Jacob ben Reuben's 'Sefer Milhamot Hashem', Chapter One: A Jewish Philosophical Critique of Christianity

My dissertation is a critical edition, translation and analysis of the opening chapter of Sefer Milhamot Hashem (1170), Jacob ben Reuben's philosophical polemic against Christianity. This groundbreaking text, possibly the first of its kind in Europe, emerged seemingly out of the blue after a thousand-year Jewish silence in the face of Christian polemical attacks. In reality, Milhamot Hashem is a response to Christian missionary pressure that had been building for decades and that heralded a fundamental change in the status of Europe's Jews. Milhamot Hashem is itself a herald: a sign that Jews could no longer ignore Christian missionizing but understood that they had to engage it, drawing them firmly into a debate that they would not be permitted to win.;Jacob ben Reuben engaged in this debate in the language of his times and his formative years in Islamic lands: philosophy. His opening chapter is a rational critique of the central tenets of Christianity -- the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Incarnation -- in which, unlike the vast majority of medieval polemics, he allows his Christian opponent to mount full and vigorous arguments and rebuttals. An analysis of this chapter thus reveals how Jews and Christians engaged each other's core beliefs at a time when pressure was building, but the stakes were not as high as they would be even a few decades later.;When put in the larger philosophical and historical context of Christian missionizing, Jacob's text reveals the special vulnerability of Christianity to Jewish arguments, and the shifting historical winds of twelfth-century Europe that would lead Christians to reevaluate the place of Jews in Christendom.