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Saadia, the first Rabbanite philosopher, discusses no less than thirteen erroneous views concerning the origin and nature of the world, but he does not lay down any principles of theoretical physics explicitly.
An arm of the sea of Marmora shuts them in on the one side, and they are unable to go out except by way of the sea, when they want to do business with the inhabitants . In the Jewish quarter are about 2,000 Rabbanite Jews and about 500 Karaïtes, and a fence divides them.
It was originally called Bene Berak. The place is four parasangs distant from the ancient ruined city of Askelon. New Askelon is a large and fair place, and merchants come thither from all quarters, for it is situated on the frontier of Egypt. About 200 Rabbanite Jews dwell here, at their head being R. Zemach, R. Aaron, and R. Solomon; also about forty Karaïtes, and about 300 Cuthim.
Karaism was only a sect and never showed after the days of Saadia anything like the life and enthusiastic activity of the great body of Rabbanite Judaism, which formed the great majority of the Jewish people. The Karaites had their important men in Halaka as well as in religious philosophy and Biblical exegesis. But they cannot be compared to the great men among the Rabbanites.
No Rabbanite after Maimonides would think of going back to the old arguments made popular by the Mutakallimun the theory of atoms, of substance and accident in the Kalamistic sense of accident as a quality which needs continuous creation to exist any length of time, the denial of law and natural causation, the arguments in favor of creation and the existence of God based upon creation, the doctrine of the divine will as eternal or created, residing in a subject or existing without a subject, the world as due to God's will or to his wisdom, the nature of right and wrong as determined by the character and purpose of the act or solely by the arbitrary will of God these and other topics, which formed the main ground of discussion between the Muʿtazilites and the Ashariya, and were taken over by the Karaites and to a less extent by the early Rabbanites in the tenth and eleventh centuries, had long lost their significance and their interest among the Rabbanite followers of Maimonides.
In certain things our scholars followed the theory and the method of these Muʿtazila." Thanks to the researches of modern Jewish and non-Jewish scholars we know now that the Rabbanite thinker Saadia and the Karaite writers, like Joseph Al Basir and Jeshuah ben Judah, are indebted far more to the Mohammedan Muʿtazilites than would appear from Maimonides's statement just quoted.
The circumstance that it was most likely from Karaite writings, which found their way into Spain, that Ibn Zaddik gained his knowledge of Kalamistic ideas, was not exactly calculated to prepossess him, a Rabbanite, in their favor.
In Islam we saw in the introduction how the various schools of the Kadariya, the Muʿtazila and the Ashariya arose in obedience to the demand of clarifying the chief problems of faith, science and life. In Judaism there was in addition to this more general demand the more local and internal conflict of Karaite and Rabbanite which centred about the problem of tradition.
For while it is true that the early Rabbanite thinkers like Saadia, Bahya, Ibn Zaddik and others moved in the circle of ideas of the Mohammedan Mutakallimun, that period had long since been passed. Judah Halevi criticized the Kalam, Ibn Daud is a thorough Aristotelian, and Maimonides gave the Kalam in Jewish literature its deathblow.
It is four days' voyage from here to Cyprus, where there are Rabbanite Jews and Karaïtes; there are also some heretical Jews called Epikursin, whom the Israelites have excommunicated in all places. They profane the eve of the sabbath, and observe the first night of the week, which is the termination of the sabbath .
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