289 Ram Ben-Shalom MeÞir Nativ: The First Hebrew Concordance of the Bible and Jewish Bible Study in the Fifteenth Century, in the Context of Jewish-Christian Polemics The history of science has shown how ideological and religious debates have helped to advance knowledge and occasioned breakthroughs in various branches of science. I refer not only to scientific revolutions, in the Kuhnian sense, but to the improvement of scientific paradigms within existing fields, as a result of internal or external debate. Jewish Bible study, for example, developed greatly as a result of the encounter between Jewish and Islamic scholarship and as a result of internal religious debate with the Karaites. 1 In Western Europe, in the twelfth 1 See M. Zucker, Rav Saadya Gaon’s Translation of the Torah: Exegesis, Halakhah and Polemics in R. Saadya’s Translations of the Pentateuch (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1959); R. Drory, Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2000); M. Polliack, “Medieval Karaite Methods of Translating Biblical Narrative in Arabic,” Vetus Testamentum 48 (1998): 375–398. © Aleph 11.2 (2011) pp. 289-364