, “the Children of Israel”.

1. This designation of the Jewish people occurs in the Ḳurʾān about forty times. The terms Yahūd , Jews, and its derivatives as well as Naṣāra , Christians, ¶ appear only in the Medinese period, although they had been widely used in pre-Islamic poetry and certainly were familiar to every Arab townsman (Joseph Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen , 144 ff. and 153 ff.). On the other hand, Banū Isrāʾīl never occurs in authentic pre-Islamic poetry (ibid., 91). It would therefore seem to follow that the exclusive use of this term during the Meccan pe…