Anti-Jewish proof texts were recycled wholesale into Christian missions to Muslims
Evidence
Though both Islam and Judaism are condemned for their understanding according to the letter of the law rather than the spirit, they differ crucially with regard to the potential for conversion. For the author of Mandeville’s Travels, the prospect of the conversion of the Muslims is extremely promising; the conversion of the Jews, by contrast, is not even suggested. They are presented as a threat not only to the spiritual welfare of the righteous, but to their physical health as well: in the course of his travels, the narrator claims to have encountered a highly poisonous tree, the “venym” of which the Jews had sought to use “to enpoysone alle Cristiantee” (21; 139.34–35). — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 297 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
There does seem to have been a genuine lingering suspicion in some quarters that Muslims were only incompletely de-paganised, despite their ostensible teaching, and even that they actually were crypto-polytheists. This point was made some ten years ago by Grégoire in his stimulating discussion of the problem. He concentrated on the idea that the cults of the Jahiliyah were deliberately preserved in the Ka’bah. He suggested that this suspicion might have entered Christendom from Rabbinic writers known to Pedro de Alfonso. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1766 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
Lull’s work is so individual that it is usually impossible to distinguish recognisably Islamic terms in the language, and often in the thought, of the Muslims whose arguments he represents in some of his disputationes. These were imaginary conversations in which the Muslim participants were never very successful; in a public debate on neutral ground in real life, they might have done a great deal better. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 682 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Muslims held that Jews and Christians corrupted their scriptures; A forged Jewish-Muslim disputation text buoyed Dominican missionaries for centuries.; Jewish texts themselves served Christians as testimony to Jewish destruction — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 291 (+18 more)
Broader Connections
- Jewish texts themselves served Christians as testimony to Jewish destruction
#complicates(0.85) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 291 - Jews were repudiated as internal to Christendom while Muslims were repudiated from outside
#complicates(0.85) - Medieval Christian texts deemed Muslims convertible but Jews a fixed physical threat
#complicates(0.85) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 297 - Medieval Christian texts deemed Islam convertible but Judaism unconvertible
#complicates(0.85) - Christian apologetic texts staged strawman Muslim interlocutors to prime readers against Islam
#complicates(0.85) — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1553 - Medieval Christian suspicions about Muslim crypto-polytheism drew on Jewish sources.
#complicates(0.85) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1766 - Medieval Christian accounts of Muslim disputants are constructed strawmen
#complicates(0.85) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 682 - A single forged text served both Christian and persecuted Muslim interests
#complicates(0.80) - Medieval Christian texts distinguished Jews from Muslims rather than equating them
#complicates(0.80) - Theology branded Muslims as tainted collaborators with Jews against Christendom
#complicates(0.80) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 163 - Christian polemic inverted Muslim claims about the Paraclete into anti-Muslim mockery
#complicates(0.80) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 308 - Later interpreters weaponized earlier Jewish texts to justify antisemitism
#complicates(0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 497 - Christians fabricated authoritative-sounding refutations of Islam by forging famous names
#complicates(0.80) — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 384 - Muslims were placed in the same Christ-killer schema as Jews
#complicates(0.80) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 221 - Christians inherit Jewish scripture, Muslims replaced rather than adopted it
#complicates(0.75) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1643