WHEN Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages was originally written over thirty years ago as my doctoral dissertation at Brandeis University, under the direction of Professor Alexander Altmann, of blessed memory, the modern study of the medieval Jewish-Christian debate was already a century old, yet still in its infancy. The pioneering works of Isidore Loeb, Adolf (Ze'ev) Posnanski, Samuel Krauss, Yitzhak Baer, Judah Rosenthal, Bernhard Blumenkranz, Frank Talmage, and others had provided the scholarly world with a number of basic polemical texts and a certain amount of interpretation of those texts. Editions of polemical works were of varied quality. Interpretations often revolved around the simple question: Who won the debate? The intellectual or religious aspects of the Jewish-Christian encounter, as opposed to the unhappy occasions of massacres, forced conversions, and expulsions, were not discussed at length. It would appear that most students of Jewish studies regarded the polemical genre of literature, and the arguments included therein, to be too insignificant for serious consideration.

It is in this context that I decided to study one aspect of the Jewish-Christian debate, namely the role of philosophy in the Jewish critique of the majority religion. It was the first work to take a central theme in this literature and trace it from the ninth century to the eighteenth. In light of my methodology, namely analyzing the philosophical arguments, this book did not address the historical circumstances in which those arguments were proffered. I restricted myself to a presentation of a catalogue of arguments which range across the whole Middle Ages into the early modern period. Thus, the same section of the book can comfortably cite authors from eight or nine centuries. By restricting myself to an account of the arguments, I did not have to answer historical questions about the significance of the debate or provide a narration of specific ideas. In the past thirty years, however, both historical and other questions pertaining to the medieval debate have been investigated, and the study of Jewish-Christian polemics has progressed greatly. Research into the polemics can record quite a number of accomplishments during this period, and it is these developments which I wish to survey in this new introduction.