converts influence Muhammad against Christianity.
In the Jewish counter-narrative, the sages supposedly deceive Muhammad to protect Jewish communities and challenge the Quran's divine authority.
The underlying motif is similar, but the motives are different.
This difference is not incidental.
It raises the possibility that each community adapted an existing story to address its own theological and political concerns.
Other medieval Christian traditions, including accounts associated with the monk Bahira, also attempted to explain Muhammad's religious teachings through supposed human instructors.
Research by historians including Liran Yadgar and David Freidenreich has examined relationships among these narratives and their use of figures familiar from Islamic tradition.
The result is a picture of medieval communities responding to one another's religious claims through competing accounts of sacred history.
What remains uncertain is the direction of transmission.
Theophanes predates the earliest surviving Jewish manuscripts, but an earlier surviving written account does not necessarily prove that its author originated the story.
An older Jewish oral narrative could have existed without surviving in written form. Equally, later Jewish authors could have adapted Christian or Islamic material.
The surviving evidence does not settle those possibilities.
Why would such an allegation circulate?
Firestone proposes that the Jewish versions served as a form of counter-history.
In medieval Islamic societies, Jewish communities were frequently minorities living under Muslim political authority.
Islamic religious arguments asserted that the Quran superseded earlier revelations and challenged Jewish understandings of scripture.
The ten-sages narrative reversed that relationship.
Instead of portraying Jewish scripture as superseded by a later revelation, the story alleged that Jewish scholars were secretly responsible for producing the later scripture itself.
This interpretation helps explain the narrative's theological function.
But an explanation of why a story might have circulated is not proof that its authors invented it, nor proof that the events described actually occurred.
The historical task is to distinguish the narrative's documented existence from the motives modern scholars attribute to its transmission.
The original allegation about Christianity
The Instagram Reel that prompted this investigation made a stronger claim than either manuscript tradition establishes independently.
It suggested that Islam had been deliberately created by Jewish scholars as an instrument for destroying Christianity.
The available sources contain elements relevant to that allegation.
Theophanes alleges Jewish influence directed against Christians.
The Geniza narrative alleges Jewish participation in composing the Quran.
But those are not identical claims, and neither source independently documents a coordinated operation to manufacture Islam for the destruction of Christianity.
Combining them produces a more sweeping allegation than the individual documents establish.
That is precisely why their relationship deserves further investigation.
The historical circulation of related accusations is documented. The proposed secret operation remains unverified.
The unanswered question: Where did the allegation begin?
The documentary trail now reaches back more than a thousand years.
By the early ninth century, a Christian chronicler had recorded an allegation involving ten Jewish converts and their supposed influence on Muhammad.
By approximately the tenth century, surviving Jewish manuscript traditions contained a more explicit allegation that Jewish sages helped compose the Quran.
Later versions continued to circulate across languages, regions and religious communities.
What remains unknown is whether these accounts descend from an earlier common narrative, whether one community adapted the writings of another, or whether some underlying historical encounter was subsequently transformed through religious storytelling.
The most promising evidence would be an identifiable source predating Theophanes that contains the specific ten-converts allegation.
Equally valuable would be a manuscript demonstrating how the Christian and Jewish accounts were transmitted between communities.
Until such evidence emerges, the earliest surviving documents establish when the allegations were recorded, not necessarily when they were first conceived.
A thousand years of allegations, and the importance of separating history from belief
The investigation has produced a significant historical finding.
For more than a thousand years, surviving Jewish and Christian texts have circulated related allegations that Jewish converts influenced Muhammad, with some Jewish versions explicitly claiming that Jewish sages composed the Quran.
That finding is grounded in identifiable manuscripts, published scholarship and historical writings.
The documentary trail runs from Byzantine Christian literature through medieval Jewish manuscripts to twentieth-century academic publication and contemporary research.
The story's existence, longevity and circulation are historically demonstrable.
Its truth as an account of Muhammad's life and the Quran's composition is a different question.
The evidence currently examined does not establish that ten Jewish sages secretly wrote the Quran, nor that Islam was deliberately created to destroy Christianity.
For independent journalism, the distinction is essential. A historical allegation should not be dismissed merely because it challenges an established religious narrative. Equally, its age and repetition cannot substitute for evidence that the alleged events occurred.
The discovery is that the allegation has a documented history extending over a millennium. The next challenge is to establish where that history began.
That is where the investigation continues.
Sources
Primary manuscript and historical material
Scholarly research
- Reuven Firestone, Muhammad, the Jews, and the Composition of the Qur'an: Sacred History and Counter-History, Religions, 2019
- Liran Yadgar, Jewish Accounts of Muhammad and His Apostate Informants, Mizan Project
- David Freidenreich, Co-produced Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Harvard Theological Review
- Cambridge University Library, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection