Abstrakt
The Muslim-Jewish polemics is a phenomenon as old as Islam itself, and the Qurʾān was its very first source. Its sūras contain, explicitly or implicitly, a germ of major topics of the Muslim medieval polemics against Judaism and Hebrew Bible that the later generations of Muslims will further develop and reformulate: the Hebrew Bible contains a prophesy of Muḥammad's coming; the Hebrew Bible is a falsification; and the new revelation of Islam has abrogated Jewish Law.
While the Muslim side of the polemical encounter between the Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages has been already sufficiently studied, the Jewish apologetical response has received comparatively little attention. The essay, therefore, based on the wide range of the Muslim and Jewish polemical literature, juxtaposes their entangled arguments and motifs and explores their inter-religious transmission.
It focuses mainly on Ibn Ḥazm's polemics in his Book of Opinions on Religions to whose thorough and scathing arguments responded Solomon ibn Adret of thirteenth-century Barcelona in his Hebrew Treatise against the Muslims. Similarly, the specific Spanish background can be assumed for the anti-Islamic polemical treatise Bow and Shield of Shimʿon b. Ṣemaḥ Duran that is contrariwise rooted in the Christian-Islamic polemics.