Dominican missionaries weaponized their opponents’ own scriptures in coerced religio-legal debates.

Evidence

Yet the Dominican missionaries pursued this tactic with a zeal and perseverance never seen before: they schooled themselves in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, pored over the Talmud and Koran, produced massive tracts for the use of their missionaries, and (with the aid of King Jaume) forced Jewish and Muslim scholars to debate with them. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1185

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the vault’s Anidjar-derived claims about how the West constructed Islam/Judaism as a debate foil by giving the concrete 13th-c. institutional engine (Dominican studia, coercive disputations), genealogically rooting modern ‘scripture-contradicts-itself’ polemic.