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Bible may often yield a single correct meaning. This incensed the Rabbanites
(as scholars call them when they need to be contrasted with Karaites); but
Karaite commentaries embraced, where appropriate, the midrashic heritage
too, as also the Muʿtazilites’ insistence on God’s inner and essential—not just
external—unity, and his justice. Indeed, we would know a lot less about
Muʿtazilism today were it not for the preservation of their books by Karaite
Jews. Nor was the Karaites’ impact confined to the East. They were the First
Millennium forerunners of the major exegetical achievements of Spanish
Sephardic scholars in centuries to come.
Jews had taken no serious interest in philosophy since the profoundly
Hellenized exposition of the scripture by Philo of Alexandria (d. 50 CE),
even if, in the more quotidian aspects illuminated by archaeolog y, many Jew-
ish communities had continued to be culturally Greek. The rabbis never al-
lude to Philo.^78 But interest in (a very different sort of ) philosophy revived in
the ninth and tenth centuries thanks to Dāwūd al- Muqammas and later to
other pioneers such as Saadia Gaon (d. 942) and Ishāq al- Isrāʾīlī (d. 955),
writing in Arabic of course, though often in Hebrew script.^79 Saadia is per-
haps the one most central to Abbasid Jewry’s rapid evolution. He was fully
trained in rabbinic tradition, and became head of the Sūraʾ Academy. At the
same time he was well read in Aristotle, who had by his day been almost en-
tirely translated into Arabic, and in the Platonizing thought of the first Ara-
bic philosopher, Kindī. His writings defended oral Torah against the Kara-
ites, but also demonstrated the compatibility of both Jewish scriptural
commentary and rabbinic erudition with the authority of reason, as exempli-
fied by the Greeks and by Muslim theological discourse, including
Muʿtazilism. The Bible’s anthropomorphic language about God he was in-
clined to explain as metaphor.^80
Saadia reveals a maturation in Jewish thought. He is still indebted meth-
odologically to the Syriac Christian exegetical tradition,^81 but his manner is
more specifically Jewish than Dāwūd al- Muqammas’s. At the end of the First
78 On the exiguous evidence for direct rabbinic engagement with Greco- Roman philosophy, see
C. Hezser, “Interfaces between rabbinic literature and Graeco- Roman philosophy,” in Schäfer (ed.), Ta l-
mud Yerushalmi [6:53] 2.161–87.
79 H. Ben- Shammai, “Kalām in medieval Jewish philosophy,” and T. M. Rudavsky, “Medieval Jew-
ish Neoplatonism,” in D. H. Frank and O. Leaman (eds), History of Jewish philosophy (London 1997)
99–104, 120–23; S. Stroumsa, “The Muslim context,” in S. Nadler and T. M. Rudavsky (eds), The Cam-
bridge history of Jewish philosophy 1 (Cambridge 2009) 39–59. On Saadia, see further S. Stroumsa, “Saa-
dya and Jewish kalam,” in D. H. Frank and O. Leaman (eds), The Cambridge companion to medieval Jewish
philosophy (Cambridge 2003) 69–90; E. Schweid (tr. L. Levin), The classic Jewish philosophers (Leiden
2008) 3–38.
80 H. Kreisel, “Philosophical interpretations of the Bible,” in Nadler and Rudavsky (eds), Cam-
bridge history of Jewish philosophy [6:79] 1.92–94.
81 S. Stroumsa, “Prolegomena as historical evidence: On Saadia’s introductions to his commentar-
ies on the Bible,” in Wisnovsky and others (eds), Vehicles of transmission [3:18] 139–41.