Judaism's Polemic with Islam in the Middle Ages Salomon ibn Adret and Shimʿon ben Ṣemaḥ Duran Judaism's Polemic with Islam in the Middle Ages: Salomon ibn Adret and Shimʿon ben Ṣemaḥ Duran
Abstract
The Jewish polemic against Islam can be found as early as in the oldest Muslim literature - the Qurʾān and the biography of the prophet Muhammad. The same holds true for the oldest surviving Jewish literature to have been written under Islamic rule.
It can be found across the whole range of medieval Jewish literature, including biblical exegeses, poetry, books of history, theology, philosophy, travel books, responsa, and exegetical and halakhic works. What is lacking is thus not anti-Islamic polemics as such, but rather works whose single or main purpose is to attack Islam.
Only two such monographs have fully survived from the Middle Ages to the present, both originating in Sephardic Jewish culture and both written in Hebrew. The first, called Treatise against the Muslim, was written by rabbi Solomon ibn Adret, and the second, entitled Bow and Shield, was authored by rabbi Shimʿon b. Ṣemaḥ Duran.
The present work is a commented Czech translation of these two short texts. Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret (Rashba, ca. 1233-ca. 1310) was one of the foremost Jewish scholars and religious leaders of the High Middle Ages.
Late in his career, Ibn Adret authored Maʾamar ʿal Yishmaʾel, the Treatise against the Muslim, which is a direct response to the anti-Jewish polemic of Ibn Hazmʼs Book of Opinions on Religions, Sects and Heresies, written in the 1030s. Similarly, a specific Spanish background can be assumed for the second anti-Islamic polemic translated in the present work.
Its author, Shimʿon b. Ṣemaḥ Duran (Rashbaṣ, 1361-1444), fled his native Majorca after the 1391 anti-Jewish riots and went to Muslim Algiers, where he served as chief rabbi from 1408. That Duranʼs refutation of Islam is rooted in the Christian-Jewish polemic can be discerned from the fact that he wrote a dual polemic against Christianity and Islam as part of his commentary of the Mishnaic tractate Avot called Magen avot.
The polemical tract bears the title Qeshet u-magen (Bow and Shield).