at the owners of stone-built palaces.

Nor is it surprising that someone who speaks of Allah and His Messenger in such a manner would also call the most learned of mankind nothing but common folk.

So let the nation of wrath rejoice in the lore of the Mishnah (1) and the Talmud and in all the fabrications they contain about Allah and about Moses, His spoken-to servant, as well as in the novelties their rabbis—their scholars of evil—introduce for them at every moment. Let them exult in doctrines that teach them that Allah regretted creating human beings until it weighed upon Him, that He wept over the Flood until His eyes became sore and the angels visited Him—and in teachings that prompt them, during their prayers, to address Him with the words: “O our God, awake from Your slumber; how long will You sleep?!” They keep goading Him until, as they imagine, He rouses Himself for them and restores their dominion.

And let the nation of misguidance be congratulated for the sciences through which they abandoned every law of the prophets and contradicted the Messiah—contradictions their own scholars acknowledge in every aspect of his mission, as you will soon see—and for the doctrines by which they have spoken of the Lord of the worlds such words that the heavens nearly burst, the earth almost splits apart, and the mountains are ready to crumble (2), were it not that the Forbearing, the Patient One restrains them.

Let them also rejoice in the knowledge that led them to the trinity, to worshipping a wooden cross and images painted with ceruse and cinnabar (3), and that moved their scholar Ephraim to claim that the very hand which scooped up Adam’s clay is the one that was fastened to the cross, and that the span which