were court advisers, sometimes viziers and military officials, active in diplo-
macy and warfare against the Christian states of the north.
Two patterns are important among the philosophers of Spain. First, in the
east, Jewish philosophers were unoriginal, imitators of the prevailing schools
in Islamic philosophy and theology; only in Spain did Jewish intellectuals
become creative. The second point is that this was the time when Jews began
to move predominantly into the Christian world; by the end of the period (ca.
1200), Jewish intellectuals had shifted over to living within Christendom, while
relations with Islam had deteriorated into hostility. Jewish philosophical crea-
tivity took place at the time of this uneasy reversal of religious alliances, and
this catalyzed philosophical creativity among the Spanish Muslims as well.
Earlier Jewish philosophy in the east consisted of parallels or even branches
of Islamic thought. The Karaites produced a Jewish version of kalam; the
Rabbanites resembled the hadith scholars. In the 800s and early 900s, just at
the time when these Muslim schools were arguing over the canonical status of
their own oral tradition, the Jewish academies came alive in a similar round
of argument. The Karaites rejected the oral tradition of the Talmud and
Midrash interpretation, the province of the rabbinical scholars, to base them-
selves solely upon scripture. What began as particularistic argument over texts
became increasingly rationalistic. The Karaites attacked anthropomorphism
and elaborated metaphysics. Saadia defended the Rabbanites with alternative
metaphysics and compiled proofs of God. Isaac Israeli, in the cosmopolitan
circle of medical doctors, was a Neoplatonist drawing upon al-Kindi; his
network contact and rival Saadia, who took over the Jewish academy at the
center of action in Baghdad, adopted the arguments of the MuÀtazilites. The
first round of medieval Jewish philosophical creativity, as the attention space
split into three factions, represents a competitive appropriation of rival lines
of philosophy established by the Muslims.
Linguistically too the Jewish intellectuals merged themselves with the Mus-
lim culture. Virtually all the Jewish intellectuals of this period wrote in Arabic,
in philosophy as well as science and medicine.^24 Saadia even translated the
Talmudic Bible into Arabic. Saadia also produced a Hebrew grammar, paral-
leling another Arab preoccupation; the difficult Arabic grammar had been
elaborated by Arabic grammarians and made a mark of elite culture. When
Hebrew grammars were written among the Jewish circle at Córdoba and the
nearby Jewish academy at Lucena, they were written in Arabic. Hebrew poetry,
which enjoyed a creative burst in Spain in the same circles as the grammarians
(940–1020), was written by adaptation of Arabic metric forms. A key figure
in this development was Dunash ben Labrat, a disciple of Saadia who migrated
to Córdoba under patronage of a prominent Jewish official of the Muslim
court. Arabic was the common spoken language of Spanish Jews.
In Spain, in contrast to the Jewish communities of the east, the situation434 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths