Abstract
The aim of the present study is to outline the Muslim attitude to the Talmud and the Mishnah based on statements by several medieval Muslim writers. The information about the rabbinical literature can be found in authors such as Ibn Ḥazm, Samawʾal al-Maghribī, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, al-Maqdīsī and al-Maqrīzī.
As the Talmud and the Mishnah played only a marginal role in Muslim polemics against the Jews and Judaism, the information provided by the Muslim authors of these tracts is extremely trite and superficial. Muslims did not generally study this literature.
Ibn Ḥazm was the first to introduce the Talmud to the polemical literature. He attributes its authorship to rabbis, who invented a new religion with new beliefs, liturgy, and prayers, which are no longer based on the Hebrew Bible, but on the Oral Law expressed in the Talmud, which they consider of greater value than God's revelation in the Torah.
Ibn Ḥazm's notion of the Talmudic canon was rather vague, however, and he erroneously identifies as part of the Talmud the mystical book Shiʿur Qomā. More accurate information was furnished to Islam by Jewish apostates.
One of them, Samawʾal al-Maghribī, turns against the whole Talmud, its tendencies, the way the rabbis enact laws, and he depicts contemporary rabbis as totally depraved. Samawʾal's polemic proved very influential and served as a reference text for later Muslim authors writing polemics against Judaism.
Muslim polemicists in the Middle Ages generally put forward arguments to some degree similar to those levelled against the Talmud in Europe. They assert that the Talmud is full of blasphemies and was created by the Rabbanites as a tool to prevent the Jews from mingling with Gentiles, corrupts morals, teaches and even forces people to lie to, deceive and hate non-Jews.
The same attitude still prevails among Muslim authors.