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Updated: June 24, 2025
The succession of Geonim in the Talmudical schools of Sura and Pumbadita, and particularly the great fame of Saadia, made all the other Jewish communities of the world look to Babylonia as the spiritual centre. They considered it a privilege to contribute to the support of the great eastern academies and appealed to their spiritual heads in cases of doubt in religious matters.
When I looked, he says, into the works composed by the early writers after the Talmud on the commandments, I found that their writings can be classified under three heads. First, exposition of the Torah and the Prophets, like the grammatical and lexicographical treatises of Ibn Janah, or the exegetical works of Saadia.
Isaac Israeli and Gabirol discuss special questions in Physics and Metaphysics without bringing them into relation with Judaism or the text of the Bible. Saadia takes cognizance of philosophical doctrine solely with a view to establishing and rationalizing Jewish dogma, and only in so far as it may thus be utilized.
The same thing holds true of the Jews. Their philosophizing career stands chronologically between that of their Arab teachers and their Christian disciples. And the line of their development was similar. It was parallel to that of the Arabs. First came Kalam in Saadia, Mukammas, the Karaites Al Basir and Jeshua ben Judah.
Though the tendency to read philosophy into the Bible is as old as Philo, from whom it was borrowed by Clement of Alexandria and Origen and by them handed down to the other Patristic writers, and though in the Jewish middle ages too, from Saadia down, the verses of the Bible were employed to confirm views adopted from other considerations; though finally Abraham Ibn Daud in the matter of exegesis, too, anticipated Maimonides in finding the Aristotelian metaphysic in the sacred scriptures, still Maimonides as in everything else pertaining to Jewish belief and practice, so in the interpretation of the Bible also obtained the position of a leader, of the founder of a school and the most brilliant and most authoritative exponent thereof, putting in the shade everyone who preceded him and every endeavor in the same direction to which Maimonides himself owed his inspiration.
We see here, and we shall learn more definitely later, that Saadia is opposed to the view of the ascetics a view Neo-Platonic in its origin that matter and body as such are evil, and that the constant effort of man must be to free the soul from the taint of the body in which it is imprisoned, and by which it is dragged down from its pristine nobility and purity.
But the difference of masters does not obscure the likeness of aim, and, albeit unconsciously, Saadia renews the task of the Hellenic-Jewish school. Saadia's work was carried on and expanded in a great outburst of the Jewish genius, which showed itself most brilliantly in the Moorish-Spanish kingdom.
As we shall see later, the entire chapter on the existence and unity of God, which introduces the ethical teachings of Bahya, moves in the familiar lines of Saadia, Al Mukammas, Joseph al Basir and the other Jewish Mutakallimun. There is besides a touch of Neo-Platonism in Bahya, which may be due to Gabirol as well as to Arabic sources.
A man's conduct is prescribed for him in the divine commandments, though in a general way the reason sees the right and the wrong of the so-called rational group of laws. Still as an after thought Saadia added a chapter to the "Emunot ve-Deot" in which he attempts to give a psychological basis for human conduct.
It follows therefore that we must first show that the world is not eternal, that it came to be in time, and this is what Saadia does. Here are some of his proofs. The world is finite in magnitude. For the world consists of the earth, which is in the centre, and the heavens surrounding it on all sides. This shows that the earth is finite, for an infinite body cannot be surrounded.
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