Thorough and meticulously researched, this study
is based on a comprehensive reading of philosophical arguments drawn from all
the major Jewish sources, published and unpublished, from the Geonic period in
the ninth century until the dawn of the Haskalah in the late eighteenth
century.





The core of the book is a detailed discussion of
the four doctrines of Christianity whose rationality Jews thought they could
definitively refute: trinity, incarnation, transubstantiation, and virgin
birth. In each case, Daniel Lasker presents a succinct history of the Christian
doctrine and then proceeds to a careful examination of the Jewish efforts to
demonstrate its impossibility. The main text is clearly written in a
non-technical manner, with the Christian doctrines and the Jewish responses
both carefully explained; the notes include long quotations, in Hebrew and
Arabic as well as in English, from sources that are not readily available in
English.





At the time of its original publication in 1977
this book was regarded as a major contribution to a relatively neglected area
of medieval Jewish intellectual history; the new, wide-ranging introduction
prepared for this paperback edition, which surveys and summarizes subsequent
scholarship, re-establishes its position as a major work.