Chapter Nine
The factors involved in the progressive exclusion of the Jews from the Christian social order might have led to their total extirpation but for the contingent religious toleration stipulated by Augustine in his doctrine of witness. That contingency was implicit in the organic connection between Old Israel and New Israel; the latter needed the former to prop up its own legitimacy. By preserving the Old Testament, the Jews—though blinded to its spiritual, christological meaning—bore witness to the gospel of the New. In so doing, they buttressed the faith of Christians and confounded those among the pagans who accused them of inventing prophecies of the advent of Christ after the fact. Living dispersed among the Christians in a state of abject defeat, Jews testified daily to the triumph of Christianity. At the Second Coming, their blindness removed, the Jews would, through conversion, crown their role as witness and thus testify to the veracity of Jesus’ messiahood.1
Nonetheless, Christianity could not remain passive until the Redemption. It felt compelled to combat Judaism, which stubbornly insisted on its own exclusive claim to divine election. Disputing the Jewish claim to religious truth was, therefore, actively pursued by church thinkers. Polemics against Judaism were part of the fabric of Christianity from its earliest days: anti-Judaism was, from the outset, an essential ingredient of Christian self-definition.2
The anti-Jewish polemic is scattered throughout Christian writings as well as appearing in separate treatises devoted to the subject. A. Lukyn Williams summarized examples of this “adversus judaeos” literature.3 More recently, Heinz Schreckenberg has assembled an impressive, chronological, descriptive bibliographical survey of Christian polemical literature against Judaism. This material, dating from the first through the thirteenth century, includes not only anti-Jewish tracts but also material in papal pronouncements, conciliar decrees, canonist texts, royal documents, historical chronicles, poetry and drama, iconography, and even comments on Christianity and its relations with the Jews in Jewish literature from Rashi to Maimonides. In size and scope alone, this enormous compilation demonstrates the fundamental, continuous struggle in Christian history to affirm Christianity at the expense of the Jews and Judaism.4
An early type of polemical literature in Christianity took the form of citations of biblical testimonies, perhaps even whole “Books of Testimonies,” manuals of Old Testament verses with their “correct” christological meaning, usually featuring veiled foretellings of Jesus and his mission. A corollary of the conviction that the Jewish Bible contains God’s authentic word about the mission of Christ, this method of interpreting the “Old Testament”—essentially Jewish hermeneutics turned against the Jews—lay at the heart of the Christian-Jewish argument. Such “testimony” served to bolster the faith of Jewish converts to Christianity.5 The majority of Jews—those who failed to see the light—were considered “sick” or “blind” to the real meaning of their own Scripture. “Testimonies,” wrote Augustine, “are to be selected from sacred Scripture, which has great authority among the Jews, and if they do not want to be cured by means of this advantage offered them, they can at least be convicted by its evident truth.”6
A leading authority on Jewish-Christian polemics has written that “every major Christian doctrine could be supported by several verses in the Hebrew Bible.”7 For example, exegetes found support for the fundamental dogma of the divine rejection of the Jews and of God’s election of the Christian “New Israel” in two famous Old Testament “testimonies” that illustrate the issue lying at the heart of the Jewish-Christian conflict. The first testimony is found in Genesis, at the close of Jacob’s blessing to his twelve sons. To his fourth son, Judah, Jacob prophesies: “The scepter shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler’s staff from between his legs until Shiloh comes” (Genesis 49:10). Already in ancient Jewish exegesis, the enigmatic “Shiloh” was given a messianic twist. The Targum, or Aramaic translation of the Torah, takes the verse eschatologically, rendering the final, puzzling words, “until the messiah comes, to whom belongs kingship [or, the kingdom; malkhuta].” Christianity adopted this Jewish interpretation. Looking back at Rome’s destruction of the Second Temple, in 70 C.E., and to the dissolution of the Jewish state, Christian commentators found that Genesis 49:10 had predicted everything. With Rome’s victory, the scepter departed from Judah, God having rejected the Jews. Hence, Shiloh must have come. Shiloh could be none other than Jesus himself.
Another crux, Genesis 25:23, presents God’s poetic promise to Rebecca that she will bear twins, each representing a “nation,” of which “one people shall be mightier than the other, and the older shall serve the younger.” In context, the older child was firstborn Esau, who solidified his prophesied subservience to his younger brother Jacob when he sold the latter his birthright in return for a helping of lentil stew (Genesis 25:30-34). Later, their father, Isaac, misled on his deathbed into thinking that Jacob was Esau, bestowed on the “younger” the blessing, “Be master over your brothers” (Genesis 27:29), and upon the “older” the famous words, “You shall serve your brother” (Genesis 27:40). Christian readers of the prophecy to Rebecca made older and younger refer, respectively, to Judaism, the “older” religion, and Christianity, the “younger” faith. Thus, God’s prophecy tells of the eventual submission of Judaism to Christianity. This Christian midrash countered the standard Jewish exegesis, which identified Esau, also known as Edom in the Bible, with Rome and Roman Christendom and used the Jacob-Esau motif to shore up the Jewish conviction about God’s eternal election of Israel (Jacob) and of its ultimate redemption.8 These and numerous other Old Testament testimonies about the true Israel were used by Christian thinkers to challenge Judaism and strengthen Christian faith.
To appreciate the intensity of the challenge that Old Testament “proofs” of the authenticity of Christianity (as well as face-to-face polemics against Judaism) posed to Jews, one need only consider the Jewish response. The early midrash includes many veiled answers to Christianity, intended to bolster Jewish self-confidence in the face of an aggressive Christian “adversus judaeos” tradition.9 In addition, mishnaic and talmudic literature contain explicitly disparaging references to Jesus, although, by the time of printing, these were mostly excised as a result of Christian or self-imposed Jewish censorship. There was also the early medieval Hebrew biography of Jesus, Toledot yeshu, with its derogatory, blasphemous parody of the life and acts of Jesus. Medieval Hebrew chronicles of Jewish suffering at the hands of Christians, especially during the Crusades, heaped opprobrium on Jesus and Christianity. Jesus was called by such names as “the crucified one, a rotting corpse that cannot avail and cannot save,” and Christianity was regularly classified, at least in theory, as idolatry.10
Christians, early on, encountered Jewish invective toward Christianity. In the ninth century, Bishop Agobard of Lyons was familiar with Toledot yeshu.11 In later centuries, Christians became acquainted with alleged and real anti-Christian comments in talmudic literature, either through personal study or thanks to the good offices of such apostates as Nicholas Donin.12 Medieval Jewish Bible commentary is filled with anti-Christian polemic. One scholar observes that rebuttal of christological interpretations of Old Testament verses was not a mere by-product of the activity of the Jewish commentators, but “an integral part of their work. . . . The whole body of medieval exegesis is an eloquent witness to the relentless struggle between a powerful Church and a Jewry at bay.”13
Rashi (R. Solomon b. Isaac of Troyes, France, 1040-1105) used his commentary on the Bible to stress the Jewish interpretation of passages that Christianity applied to Jesus. He emphasized the eternality of the Law, the chosenness of Israel, and other Jewish claims disputed by Christianity.14 For a time after Rashi’s death, Jewish exegetes in France, notably, Rashi’s own grandson, Samuel b. Meir (Rashbam), but also Joseph Qara, Rashi’s student and older contemporary of Rashbam, focused their energies on the simple, literal meaning of the biblical text in order to outmaneuver Christian spiritual exegesis, with its propensity for finding christological prefigurations throughout the text.
The defense of Judaism against Christian polemics intensified in the twelfth century. This was the period of the Crusades, a time of increasing anti-Jewish hostility in Europe. Daniel Lasker divides into six categories the strategies in the literature that began to emerge in the twelfth century: exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, exegesis of rabbinic literature, attacks on Christianity, comparisons of Christian doctrines with the New Testament, attacks on the articles of Christianity, and comparisons of Christianity with the principles of philosophy.15 Jewish philosophical polemicists, particularly studied by Lasker, strove to expose the logical impossibility of key Christian doctrines, mainly the trinity, incarnation, transubstantiation, and virgin birth.
Joseph Kimhi (1105?—1170?), a Jewish refugee from Almohad persecution in Muslim Spain, wrote what is probably the first full Jewish treatise against Christianity. He wrote in Provence, where he regularly came in contact with Christians and may have felt impelled by what would have seemed to him a more intense anti-Jewish polemic than the type he had known in his native milieu. His Book of the Covenant upholds the eternal election of the Jews against Christian insistence that God had abandoned them. He responds to the christological interpretation of Jacob’s blessing for his son Judah in Genesis 49:10 on historical grounds. Shiloh, he says, alludes to King David, the descendant of Judah. The Davidic line of monarchy ended with the Babylonian captivity—more than four hundred years before Jesus.16
Kimḥi derides the Christian dogma of the incarnation: “How shall I believe that this great inaccessible Deus absconditus needlessly entered the womb of a woman, the filthy, foul bowels of a female, compelling the living God to be born of a woman?”17 He turns the tables on the Christian critique of Jewish usury, demonstrating that Jews scrupulously obey the Torah, which forbids taking usury only from one’s “brother,” whereas Christian moneylenders engage in usury even with their brethren.18
A close contemporary of Joseph Kimḥi, Jacob b. Reuven, compiled (probably in 1170) a Hebrew polemical treatise in the form of a debate between a Christian mekhaḥed (denier of God’s unity), said to represent an actual interlocutor of the author, and the author himself, ha-meyaḥed (proclaimer of God’s unity). The book’s combative title, “The Wars of the Lord” (Milḥamot ha-shem), signals its polemical purpose. It begins with a philosophical, logical discussion of the trinity and incarnation; following that, it takes up and refutes alleged biblical proofs of the truth of Christianity. In an exchange about the trinity and its alleged attestation in the story of Abraham’s encounter with the three visitors (Genesis 18), a story that alternates between three and one, the Jewish disputant responds, paraphrasing Isaiah (33:15), 'atzamta me-re'ot 'einekha, “You have shut your eyes so that you cannot see.” This jibe turns against the Christian the classic New Testament theme of Jewish blindness to the truth of their own Scripture. Taking the offensive against Christianity, Jacob’s “Wars of the Lord” includes a daring, informed critique of the Gospel account of Jesus, about which the Jewish disputant declares: “Of this section, God knows, I did not intend to mention anything, but my friends compelled me. . . . Therefore, I have mentioned a few of the errors and distortions in their book, and a hundredth I have not revealed out of fear.”19
A major summa of Jewish responses to Christian polemics against Judaism was compiled in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Its title, again alluding to the bellicose nature of interreligious polemics, is Sefer nitztzahon yashan, “The Old Book of Polemic.” The author presents Christian “testimonies” from the Bible, followed by Jewish rejoinders. The organization follows the order of the books of the Old Testament, a useful arrangement for Jews potentially finding themselves locked in debate with Christians over Scripture. David Berger, who edited and translated the treatise, notes that “the array of arguments in the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus is almost encyclopedic, and the book is therefore an excellent vehicle for an analysis of virtually all the central issues in the Jewish-Christian debate during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”20 One example from this vast anthology of anti-Judaism and Jewish response concerns the controversial issue of the status of Jewish law. Jeremiah’s verse (31:31), “And I will make a new covenant with Israel and with the house of Judah,” a favorite among Christians, offered proof from God Himself of the cardinal doctrine that His new covenant with the Christians had replaced Jewish law. The Jewish voice in Nitztzahon yashan produces counterevidence from the New Testament: “They contradict their own Torah, for it is written in the book of their error that Jesus himself said, ‘I have not come to destroy the law of Moses or the words of the prophets, but to fulfill them.’”21
Books like Nitztzahon yashan were valuable resources for Jews engaged in religious disputation with Christians. This disputation took different forms. Especially before the era of the Crusades, some could hardly be called disputations at all. They arose from more or less friendly conversation between Jewish and Christian intellectuals eager for firsthand knowledge of each other’s faith and, indirectly, to convince the opposite number of his error.22 Many Christian exegetes satisfied a yearning to know the original Hebrew of the Bible by befriending Jewish teachers. Jewish intellectuals, for their part, obtained sufficient knowledge of Latin to respond from a position of strength.23 Blumenkranz summarizes the issues debated in the early Middle Ages under three broad headings: the lapsed nature of the Mosaic Law; the messiahood of Jesus; and the rejection of the Jews and the election of the gentiles, the True Israel.24
Respectful exchange of this sort, even collaboration between Jewish and Christian intellectuals, did not disappear, as Gerard Dahan has recently shown for the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.25 By and large, however, the Christian-Jewish debate heated up in the twelfth and especially the thirteenth century, in tandem with the worsening of Jewish-Christian relations on all other levels.26 During this period, Christians went beyond the Jewish Bible for their material, exploiting rabbinic literature, only sketchily known to them before the twelfth century. For some, the Talmud and its kindred literature provided proof of Jewish anti-Christian enmity. For others, rabbinic texts contained affirmation of Christianity’s messianic claim. For still others, familiarity with rabbinic literature begot a revision of the Christian theory of Jewish history. Postbiblical Judaism—the Judaism of contemporary Jews—was no longer viewed as the fossilized bearer of a misunderstood scriptural prefiguration of the new, Christian dispensation but as a heretical departure from biblical religion. Postbiblical rabbis—the authors of the Talmud and their medieval successors—were now seen as enemies of Christendom, perversely preventing the Jews, by their inane midrashim, from ever grasping the true, christological message of their own divinely revealed book.27
Three great, “formal” interfaith disputations on the merits of rabbinic Judaism stand out boldly.28 The first took place in France, the second and third in Spain. The disputation over the Talmud in Paris, in 1240, functioned more as a “trial” than a genuine debate, and the outcome—the Talmud condemned for blasphemy and then burned in Paris in 1242—was a foregone conclusion. Most scholars agree that the Disputation at Barcelona of 1263 was conducted on a higher intellectual plane than the Paris confrontation and turned out to be more open-ended. The Christian side here focused on rabbinic literature not to vilify it, as in Paris, but to exploit it to verify that the messiah (Jesus) had come. The less vituperative tone of the Barcelona confrontation reflected the relatively more secure position of the Jews in Spain at that time. They were less detested than were the Jews of northern Europe, more integrated economically and culturally into their surroundings, and still-valued servants of Aragon state interests during the Reconquista. In brief, Jews benefited from the more accepting, economically and politically more favorable setting of Mediterranean Christendom that we have noted with reference to the Jews of the Midi, as well as from the legacy of Muslim Spain. The last of the three, the Disputation at Tortosa, in 1414—15, came after the Jewish situation in Spain had taken a radical turn for the worse following the massive and widespread anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391. It served as a terror tactic to induce Jews to convert to Christianity, and in this it had considerable success. Many other, smaller confrontations between Jews and Christians, as well as an abundance of literary polemics on both sides, dotted the landscape during the difficult centuries of the High and late Middle Ages in the West, as the debate with Judaism, so essential to Christian self-definition from earliest times, expanded outward from biblical “testimonies” to a broader and more intensely critical evaluation of Jews and their religion, with ominous implications for the continued toleration of the Jews as an essential ingredient in Christian society and soteriology.
A comparison between Islamic and Christian polemics with Judaism should yield substantial insight into the attitude toward and treatment of the Jews of Islam.29 To anticipate our conclusion: neither the Christian preoccupation with the intellectual struggle against Judaism nor the bellicose Jewish response to Christian polemics has a counterpart of similar intensity in the Judaeo-Islamic context. Combating Judaism and Jewish interpretations of Scripture was essential in Christianity; it was incidental in Islam.
At first glance, to be sure, the Islamic conflict with the Jews (and Christians) seems quite fundamental. Scriptural polemics, as in Christianity, play a major role. In many places, the Qur’an is decidedly antagonistic toward the Jews, more so even than the Gospels (especially in verses revealed in Medina, where Muhammad encountered stiff Jewish opposition). A frequently cited example likens the Jews to idolaters while holding forth with praise for the Christians: “Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe [to be] the Jews and the idolaters. And thou wilt find the nearest to them in affection to those who believe [to be] those who say: Lo! We are Christians. That is because there arc among them priests and monks, and because they are not proud.”30 But, in the long run, this Qur’anic hostility—the product of Muhammad’s head-on conflict with the Jews of his time—failed to make its stamp on the Muslim-Jewish polemic, which differed fundamentally from its counterpart in Christendom.
Already in the Qur’an, the People of the Book arc said to have corrupted their Scriptures (e.g., Sura 3:78).31 The Torah in the possession of contemporary Jews was said to be a massive, willful falsification of the original revealed book, lost to the Jews through their sins and the vicissitudes of their history.32 Eventually, Ezra came along and composed a new Torah, which strayed far from the original.33 The Qur’anic theme of taḥrīf found its first detailed elaboration in the influential writings of the eleventh-century Andalusian savant Ibn Ḥazm, who singled out chronological and geographical inaccuracies, theological impossibilities (especially anthropomorphic descriptions of God), and instances of preposterous behavior (such as the incident of sexual intercourse between Lot and his two daughters).34
Islamic censure of the text of the Bible accompanies a related doctrine, naskh, or “abrogation.” Originally applied to verses in the Qur’an said to nullify earlier revelations to the Prophet, naskh, as applied to the Jewish Bible, designates the abrogation of the law of Moses by the Qur’an. By expansion and extension, naskh characterized the supersession by Islam of both Judaism and Christianity. This recalls the Christian anti-Jewish doctrine of the divine rejection of the Jews, but it does not have quite the same salience in the Muslim-Jewish debate. A third major theme of Islamic polemics takes issue with anthropomorphic portrayal of God (tajsīm) in the Bible, a charge that called Jewish monotheism into question.
In matters relating to Jewish Scripture, Islam, with its doctrine of taḥrīf, takes the opposite approach. For Christians, the text of the Old Testament is wholly authentic; the words are divine, not open to challenge. The disagreement with the Jews concerns primarily the correct interpretation of the revealed text. Hence, the relentless drive by Christians century after century to press their own interpretation against that of the Jews. Muslims lack this obsession since they judge the Old Testament to be textually corrupt.35
To make the contrast sharper—and, thereby, differentiate more clearly between Islamic and Christian attitudes toward Judaism—it is useful to note that early Christian thinkers actually experimented with a notion of Jewish falsification of Scripture.36 The Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Bible, which was prepared for Greek-speaking Jews in the Hellenistic diaspora, was soon recognized by Christians as the authoritative text. As new, rival Greek translations by Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity appeared in the second century, minor variants to the Septuagint were introduced which challenged its accuracy. In an effort to uphold the official Greek Bible, certain fathers of the church, as early as Justin Martyr in the second century, accused the Jews of deliberately tampering with these versions or even the underlying Hebrew itself for the purpose of confounding Christians by denying them access to textual readings supportive of Christian doctrine. As William Adler has shown, however, this theory could not be upheld for long. Origen, Jerome, and Augustine rejected the premise as ultimately self-defeating. “[B]y indiscriminately raising the charge of Jewish tampering with their own Scriptures, Christian polemicists were shaking one of the very foundations of their own canon, namely the Bible of the Jews.”37 Unimpeded by any such dependency on either “testament,” old or new, Muslims could freely brandish their indictment of the Jews and Christians for falsifying (taḥrīf) Scripture.
Paradoxically, the conflict between Islam and Judaism over the meaning of Jewish Scripture generated less acrimony and tension than did the Jewish-Christian debate.38 While Christianity uncovered (in its own perception) Old Testament verses substantiating every important Christian doctrine—whether the trinity, virgin birth, incarnation, or messiahship and divinity of Christ—Islam mostly restricted itself to locating alleged foretellings in Christian and in Jewish Scriptures of the advent of Muhammad and his divinely ordained prophethood.
The Jewish Bible provided Muslim polemicists with the lion’s share of the good tidings, not because Muslims were fundamentally or ideologically more hostile toward Judaism or because Judaism posed more of a threat than Christianity. The Hebrew Bible simply contained much more usable material than the New Testament. Moreover, Muslims had the Christian example of “testimonies” drawn from the Book of the Jews as a model.
The most popular New Testament foretelling of Muhammad was “discovered” in John (14:15-16), where Jesus discourses during the last supper about an advent to come. “If you love me you will obey my commands; and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another to be your Advocate [in Greek, paraklētos], who will be with you forever—the Spirit of truth.”39 Some Muslim writers claimed that the Paraclete verse foretold the mission of Muhammad, because, they said, the word means “praised,” which derives from the same root, ḥ-m-d, as the name Muhammad.40
The Jewish Bible, however, provided the richest, most abundant material. The Torah contains the patriarchal narratives—especially the Abraham-Ishmael saga—which Arabs readily adopted as part of their own ancestral history. Also, by their nature, the prophetic books of the Jewish Bible presented oracles that could be interpreted as heralding Islam. There may be yet another explanation for the prominence given to Old Testament material. One of the earliest Muslim religious polemicists was 'Alī ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī. At the request of Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil, about 855, 'Alī ibn Rabban wrote The Book of Religion and Empire. The book claims that Christian and Jewish falsification of their respective Scriptures had all but obliterated forecasts of Muhammad’s future mission. 'Ali ibn Rabban’s professed goal was to recover these prophecies from each holy book, to “disclose its secret, and withdraw the veil from it, in order that the reader may see it clearly and increase his conviction and his joy in the religion of Islam."41 He wished not only to bolster belief in Islam, but also (and, probably, principally) to justify his own conversion and convince other Christians to follow his lead. 'Alī ibn Rabban tells us that Christians who abjured belief in the Prophet Muhammad said: “We do not see that a prophet has prophesied about him prior to his coming” and “the Christ has told us that no prophet will rise after Him.”42
Originally a Christian, 'Alī ibn Rabban naturally had firsthand knowledge of the essentialist Christian exegetical strategy of authenticating the advent of Christ and the truth of Christian teachings with prooftexts from the Old Testament. He seems to have decided that, to authenticate Islam for Christians, he needed to focus his efforts on retrieving foretellings of the prophethood of Muhammad from the Jewish Bible.43 The flow of anti-Jewish polemic from Christianity to Islam via converts is one of the chief conclusions arrived at by Moshe Perlmann, the most dedicated student of Islamic-Jewish polemics in the twentieth century.44
A brief look at some of the most popular biblical predictions about Muhammad highlights the contrast with the more essentialist Christian use of the Old Testament. For the most part, the Muslim technique relies on the literal meaning of texts, rather than on the typological-allegorical understanding so common in Christian exegesis.
The Genesis cycle of stories about Hagar and Ishmael served as grist for the Muslim exegetical mill. In chapter 16 the angel speaks to Hagar during her flight from Sarah: “I will greatly increase your offspring, and they shall be too many to count. . . . You shall call him Ishmael, for the Lord has paid heed to your suffering. He shall be a wild man [pere’ adam]; his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (Genesis 16:9-12). Since, by universal agreement, Ishmael was the ancestor of the Arabs, the Muslims happily took this passage literally as heralding Muhammad’s future absolute power.45 On this understanding, Islam descended directly from one of the two sons of Abraham—the first Muslim—just like Judaism. Moreover, Abraham, acting at Sarah’s behest and with God’s blessing, did not reject Ishmael, as the biblical narrative has it. Post-Qur’anic sources beginning in the ninth century preserve a story, probably Jewish in origin, according to which Abraham twice visited Ishmael in his desert exile at Mecca, exhibiting fatherly concern and, by implication, ensuring that the patrimony of Islam would be transmitted through the long line of his first son.46
The relationship in Islamic exegesis between Isaac and Ishmael, the brotherly progenitors of Judaism and Islam, contrasts with the Jacob-Esau antinomy in the Christian allegory on Genesis 23. It reveals a fundamental difference between Islamic and Christian conceptions of the Jews’ place in the divine historical plan. As noted, Christian exegetes took God’s prophecy to Rebecca—“and the older shall serve the younger”—to prefigure the triumphal subjugation of the “older” religion, Judaism, to the “younger” one, Christianity. In its more characteristic form, Christianity completely supersedes Judaism: the New Israel is superimposed over the Old Israel and claims its history.
Islamic historical theory, by contrast, posits for itself a linear, “national” existence beginning with Ishmael and a history that parallels rather than assimilates the annals of both the Jewish and Christian peoples. 'Alī ibn Rabban, for example, explains that the descendants of Abraham, through Ishmael, became dispersed among the nations of the earth, including Egypt, the Hijaz (northern Arabia), and Syria:
Then after a long time all the prophecies were realized and the messages fulfilled, and the children of Ishmael triumphed over those who were around them. . . . They spread in all the regions of the earth like young locusts. . . . [t]hey reigned, too, in East and West. . . . The name of Abraham appeared then in the mouth of all nations. ... As to Judaism, it had appeared only in one section [ṭā’ifa] of mankind. As to Christianity, although it appeared in a great and glorious nation, yet in the land of Abraham and his wife Sarah, and their forefathers, and in the land of Hagar and her fathers, it had not wielded the sceptre and held absolute power and sway such as those vouchsafed by God to their inhabitants through the Prophet.47
This description of the Islamic scheme of the past presumes that the Islamic people had a continuous history from the time of the biblical patriarchs. For ages the descendants of Ishmael survived among other people in a dispersion not unlike that of the Jews. With Muhammad’s appearance in history, fulfilling the prophecies of his advent, the Ishmaelite people arose, united, to a position of great power and geographical dominion. The Jewish and Christian peoples had inherent limitations—ethnic exclusivity, in one case, and geographical narrowness, in the other. Only Islam achieved true universality and globality. Noticeably absent from this scheme is the suggestion that the people of Islam were anchored historically in either Jewish or Christian society, let alone that Islam constituted a New Israel or New Christendom. Following this understanding, Islam need not deny to either the Jews or the Christians their continuous history alongside Islam. They are ahl al-dhimma and ahl al-kitāb—but still an ahl, a “people” living out their own histories dispersed among the Muslims, and still living.
Other popular passages in the biblical patriarchal cycle foretell the coming of Muhammad. God announces the birth of Isaac to Abraham while at the same time promising to “bless [Ishmael]. I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous. He shall be the father of twelve chieftains, and I will make of him a great nation” (Genesis 17:15-21). It is hardly surprising that the Muslims took this passage as a direct reference to the great Islamic umma to come.48 Another prophecy derived from the same passage is based on the numerical value of words rather than literalism and is strikingly “Jewish” in technique. The Hebrew expression for “exceedingly,” bi-me'od me’od, computed mathematically (each letter of the Hebrew alphabet having a numerical value), yields the numerical equivalent of the name of the Prophet (the consonants M Ḥ M D add up to 92, the same total as the letters B M’ D M’ D).49 This exegetical method, called “gematria” in the Talmud, might be a Jewish import into Islamic polemics, for this and other “gematrias” appear in anti-Jewish polemical works written by Jewish converts to Islam.50 It entered Islam early, however. 'Alī ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī employs a gematria on the “Paraclete verse” in the Gospel of John, where the words “He shall teach you everything,” in what 'Alī Ṭabarī calls a “wonderful mystery” (sirr 'ajīb), have the numerical value of Muḥammad bin Abdallāh al-nabī al-hādī (Muhammad the rightly guiding Prophet, son of 'Abdallah).51
Deuteronomy 18:15ff. contains an extremely popular passage predicting Muhammad’s advent. Moses speaks: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your own people [me-aḥekha] like me” (verse 15), and continuing, quotes God, “I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own people [mi-qerev aḥeihem], like yourself” (verse 18). Muslim exegetes understood the Arabic translation of the Hebrew words mi-qerev aḥeihem as min ikhwatihim, “from among their brothers,” hence an allusion to the descendants of Ishmael. Jewish attempts to understand the verse differently (incorporated into the Jewish Publication Society translation just cited) constituted taḥrīf.52
Yet another prognostication widely used in Islamic polemics derives from a literal-historical reading of the opening line of Moses’ blessing for Israel just before his death (Deuteronomy 33:2-3): “The Lord came from Sinai, He shone upon them from Seir, He appeared from Mount Paran.” This was taken to be a prophecy of the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in three successive divine revelations. Al-Qarāfī (d. 1285) explains: Sinai was the mountain from which God spoke to Moses; Seir, the mountain al-Khalil in Syria, where the messiah (Jesus) practiced his pieties; and Paran, the mountain of Banu Hisham, where Muhammad practiced his own pious devotions and which was identical with Mecca according to the agreed opinion of the People of the Book.53 Thus, the verse served to proclaim that a future revelation would come to Ishmael’s most famous descendant, the Prophet Muhammad. In the words of 'Alī ibn Rabban a propos the portent in question, “If this is not as we have mentioned, let them show us ‘a lord’ who appeared from Mount Paran; and they will never be able to do so. The name ‘lord’ refers here to the Prophet. . . . [I]t is a word applied by Arabs and non-Arabs to the Most High God.”54
Recent research on the Islamic approach to Jewish material reinforces from a different angle the distinction I am suggesting between Muslim and Christian exegetical strategies. In an illuminating study of “the evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael legends in Islamic exegesis,” Reuven Firestone shows that Muhammad and the early Muslims inherited a large body of monotheistic oral traditions about the lives of this important father and son, much of it acquired from the storytelling of “Biblicists” in Arabia before and during the lifetime of the Prophet. As Islam crystallized, Muhammad, in the Qur’an, and his successors who compiled post-Qur’anic exegetical literature adopted versions that fit best with conceptions of Islam and with Arab notions of their ancient past. Muslims believed that Qur’anic and extra-Qur’anic stories about Abraham and Ishmael—such as the conviction held by some that Ishmael, not Isaac, was Abraham’s intended sacrifice—were authentic originals that the Jews had simply distorted.55
Following Firestone’s thesis, Muslim presentations of legends found in the Bible would have been distilled from oral adaptations that were already current before the rise of Islam. They preexisted—or, at least, paralleled—Jewish renderings; they did not, as in Christianity, exegetically supersede them. The challenge presented by the existence of such divergent exegetical traditions was, accordingly, far less threatening to Judaism than the one presented by Christian understanding of the Jewish Bible. Christological exegesis of the Old Testament stretched and pulled the sacred Hebrew text in new ways and put the Jewish keepers of the Bible to a severe test. In the short run, as well as the long, Jews living within the orbit of Islam found it easier to dismiss or ignore Muslim interpretations simply by holding fast to their own, “truer,” literal understanding.
Before discussing the Jewish response to Islamic polemics, we will briefly examine the Islamic-Christian debate. The Islamic polemic against Christianity expended most of its effort denouncing doctrines that fundamentally conflicted with the religion of Islam rather than seeking foretellings of Muhammad in the New Testament. To exemplify the difference in tone and substance between anti-Christian and anti-Jewish polemic in Islam, I take the case of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s treatise, “Guide of the Perplexed in Reply to the Jews and the Christians.”56
The Muslim author addresses the standard themes of Islamic polemic, alternating between Judaism and Christianity for his examples. He pays considerable attention to predictions in both the Old and New Testaments. Near the end of the book, however, he devotes separate chapters to each of the two other Scriptural faiths. A comparison of these sections permits us to gauge the relative opinions of this Muslim intellectual concerning Judaism and Christianity. The chapter on Judaism occupies a quarter of the space devoted to Christianity.57 In the main, it discusses Jewish practices and beliefs considered absurd, such as rigid dietary restrictions, levirate marriage, and the Jewish claim to “chosenness.” Some of the complaints about Judaism are not original with Ibn al-Qayyim; he borrows much from “Silencing the Jews” by the Jewish apostate to Islam Samau’al al-Maghribī.58 Ibn al-Qayyim has even harsher words for Christianity, including a diatribe on the virgin birth, as well as beliefs and practices (especially intercession) regarding Mary and Jesus. He refers to the Christians as “the nation of those who go astray and of worshipers of the cross and of images on walls and ceilings.”59 Idolatry in the form of the trinity rankles him more than any belief of Judaism. “If the monotheists were to commit every sin . . . it would not reach the weight [mithqāl] of the sin of this immense unbelief [al-kufr al-'aẓīm] regarding the Master of the Universe.”60
Faced with Islam’s critique of the doctrines and practices of Christianity from early in the Islamic period, Christians of the Islamic world responded with numerous specifically anti-Islamic polemical works, outdoing the Jews by far in this respect, as well as ensuring a larger return of anti-Christian invective.61 The Melkite bishop of Harran (in Mesopotamia), Theodore Abū Qurrah (bishop 795-812), wrote in Arabic a tract justifying Christian veneration of images against the critique of both Jews and Muslims, which apparently had instilled something resembling iconophobia among some Christians.62 In the ninth century, a Muslim and a Christian conducted a “correspondence” in Arabic on the issue of Christian belief. The Muslim writer (al-Hāshimī) invited the Christian to convert to Islam, citing the unacceptability of the trinity and asserting the superiority of Islam, its doctrine of the prophethood of Muhammad, its religious law and practices, and its this-worldly rewards. The Christian (al-Kindī) responded with an emphatic defense of Christianity, especially its trinitarian theology, and with a critique of Islam’s inferior laws and of the prophethood of Muhammad.63
Around 1150, the bishop of Sidon (Ṣaidā), Paul of Antioch, penned an “Epistle to One of the Muslims” which, in turn, elicited the apologetic treatise of al-Qarāfī. Later enlarged, this “Epistle” provoked the theologian Ibn Taymiyya to write “The Correct Answer to Those Who Changed the Religion of Christ.” His theme was that “the false religion of Christians is nothing but an innovated religion which they invented after the time of Christ and by which they changed the religion of Christ.” Comparing the two Religions of the Book, Ibn Taymiyya asserts that “Christians’ unbelief is more profound than that of the Jews, although they have gone to great lengths to pronounce the Jews unbelievers. They are far more deserving of being declared unbelievers than the Jews. The Jews claimed that Christ was a lying magician. . . . The Christians claim that he is God.”64
Although Muslims occasionally challenged Christians and Jews to participate in disputation, we have written accounts mainly for Christians.65 Timothy I, a Nestorian patriarch in the ninth century, committed to writing his version of a dialogue he had held with the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī. Among the issues debated are the trinity, foretellings, and circumcision (the Christian abandonment of which roused much criticism among Muslims).66
Bernard Lewis comments on why Christianity was on the receiving end of more intensive religious polemics than Judaism:
In general, Muslim polemicists pay little attention to the relatively insignificant Jew. . . . [T]hey are far more concerned with the Christians who, as the bearers of a competing proselytizing religion and the masters of a rival universal empire, offered a serious alternative and therefore a potential threat to the Muslim dispensation and the Islamic oecumene.67
To this, it should be added that the essential doctrinal congruence between Islam and Judaism regarding the unitary nature of God eliminated an important stimulus to interreligious polemics always present in the Islamic-Christian encounter.
To be sure, during the Islamic Middle Ages, members of all three monotheistic faiths often met in relative amity to discuss a wide range of issues. These learned study sessions, however, treated religion and religions in a nonparochial manner. Reason rather than revelation served as the common denominator of the interchanges. Joel Kraemer summarizes this phenomenon for the tenth-century “Renaissance of Islam”: “Cosmopolitanism, tolerance, reason, and friendship made possible the convocation of these societies, devoted to a common pursuit of the truth and preservation of ancient wisdom, by surmounting particular religious ties in favor of a shared human experience.”68
Opportunities for Jews and Christians to discuss matters of mutual concern in a neutral setting existed to a much lesser extent in Ashkenazic northern Europe. Such gatherings of Christian and Jewish scholars as existed served the former as a means of learning the allegedly “true” Jewish understanding of the Old Testament and the latter as a forum for understanding Christian exegetical methods.69 It is doubtful, however, that the kind of open-minded discussions of religious questions characteristic of the majlis in Islam had a significant counterpart in northern Christian Europe. There, by way of contrast, the penetration of reason into the thinking of Christian savants, like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, did not extend to the Jewish intelligentsia. Moreover, no winds of religious relativism blew to soften the exclusivism of either Judaism or Christianity. And there, the polemic between Christianity and Judaism often played itself out in the street in popular prejudice and violence.70
Commensurate with Islam’s relatively mild assault on Judaism, compared with its heated polemic against Christianity, the Jewish response to Islam was similarly bland, especially when compared with the vigor of the Jewish anti-Christian polemic in Europe.
Though far from absent in Jewish writings, hostility toward Islam had little of the acerbic tone that its counterpart in the Christian world had. Moreover, while Jesus and the symbols of Christianity evoked unbridled contempt among the Jews of Christendom,71 a similar pattern of stimulus and response appears not to have existed among the Jews of Islam. By the time of the Islamic conquest, anti-Christian themes, whether overt or veiled, had become so engrained in the Jewish mentality that they continued to appear even in Jewish writings in the Arab world.72 the Jews of Islam, further, continued to confront Latin Christianity in debate in the tridenominational marketplaces of the Mediterranean littoral, in such ports as Ceuta (Morocco) and Alexandria.73
Only two derogatory epithets describing the Prophet Muhammad are known to have been in use among Jews of the Islamic world. The first was “madman” (meshugga'). Evidently inspired by the adjective “crazed” (majnūn) hurled at Muhammad by some of his unbelieving Arab contemporaries, Jews connected the word with a verse in Hosea (9:7): evil ha-navi’ meshugga' ish ha-ruah, “The prophet was distraught, the inspired man driven mad by constant harassment.”74 The other epithet was “defective” (pasul), a Hebrew pun on rasūl (messenger). According to Islamic law, such blasphemies were punishable by death. There is little indication, however, that the Jewish characterization of Muhammad as “madman” or “the defective one” became known to Muslims, or that Jews secreted a more elaborate, irreverent jargon about Muhammad that expanded on the hostile utterances of the Jews of Medina during the Prophet’s lifetime.75
A comparison of anti-Islamic material in Jewish Bible commentary written in the Muslim world with interreligious polemic in European Jewish biblical exegesis yields meager results. One might expect, for example, to find a Jewish rejoinder to purported biblical foretellings of Muhammad in the commentary of the Spaniard, Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164). Though born in Christian Tudela and a wanderer in Italy, France, and England during a large part of his adult life, Ibn Ezra had been educated in the culture of Muslim Spain, in the Jewish courtier society of Andalusia. His treatment of the crux verses shows rather little concern with the refutation of Islam. In Genesis 17, for instance, Ibn Ezra skips over the section containing God’s blessing for Ishmael, though at another occurrence of bime’od me’od in the Bible (Exodus 1:7; regarding Pharaoh’s fear of Israelite overpopulation), in one edition of his commentary, Ibn Ezra dismisses the numerical forecast of Muhammad’s advent out of hand.76 For the passage in Deuteronomy 18 beginning “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your own people, like me,” he gives the simple historical explanation that the prophet whom “God will raise up” refers to Joshua, Moses’ successor, and that this prophet will be sent from God, and not be a diviner. Commenting on Hosea 13:5, “I am the Lord God who have shepherded thee in the wilderness”—which, according to Muslim interpretation, alludes to Muhammad—Ibn Ezra states simply that it contains God’s review of the favors he had wrought for the Israelites when they came out of the desert. Evidently, Ibn Ezra sees no significant challenge in Muslim biblical exegesis. Muslim explanations merely represent tendentious readings of the literal text, easily countered by plausible Jewish literal readings of the verses.
More complex is the treatment of the story in Genesis 16. During Hagar’s flight with her son, Ishmael, the angel comforts Hagar with the prophecy that the boy will spawn a large, powerful people. Long before the rise of Islam, in a midrash on the “Sinai-Seir-Paran verse” in Deuteronomy 33:2-3,77 the rabbis had connected the description of Ishmael in Genesis 16 with the tradition that God had offered the Torah to the gentile nations before Israel. The characterization of Ishmael as a “wild man” (pere’ adam) whose “hand [is] against everyone” (Genesis 16) was understood by the Jewish homilist to mean that Ishmael and his descendants were all thieves, hence unworthy of receiving the Torah.78
For medieval Jewish commentators writing in the Muslim milieu, there was room for development of this hostile theme, but the opportunity seems, for the most part, to have been waived.79 Ibn Ezra’s remarks on Ishmael as a “wild man” illustrate this:
Insofar as he was “wild,” “his hand was against everyone,” and insofar as he was a “man,” “everyone’s hand will be against him.” The correct meaning, in my opinion, is that he will be among men like a wild person and will be victorious over everyone, but later on “everyone’s hand will be against him,” and this is how it is explained in Daniel, namely, that he [Ishmael] is the fourth beast.
The fourth beast of the Book of Daniel had traditionally been understood in Jewish exegesis as a symbol of Rome and Christendom, the final kingdom before the messianic Redemption. In his lifetime, Ibn Ezra experienced the exiles of both Christendom and Islam, and in his own commentary on Daniel, written after the Almohad persecution, he, like his tenth-century forerunner Saadya Gaon, “updated” the prophecy to take into account the kingdom of Ishmael.80
Ibn Ezra knew the old rabbinic midrash on the Sinai-Seir-Paran verse. For Deuteronomy 33:2-3, he quoted Saadya’s apparently apologetic treatment of the passage. “The Gaon of blessed memory stated that Mount Sinai, Seir, and Paran in the biblical verse are near one another and that this verse tells about the revelation at Mount Sinai.”81
Saadya’s “geographical” interpretation seems aimed at the Muslim prophecy derived from that passage. Some Jews may have found the Muslim claim compelling, since the old rabbinic midrash distinguishes between the three place names and identifies the third, “from Paran,” with the Ishmaelites. Possibly the inclination of Jews to believe the Muslim interpretation of the Paran passage was strengthened by another, related old midrash on the same verse, which states that God revealed himself in four languages, including Arabic.82 Where a Muslim portent like the “Paran verse” seems to have drawn support from Jewish sources, Saadya (followed by Ibn Ezra) felt compelled to respond.
Not enough of Saadya’s commentary on the Torah has been preserved for us to know how seriously he addressed Islamic polemics. There is a veiled reaction to the standard Muslim interpretation of God’s blessing for Ishmael, “I hereby bless him. I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous” (Genesis 17:20). Evidently, Saadya is responding to the Islamic interpretation when he notes that in the next verse God says he will maintain his covenant with Isaac, while later, after Isaac’s birth, God exhorts Abraham to follow Sarah’s advice and send Ishmael away, “for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be continued for you.”83
In his philosophical treatise, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Saadya incorporates what may be a refutation of Islamic arguments against Judaism. In Book 3, Saadya refutes the charge of abrogation of the law (naskh), although he does not attribute it to Islam by name. This may not be accidental, since Christianity also preaches the abrogation of Jewish law, and Saadya challenges Christianity in several places in his Beliefs and Opinions.84 Daniel Lasker contends that Saadya’s polemic is concerned less with Islam than with Christianity.85 It seems reasonable, however, that, in refuting such a central Islamic tenet as naskh, Saadya meant his argument to be applied principally to the dominant religion of his surroundings.86
Saadya brings biblical prooftexts for the eternity of the Torah, then turns to arguments drawn from reason, which he anthologizes from earlier, unnamed Jewish defenders of Judaism against naskh. After that, the Gaon discusses (and refutes) the contention of “proponents of the theory of abrogation” that certain biblical verses actually state that the Torah would be replaced. It is in this context that he cites the Paran verse, using geographical data culled from the Bible to show that the ostensible prophecy about three successive revelations refers to one and the same event—the theophany at Sinai. Finally, the Gaon takes up a number of biblical verses that seem to be contradicted by other verses and shows that they do not constitute abrogation.87
Karaite writers reacted more vigorously to Islam than Rabbanites such as Saadya. There were complaints about the hardship of “the Exile of Ishmael” combined with derogatory nicknames for the ruling institution, negative generalizations about Islam, and rationalistic theological arguments. Al-Qirqisānī, for instance, a tenth-century Karaite intellectual, discusses the abrogation of the law, foretellings of the prophethood of Muhammad, prophethood itself and miracles, and the lack of credibility of Muslim oral tradition.88 In some of its practices, Karaism was closer to Islam than Rabbanite Judaism.89 Karaite thinkers may have responded more aggressively to Islamic claims against Judaism than their Rabbanite counterparts, in order to dissuade Karaites from taking the similarity too far.
Two centuries after Saadya, the Spanish Hebrew poet and philosopher Judah ha-Levi wrote his “Book of Refutation and Proof on the Despised (or, Lowly) Faith,” popularly known as The Kuzari. The book’s very title proclaims its polemical purpose. In a Christian milieu, such a book would be devoted exclusively to refuting Christian arguments against Judaism. Characteristic of a Jew living in the Muslim milieu, however, ha-Levi finds in Islam only one of several challenges. In an effort to prove the superiority of rabbinic Judaism, he confronts Karaism and philosophical relativism. Written in Muslim Spain, where Reconquista Christianity was a factor in politics, The Kuzari confronts Christian polemics, as well.
Against the Islamic critique that Judaism’s Scripture is filled with anthropomorphisms, ha-Levi details a doctrine of divine attributes in the Kuzari, which explains away Scriptural adjectives ascribing human activity to God. In answer to the Islamic prooftext of Muhammad’s prophethood (“I hereby bless him [Ishmael]. I will make him fertile and exceedingly numerous), ha-Levi, like Saadya before him, points to the next verse (“But my covenant I will maintain with Isaac”) as proof that God rejected Ishmael in favor of the ancestor of Israel.90 In the same breath, he combines response to Islam with refutation of Christianity, saying: “Neither Ishmael nor Esau had a covenant,” for Esau, too, was rejected, as indicated by the story of the sale of his birthright to Jacob.
Similarly, Maimonides battles Islamic arguments in his writings, though, characteristically, in works that are not devoted specifically to the defense of Judaism against Islam. In the commentary on the Mishnah, Maimonides entitles one of his thirteen compulsory articles of Jewish faith naskh, stating “the Torah of Moses cannot be abrogated and no other Torah but this shall come from God.”91
Anticipated chronologically by the defensive, anti-Islamic polemical chapter 6 in the theological work, Bustān al-'uqūl [Garden of Wisdom], by the twelfth-century Yemenite Nethanel ibn Fayyūmī—written against the background of the particularly oppressive, Shiite regime of that country—Maimonides addressed to the latter’s son, Jacob, his famous “Epistle to Yemen” (Iggeret teiman), in which he consoles a community oppressed by an Islamic regime and attracted to a local messianic pretender who had converted from Judaism to Islam.92 Though not exclusively a polemic against Islam, the epistle contains the necessary ingredients. Maimonides responds to a report that the apostate in Yemen had adduced biblical verses announcing the future appearance of Muhammad. Before discussing them individually, he scoffs at the Muslims, saying even they realize how fallacious the foretellings are. For that reason, “they are compelled to accuse us, saying ‘You have altered [baddaltum] the text of the Torah and expunged every trace of the name of Muhammad therefrom.’” While singling out some of the most popular Muslim portent verses in the Bible, Maimonides’ response is characteristically mild and unperturbed. “I will make of him a great nation” in the blessing for Ishmael (Genesis 17:20) “implies neither prophecy nor a Law, but merely large numbers and no more.” In the same vein as Saadya, Maimonides asserts that God made it clear to Abraham that all his blessings were meant only for the seed of Isaac, Ishmael being an adjunct. The Paran verse, Deuteronomy 33:2, describes only the unique revelation to Israel, which came in stages, first “coming,” then “shining,” and finally, “appearing.” Maimonides discusses the Islamic interpretation of Deuteronomy 18:15, God’s promise to designate “a prophet from among your own people,” which, he says, some Jews in Yemen found compelling. “Remember that it is not right to take a passage out of its context and argue from it.” The context is the divine command not to engage in occult acts, and “the prophet alluded to here will not be a person who will produce a new Law [sharī'a] or found a new religion.” “Our disbelief in the prophecies of 'Amr and Zeid is not due to the fact that they are non-Jews, as the unlettered folk imagine, and in consequence of it are compelled to establish their stand from the biblical phrase ‘from among your own people.’” Rather, Maimonides explains, we disbelieve a prophet who comes to alter even one precept of the Torah, which Moses told us was final and eternal.93
Elsewhere in the Epistle to Yemen, Maimonides responds to the report that a certain Jew in Yemen had proclaimed himself messiah. He is fully aware of the Christian polemical challenge to Judaism, citing the example of Jesus, to whom the Christians “falsely ascribe marvelous powers,” which can be refuted with “a thousand proofs from Scripture.” Living in the environment of Islam, in which messianism played but a minor role in (at least Sunni) religious thinking, Maimonides must address the challenge of Christianity to make his point that the Yemenite pretender is a false messiah.94
Maimonides’ son Abraham, known for his admiration of the Muslim Sufis in his “Complete Guide for the Servants of God” (Kifāyat al-'ābidīn), has some unambiguous jibes for Islam in his commentary on Genesis. His notes on chapter 21, which contains the story of the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, are a case in point.95 Sarah’s words, “the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance [lo yirash] with my son Isaac” (verse 10), give Abraham Maimuni the opportunity to present an interpretation unfavorable to Islam. It means, he says, that the seed of Ishmael is destined not to inherit and share with Isaac the perfection (the Torah) promised his seed, “for even though they believed in it, they negated it [abṭalūhā] with the claim that it had been abrogated [naskh] and cast it away with the claim that it had been changed [taghyīr] and subjected to alterations [tabdīl].” Literally understood, he adds, the passage refers simply to Sarah’s desire to remove Isaac from Ishmael’s bad influence.96 Abraham Maimonides takes the words “As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed” (verse 14) to be “an allusion to the appearance of the religion of Islam, of the believers in the unity of the Creator, who will descend from him . . . after the appearance of the religion of Israel, at a time of obscurity for them on account of their sins.”97 This comment, remarkably consistent with Muslim understanding of the passage, suggests that Abraham Maimuni was not greatly exercised over Muslim foretellings based on Jewish Scripture.
Most interestingly—and, again, characteristic of Jewish exegetes living under Islam—Abraham Maimuni devotes attention to Christian exegesis. He knows that Christians adduce proofs of the dominance of Christianity over lowly Judaism from such biblical passages as Genesis 25, the prophecy of the birth of Rebecca’s twins, in which it is promised that “the older shall serve the younger.” In Abraham Maimuni’s literal understanding, the “older” must be Esau, who, indeed, served his “younger” brother Jacob “during the period of the first temple and most of the years of the second temple, and [will so] eternally in the messianic future.”98 Further, Maimuni considers the popular christological interpretation of Genesis 49:10, the “Shilo” verse, exploited in Christian exegesis to link the end of Jewish dominion with the advent of Jesus. Abraham Maimuni brings several Jewish explanations, including one in the name of Abraham ibn Ezra, which refute the polemical Christian interpretation.99
All of the Jewish polemical responses to Islam discussed thus far appear incidentally in works devoted to other topics. In contrast to the Jews of Christendom, with their numerous treatises dedicated to the defense of Judaism against Christianity—and differing, too, from Oriental Christians—the Jews of Islam produced no polemical text aimed exclusively and entirely at Islam. In fact, their comments in biblical commentaries, philosophical, or halakhic works often combined response to Christianity with rejoinder to Islam.
We should not forget that Rabbanite Jews had, in the Karaites, an adversary closer to home. Especially in the early Islamic period, most prominently in the person of Saadya Gaon, then, later on, in the work of Judah ha-Levi, the intra-Jewish debate with Karaism occupied an important place in Rabbanite polemics.100 This multiplicity of polemical targets—Islam, Christianity, Karaism, and skepticism—resembles the diffusion of polemical energy in Muslim polemics against the dhimmīs, which diminished the intensity of specific anti-Jewish belligerency.
The only two Jewish polemical works against Islam that have come down to us were written by Jews from the Christian West, where Jewish-gentile interreligious polemics were widespread and more heated. The thirteenth-century rabbi Solomon ibn Aderet of Barcelona (Rashba) compiled a Hebrew refutation of the Islamic doctrine of taḥrīf (shibbush in his Hebrew), responding to the allegations of a Muslim, whom he calls the meshugga' like Muhammad.101 The other work occurs alongside a refutation of Christianity in an extract from a philosophical treatise by Rabbi Simon b. Tzemaḥ Duran (Rashbatz), a Majorcan rabbi and scholar who fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391 and took refuge in Muslim Algiers. His dual polemic, given the bellicose title Qeshet u-magen, “Bow and Shield” in its separately printed form, affords an excellent opportunity to compare Jewish responses to the two enemy religions.
Duran begins with Christianity. He defends the eternality of the Law: the Christians perverted (heḥeti'u) the intention of Jesus by saying that he meant to abolish the Law.102 He presents the Jewish version of Jesus’ life and death and contradicts Christian interpretations of verses in the Bible said to herald the coming of Jesus as messiah. Christians ascribe fault to the Torah, so Duran counters with examples of the inferiority of the Gospels “which is their Torah.” “Even though this be scoffing [letzanut], and scoffing is forbidden, this is not the case with scoffing about idolatry.”103
Turning to Islam, Duran concentrates on the common allegations of distortion and abrogation but omits entirely a discussion of verses in Jewish Scripture claimed as foretellings of the mission of Muhammad. As a Jew reared among Christians, and accustomed to their relentless anti-Jewish polemics over the Bible, he may have perceived that the Islamic version of the Christian technique paled by comparison. Rather, Duran dwells on things in the Qur’an that are cause for ridicule, employing a Jewish strategy dating back to the Jewish encounter with Muhammad in Medina. He argues against Muhammad’s prophethood, downplaying Muslim claims that the Qur’an is a miracle sufficient to confirm Muhammad’s divinely ordained mission. To the contrary, Muslim interpretation of the Qur’an is filled with confusion (bilbul).104 What appear in the Qur’an to be perfect acts and beliefs, including the all-important belief in the unity of God, are nothing more than Muslim imitations of the Torah and of Moses. All were slightly altered in order to maintain a distinction from the Jews. Yet many Muslim practices, notably the pilgrimage to Mecca, are paganlike and, indeed, originated as pagan rites.
Interreligious polemics represented one of the chief modes of discourse that sustained throughout the course of the Middle Ages the religious conflict that marked the first encounter between Judaism and each of its rival claimants to religious truth. For both Christianity and Islam, polemics was a medium for expressing their intrinsic intolerance of Judaism; for Judaism, polemics afforded a way of asserting an unflagging conviction that the Jews retained God’s undivided love as well as the original religious verity.
There was a significant difference, however, between the Judaeo-Christian and Judaeo-Islamic debates. In Christianity, anti-Jewish polemic was an essential component of religious self-definition. For Islam, anti-Jewish argument was incidental, not essential; hence, both in tone and in frequency, it was more temperate than its analogue in Christianity. Judaism reciprocated with corresponding moderation, if not apathy. This important contrast reflected and helped determine the characteristically lower level of persecution that distinguished Islam from Christendom in its relations with the Jews.105