EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 181Millennium, Saadia and a few others^82 were nudging Judaism back toward
the mainstream of Arabic intellectual debate. They made the Jewish voice
heard in that extraordinary milieu of ninth- to tenth- century Baghdad,
where intellectuals could agree (as we shall see in the last chapter) to put
aside quarrels about the authority of their respective scriptures and debate
together using the tools of Greek logic and rationality as adjusted and re-
fined in the schools of Alexandria, and then in Syriac and Arabic translation.
Indeed, Saadia established rationalist theolog y as central to Judaism, whereas
in Islam it was being diluted. Where Jews had played almost no part in trans-
lating Greek philosophy from Greek into Arabic, they were prominent in its
next transition, from Arabic to Latin.^83 Thereafter Jewish philosophy did not
disappear again as it had after Philo, but became an increasingly vigorous
part of both the Latin and the Arabic thought worlds. One has only to think
of the Aristotelianism of Maimonides (d. 1204)—one of the many good rea-
sons we talk about Arabic not Islamic philosophy.
Patristic Christianity
Judaism and Islam resemble each other strikingly. The first Muslims’ violent
triumph over the old empires in the name of an uncompromisingly single
God recalls Old Testament models, rather than Christianity’s subtle penetra-
tion of Rome without recourse to arms or even to God- given law. Both reli-
gions precisely regulated personal conduct and family and community life;
both came to be dominated by scholarly- exegetical and legal rather than sac-
ramental elites.^84 Consider also the Qurʾān’s dialogue with the Jewish Bible,
especially the Psalms. And where Christians absorbed themselves in Chris-
tolog y, both Muslims and the later Jewish thinkers we have just been consid-
ering were markedly more concerned with prophetolog y. Jewish writers
might even on occasion refer to their scriptures as “Qurʾā n .”^85
Against this background, taking in Christianity on the way from rabbinic
Judaism to Islam could seem a diversion.^86 yet Christianity too was a major
exegetical culture, which emerged parallel to rabbinism in response (partly)
to the same scriptures,^87 and likewise figured prominently in early Islam’s
82 E.g., a later head of the Sūraʾ yeshiva, Samuel ben Hofni Gaon (d. 1013). His rational, critical
rabbinics and openness to Muʿtazilism is excellently discussed by Sklare [6:73] 37–67.
83 S. Stroumsa, in Nadler and Rudavsky (eds), Cambridge history of Jewish philosophy [6:79]
1.57–58.
84 J. Neusner and T. Sonn, Comparing religions through law: Judaism and Islam (London 1999).
85 S. Stroumsa, in Nadler and Rudavsky (eds), Cambridge history of Jewish philosophy [6:79]
1.52–53.
86 Pocock 2.108: “It was a problem for all would- be composers of treatises de tribus impostoribus
that Jesus had not been a legislator... .”
87 The argument of G. Stroumsa, End of sacrifice [6:70]: see esp. 130.