Rashi and Maimonides on Christianity

The common wisdom holds that Christianity was a major concern of Rashi, whose Biblical commentaries are replete with anti-Christian comments and whose attempt to find the contextual interpretation of the text (the peshat) is a reaction to Christian allegory. For instance, Rashi's commentaries on Genesis, Isaiah, and Psalms, favorite books among the Christians, have been described as full of explicit and acerbic anti-Christian polemic. Rashi was particularly interested in refuting Christianity both because of Christian conversionary propaganda and also as a result of the First Crusade of l096, which caused so much death and destruction to North European Jewry. Furthermore, it is believed, Maimonides, in contrast to Rashi, had little interest in Christianity. Although it is well known that Maimonides considered Christianity, unlike Islam, to be idolatry, the assumption is usually made that if Maimonides had lived in a Christian country, where Jews had economic reasons for absolving Christianity of the charge of idolatry, he would have seen things differently. In short, Christianity was peripheral to Maimonides' worldview, but it was central to Rashi's.