In the previous seven chapters, we have examined Jewish perceptions of major Christian polemical thrusts and the rebuttals our twelfth- and thirteenth-century polemicists proposed to their Jewish contemporaries. In many of these rebuttals, Jews to a limited extent took to the offensive against Christianity. An example of this is Jewish insistence that Christian use of the Hebrew Bible was deeply compromised by reliance on the work of two individuals – the Church Fathers Origen and Jerome. In this insistence, Jews moved beyond disputing specific Christian readings and attacked the foundations of medieval Christian biblical exegesis. Similarly, Jewish defense against the charge of divine abandonment regularly eventuated in Jewish denigration of the achievements of Christianity. Likewise – Jews insisted regularly – Christian biblical interpretations and/or rational arguments that resulted in Jesus as simultaneously divine and human are inherently unreasonable. This insistence too represents more than simply a Jewish defense against Christian claims; it is very much an attack launched against Christian thinking. Despite these flashes of Jewish assault, the preceding chapters have by and large focused on the Jews in their defensive stance. In the coming two chapters, we shall examine extended Jewish anti-Christian claims, and we shall encounter our Jewish polemicists entirely on the offensive.

The most obvious point of attack for our Jewish polemicists was the literature sacred to Christians, but not to Jews.