ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Jewish Issue in Islamic Radicalism: Historicity, Impact and Evolutions Mohamed‐Ali Adraoui* Abstract This article focuses on the long‐term ideological vision of Jews and Israel in radical Islam. By exam- ining, on the one hand, the animosity towards Judeo‐Israelis in the spawning and bolstering of Islam- ist, Salafist and Jihadist movements, and on the other hand, the sociological composition of Jihadist elites related to the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict, I show the centrality of the Judeophobic discourse in the world of radical Islam as well as the importance of Israel in its reinforcement. By trying to histor- icize this discourse, as well as political and strategic movements linked with the State of Israel, I also question the nature of the hostility towards Judaism, and more specifically the role of the Israeli issue in the development and evolution of the most radical and violent forms of Muslim identity over nearly a century. 1 | INTRODUCTION Research on Salafism and Jihadism is experiencing today an undeniable flourishing. The field of study that focuses on contemporary Islamic radicalism has already been developing strongly and renewed since the early 2000s. This evo- lution provides the opportunity to return to the fundamental ideological content and themes around which these rad- ical Islamic movements, adopting an exclusivist and agonistic 1 grammar, have been organized for nearly a century. There are several ways of apprehending the different forms taken by the proposed model of society that is supposed to perpetuate the time of the Salaf Salih, 2 which are sources of paradigmatic imitation for numerous movements within Islam that wish to return to the ‘princeps’ of belief, religion and social relations (Haykel, 2009; Lauzière, 2015; Meijer, 2009). Purely islamological readings, which aim to examine the religious constructions that are reflected in these fundamentalist views, differ from sociological interpretations that insist, for instance, on the origins and trajectories of activists or theorists of Salafist and/or Jihadist movements. Numerous ground‐breaking works have been published concerning the question of Salafism and Jihadism. The plurality of approaches used to analyze these phenomena (islamology, sociology of social movements and religious practices, anthropology, international relations, etc.) is combined with a large diversity of fields of study (extending from the Arab world to non‐Arab Muslim majority countries and to western societies). We can also differentiate authors from the field of Islamic Studies and those primarily interested by Salafism as a religious and historical construction (Lauzière, 2015; Mouline, 2014; Wagemakers, 2016). This perspective is essentially islamological, meaning that it is oriented towards the *Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the Edmund A. Walsch School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. DOI: 10.1111/johs.12237 J Hist Sociol. 2019;32:275–291. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/johs 275