It was a moment of crisis for Yeminite Jews. They were being persecuted by extremists of the Zaidi branch of Shiite Islam and forced to convert — with the explicit threat of death if they refused. Moses Maimonides, a widely respected rabbi in what is now Egypt, responded in the way he thought best: discrediting the prophetic tradition of the Muslim sect oppressing the Yemenite Jewish community — and Christianity, for the sake of definitiveness, as well.

In what became known as the “Epistle to Yemen” after widespread circulation throughout the Middle East, Maimonides claimed that Islam and Christianity were but distortions of the “true and divine religion, revealed to us through Moses, chief of the former as well as of the later prophets.” His strategy was clear: bolster the Jews of Yemen by discrediting the faith of those oppressing them. He then forcefully questioned whether Jesus and Muhammad had knowledge of the sacred — even going so far as to hurl epithets about them.

While his actions were considered praiseworthy by some of his coreligionists at the time, this picture of “support” by Moses Maimonides seems quite bleak, if not galling today. The 12th century is not widely known for its inter-religious interchange, but Maimonides, like many other Middle Eastern rabbis, was fluent in Arabic and even as a rabbi held a significant knowledge of Islam. Maimonides even served the royal court of Saladin’s empire as a physician and often demonstrated nuanced views of Islam, which he even defended at one point against accusations of idolatry from rabbis less versed in its teachings.