3 - Saadya

Summary

Saadya ben Joseph, generally called Saadya Gaon, was born in Egypt in 882 and died in Iraq in 942. He seems to have enjoyed a highly polemical lifestyle, championing the anti-Karaite school and the Babylonian Geonim in their long dispute with their Palestinian coreligionists. The Karaites were an important group at the time. They advocated a literal reading of the Bible without the accretions of the Talmud and the Midrash, and downgraded the significance of the Hebrew language in Judaism. While most of the Jews in the Middle East wrote in Arabic in Hebrew characters, the Karaites went so far as to prepare religious works in Arabic in Arabic script, arguing that what is important about a religious text is its sense, not the precise language in which it is expressed. The Palestinian rabbinate was involved in a struggle for dominance over the Jewish world with their Babylonian rivals, and this took the form frequently of arguments over the calendar. Saadya entered into these bitter disputes with great gusto, and only managed to get philosophical work done when out of political favour. His philosophical work is marked with the same desire to crush his opponents as is his more polemical work. He lived at a very exciting time intellectually. The works of the Greek thinkers were being translated into Arabic and commented upon by Islamic thinkers, and Islamic theology (kalām) came to use many of the philosophical notions imported from Greek philosophy in defence of both Islam and a particular interpretation of Islam. The Jewish community was thoroughly assimilated culturally in the local Islamic world, and had no difficulty in reading and taking part in philosophical discussions.