Concepts of Scripture among the Jews of the Medieval Islamic World 85on the Bible in antiquity, especially those by Philo and Josephus, and cer-
tain works of Second Temple and Qumran literature bear the stamp of in-
dividual Jewish authorship based on the Bible (e.g., the Book of Jubilees).
Th e question of whether and how these literatures may have reached medi-
eval Jewish circles and if and how they may have served as models for their
innovations is fascinating and still needs to be explored.6 From what is cur-
rently known, however, the Judaeo-Arabic exegetes, Karaite and Rabban-
ite alike, cite profusely from midrashic literature and engage openly with
Arabic thought and literature, whereas they appear to be mostly unaware
of the ancient and Hellenistic Jewish literary models. Th ey do not engage
with such sources or cite them directly, although some indirect channels
of contact may have existed or may yet be uncovered. Judaeo-Arabic ex-
egesis refl ects, therefore, a new era of thinking and writing on the Bible
among Jews.
Th is type of exegesis was distinctive of Karaite Judaism from its very
beginnings. It is found in the Hebrew commentaries of the 9th-century
Karaite Daniel al-Qumīsī and develops fully in the Judaeo-Arabic works
of the great commentators of the 10th to 11th centuries: Ya‘qūb al-Qirqisānī
in Babylonia and Salmon ben Yeruh.am, Sahal ben Mas.liah., Yūsuf ibn Nūh.,
Yefet ben ‘Eli, Abū Faraj Harūn, Yeshu‘ah ben Yehudah, and others in the
Jerusalem community of “returnees” (shavim). Th e same type of exegesis
was also employed by the Rabbanite Geonim of Babylonia (Iraq), begin-
ning with Sa‘adiah Gaon in the early 10th century, as well as in Muslim
Spain and North Africa during the 11th and 12th centuries, by Moses ibn
Gikatilla, Judah ibn Bal‘am, Isaac al-Kinzi, and Tanh.um ha-Yerushalmi.
Common denominators among these commentators include systematic
structure, exegetical terminology, and the content of the exegesis, which
draws from a shared treasure of Jewish exegesis, on the one hand, and from
a common mentality of Arabic language and culture, on the other hand.
Even when the Judaeo-Arabic commentators or their families left the orbit
of Islamic civilization and adopted Hebrew in place of Arabic as the lan-
guage of their exegetical works (as when the Karaite interpretive enterprise
moved from Jerusalem to Byzantium or when Rabbanites such as Abraham
Ibn Ezra and the Kimhi family moved from Muslim Spain to the lands of
Christendom), these commentators continued to integrate into their He-
brew works the heritage of the Judaeo-Arabic tradition of Bible interpreta-
tion as they directed it toward a new audience.
Th is Judaeo-Arabic hermeneutic tradition applied logical and contex-
tual tools to biblical exegesis. Rationalist thinking, of the kind that relied