Title:

De Mohammedi furto sententiarum scripturae sacrae liber unus. In quo mohammedana religio funditus evertitur

Short title

De Mohammedi furto sententiarum scripturae sacrae

Title variations

Title in English

On Muhammad’s theft of teachings from Holy Scripture (in a single book), in which the Mohammedan religion is thoroughly vanquished

Section

Language

Latin

Creation date

1711

Genre

Treatise

Content

Content table

Formal Expression

Prose

Qur'an quotations

Original

Source

Use (macro-category)

Academic / Scientific

Use (micro-category)

Polemics against Islam

Bibliographical references

Descriptive card

This treatise follows an earlier work by Schwartz on literary plagiarism (De Plagio litarario, 1706), where Muhammad’s borrowings from Judaeo-Christian Scriptures are mentioned in passing as a case in point. The work itself is highly polemical. Muhammad is portrayed, as often before in Christian polemics, as an impostor. According to Schwatz, his access to the Bible enabled him to “steal” snippets of true wisdom and present them as a new revelation. Muhammad ,we are told, could get away with such plagiarism, due to what the author believes to have been the scarcity of any knowledge of Scripture in the Arabian Peninsula at the time. This polemical work also betrays a very close reading of the Qur’an (though not necessarily in the original as Schwartz claims). The argument of borrowing from Scripture would take on an intriguing new significance in Schwartz’s Specimen philosophiae orientalis antiquissimae ex Corano (1715).

Entry author

Asaph Ben Tov