Christianity required convincing Jews of its truth, Islam did not

Evidence

The Christian dispensation claims to be the fulfillment of promises made to the Jews, the accomplishment of Jewish prophecies. In a view officially held until quite recently, and sometimes reasserted even more recently, the convenant with the Jews was taken over and Israel was, so to speak, replaced by the true Israel, verus Israel, which is the Church. Jewish survival and still more Jewish refusal were thus seen as somehow impugning the authenticity of the Christian dispensation. Muhammad and his successors made no such claim, and the conversion of the Jews was therefore a matter of little concern to them. This difference can be seen very clearly in the polemical lit­ erature. There is in medieval and even in modern Christendom a vast polemical literature by Christian theologians the purpose of which is to persuade Jews of the truth of the Christian dispensation. Islam shows nothing remotely compa­ rable. A few Muslims wrote polemics against Judaism; most of them were Jewish converts. Otherwise there is little interest in Judaism, and no equivalent to the continuing Christian concern with the Jewish obduracy and the need to over­ come it. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 324

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to readings on supersessionism and comparative religion; also to the reviewer’s interest in how belief systems handle dissent. — connects to: Muslims held that Jews and Christians corrupted their scriptures; Antisemitic Christians could still rescue Jews due to belief-system logic — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 524
• QUESTION: Why did the supersessionist claim require active persuasion of Jews specifically rather than other unbelievers?