In reading the Qur'an, I noticed this passage:
Qur'an 9:30 The Jews say, "Ezra is the son of Allah "; and the Christians say, "The Messiah is the son of Allah ." That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved [before them]. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?
Is there any basis for the claim? Did Jews believe Ezra to be the son of God when the Qur'an was written?
I had never heard of this claim before. It certainly doesn't fit with everything I understand about Judaism.
The Wikipedia article on Uzair (Qur'anic Arabic for Ezra, apparently) contains a great deal of interesting information about this claim in the Qur'an, including why it's incompatible with actual Jewish beliefs and some suppositions about how it got into the Qur'an anyway. I think the following quotation from Exodus Rabba 29 makes the former point pretty ably:
'I am the first and I am the last, and beside Me there is no God' I am the first, I have no father; I am the last, I have no brother. Beside Me there is no God; I have no son."
No. This concept is completely foreign to Judaism. The other religion mentioned derived the concept from paganism, not Judaism.
No more so than the belief that we are all G-d's children. Ezra is, however, compared to Moses (Sanhedrin, bottom of 21b; See also Yad Rama ad loc Sanhedrin 36a and Gittin 59a (comparing Ezra to Moses as a national leader and the greatest Torah scholar of his generation).
The concept of anyone being the son of God is very foreign to Judaism, as well as the majority of Jews.
Also, that's not what that verse says (but interpreting the Quran is off-topic here).
Rabbi Tovia Singer, in response to this claim, said that some Jews in Egypt probably did believe Ezra was the son of G-d but that everyone has their “crazies,” and that this should not be attributed to mainstream Judaism which is strictly monotheistic.
Dr. Bat Sheva Garsiel in her book "Bible, Midrash and Quran", pp. 181-182, discusses this passage and suggests two possible explanations for the origins of this idea:
What @BruceJames brought, that Ezra is compared to Moshe in the gemara.
In the apocryphal 4th Ezra, it says that Ezra, upon completing his duties on earth, rose to the heavens and became known as the "Scribe of the Most High" (Syriac 4th Ezra/2 Esdras, 14:49)
The second possibility falls in line with what Tabari, one of the classic Quran commentators, says about this passage: Tabari, according to Garsiel, heard from Jews of his time that Jews do not have such a tradition. And so he wrote that this tradition was held either by one Jew named Pinchas, or by a small sect of Jews. He also wrote that he heard from Wahb ibn Munabbih, a Muslim who wrote works on Jewish stories and traditions, that Jews hold the belief that when the First Temple was destroyed, all of the Torah was lost and Ezra remembered all of it and wrote it down. This particular claim is a key part of 4th Ezra (see chapter 14).
Garsiel wrote the connection to 4th Ezra in the name of Speyer, who also suggested (pg. 413) something she didn't mention, which is that perhaps Muhammed knew a Jewish-Christian sect that worshipped Ezra in the manner that some Christians worship Malkitzedek.
It's an absurd concept that has no historical basis. Islam came along 600 years or so after the fall of the Second Temple so it isn't even like the Quran has any historical/archeological basis to that claim. It is like claiming that the rabbis distorted the words of the Torah to make Lot look like a non-righteous man (Islamic doctrine does not agree with Jewish doctrine that Lot slept with his daughters).
