The Apologetic Logic of the Book of Principles : Curbing the Interreligious Polemic

This study reexamines Joseph Albo’s Book of Principles (ca. 1420) and its novel model of Jewish dogma. Shifting attention back to interreligious considerations, it demonstrates how Albo’s unique structure of principles was specifically designed to counter the conversionist challenge of his time. To do so, the study puts Albo’s dogmatic model and its scientific-universal-pluralistic assumptions in dialogue with two contemporary sources: Joshua Ha-Lorki’s Hebrew letter on Jewish conversions to Christianity (ca. 1391) and the Latin protocols of the Tortosa Disputation (1413–14), where Albo confronts Ha-Lorki, now leading the Christian mission as Gerónimo de Santa Fe. As shown, Albo’s system offered new solutions to Ha-Lorki/Gerónimo’s challenges by (1) facilitating theological disengagement of Judaism from Christianity through a pluralistic divine economy in which the two religions are no longer locked in a zero-sum game; (2) redrawing the lines of Jewish defense by reclassifying certain Jewish principles as undebatable; and (3) proving that Judaism meets the scientific criteria of a proper faith-based religion by aligning Jewish dogma with scholastic discourse. These findings strongly suggest that Albo wrote the Book of Principles in response to lessons learned at Tortosa, internalizing much of the conversionist critiques against the underdeveloped definition of Jewish faith.