Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages: With a New Introduction

Thorough and meticulously researched, this studyis based on a comprehensive reading of philosophical arguments drawn from allthe major Jewish sources, published and unpublished, from the Geonic period inthe ninth century until the dawn of the Haskalah in the late eighteenthcentury.The core of the book is a detailed discussion ofthe four doctrines of Christianity whose rationality Jews thought they coulddefinitively refute: trinity, incarnation, transubstantiation, and virginbirth. In each case, Daniel Lasker presents a succinct history of the Christiandoctrine and then proceeds to a careful examination of the Jewish efforts todemonstrate its impossibility. The main text is clearly written in anon-technical manner, with the Christian doctrines and the Jewish responsesboth carefully explained; the notes include long quotations, in Hebrew andArabic as well as in English, from sources that are not readily available inEnglish.At the time of its original publication in 1977this book was regarded as a major contribution to a relatively neglected areaof medieval Jewish intellectual history; the new, wide-ranging introductionprepared for this paperback edition, which surveys and summarizes subsequentscholarship, re-establishes its position as a major work.