34 CHAPTER TWO
with Christians and were being exposed to their theology, their Jewish
contemporaries were waiting patiently on the side until Muslims had
developed their own theology, in order to then meet with Muslims alone.
A more convincing working hypothesis postulates that, once the gates of
communication were open, due to the unifying po litical and linguistic
setting, Jews entered the arena along with everybody else.
Maimonides’ evaluation of Jewish kalam as a servile, indiscriminate
adoption of Mutazilite positions is clearly incorrect, and his sweeping
evaluations must be challenged on several accounts. Early Jewish think-
ers did not adopt Mutazilite ideas blindly, as Maimonides claimed, but
rather selectively, as evidenced by their occasional dissent from these ideas.
Nor did they follow the Mutazila exclusively, and other infl uences must
be taken into account in the study of early Jewish philosophy.
There is ample evidence for direct Christian infl uence on the develop-
ment of Jewish kalam, through the fi rst Jewish medieval thinker, Dawud
al-Muqammas (in the fi rst half of the ninth century) as well as through
second-generation authors like Saadia and Qirqisani.^34 Maimonides may
not have been aware of the direct contacts between Jews and Christians
in the ninth and tenth centuries, but it is also possible that, consciously
or semiconsciously, he was willing to sacrifi ce historical precision in order
to simplify the historical schema. Presenting Muslim kalam as the sole
source of Jewish kalam makes it easier for him to present the Jewish mu-
takallimun as servile imitators of their source of inspiration— a clearly
incorrect pre sentation. Muqammas, who studied for many years in Nisi-
bis, was thoroughly infl uenced by his Christian teachers, as demonstrated
by his sometimes wooden adaptations of their arguments to Jewish the-
ology. To the extent that his writings also refl ect direct contacts with
Muslim theology, this testifi es not to servile imitation but rather to his
independent mind, and his attempts to look beyond his Christian school-
ing. It is also noteworthy that Muqammas’s exposure to the theological
concerns of Muslim kalam went hand in hand with simultaneous expo-
sure to philosophical, Aristotelian material. Already at this early stage,
the Aristotelian corpus seems to have been accessible in some form in
Arabic. Jewish kalam was thus not a pre- philosophical, primitive stage in
the development of Jewish philosophy, but the result of a choice between
several available intellectual options.^35 Saadya, a contemporary of Ashari,
was cognizant of theories that came to be identifi ed with the Ashariyya.
(^34) See S. Stroumsa, “Maimonides’ Auffassung vom jüdischen Kalam: sein Wahrheitsgehalt
und seine geschichtliche Wirkung,” Judaica 61 (2005): 289– 309; idem, “The Impact of
Syriac Tradition on Early Judaeo- Arabic Bible Exegesis,” Aram 3 (1991): 83– 96.
(^35) See S. Stroumsa, “Soul- searching at the Dawn of Jewish Philosophy: A Hitherto Lost
Fragment of al- Muqammas’s Twenty Chapters,” Ginzei Qedem 3 (2007): 143– 44.