ABSTRACT
Jewish Polemics in the Arabic Middle Ages is a complex phenomenon. Even the literary ingenuity of authors who use the polemical genre can be best evaluated if we see it in the broader context of Jewish-Muslim-Christian debate. This chapter deals with literary aspects of the polemics in Arabic, and only with the Jewish side of these polemics. It shows that, even within these limits, for a proper understanding of the Judaeo-Arabic polemical texts the wider inter-religious polemical literature is a necessary background. The number of books written by Jews in Arabic and directed against Christianity is not substantially larger than the number of such books directed against Islam. The explanation for the lack of separate polemical works is therefore probably one that applies to both Christianity and Islam. More than a century ago, Leon Schlossberg has published an anti-Christian treatise in Judaeo-Arabic, entitled “The Account of the Controversy with the Bishop.”.
