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The organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the "Synods of the Four Countries," formed the keystone of this intricate social-spiritual hierarchy. One element was lacking, there was no versatile, commanding thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were under the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of intellectual energy.
It has been said that, though Philo was a philosopher and a Jew, yet Saadia was the first Jewish philosopher.
These points are not treated by Saadia expressly but are only mentioned incidentally in the elucidation of other problems dealing with the creation of the world and the existence of God. Like Israeli Saadia shows considerable familiarity with Aristotelian notions as found in the Logic, the Physics and the Psychology.
After Maimonides Hebrew takes the place of Arabic, and in addition to the new works composed, the commentaries on the "Guide" which were now written in plenty and the philosophico-exegetical works on the Bible in the Maimonidean spirit, the ancient classics of Saadia, Bahya, Gabirol, Halevi, Ibn Zaddik, Ibn Daud and Maimonides himself had to be translated from Arabic into Hebrew.
Instead of first proving the existence of God and then discussing his nature and attributes, as Saadia, Bahya, Ibn Daud and others did before him, he treats exhaustively of the divine attributes in the first book, whereas the proof of the existence of God does not appear until the second book. This inversion of the logical order is deliberate. Maimonides's method is directed ad hominem.
We are thus justified in saying, that Saadia's sources are Jewish literature and tradition, the works of the Mutakallimun, particularly the Muʿtazilites, and Aristotle, whose book on the "Categories" he knew at first hand. Saadia tells us he was induced to write his book because he found that the beliefs and opinions of men were in an unsatisfactory state.
But the Christians, in their proselytizing activity, had translated them into Latin and Armenian before the fifth century, and through one of these means they may possibly have exercised an influence upon the new school of Jewish philosophy, which, opening with Saadia in the tenth century, blossomed forth in the Arabic-Spanish epoch.
The Kalamistic proofs for the unity of God are similarly identical for the most part with those found in Saadia, Bahya and others, and we need only mention Maimonides's criticism that they are inadequate unless we assume with the Mutakallimun that all atoms in the universe are of the same kind.
Saadia makes a further distinction also found in Arabic theology before him between those commandments and prohibitions in the Bible which the reason itself approves as right or condemns as wrong the rational commandments and those which to the reason seem indifferent, and which revelation alone characterizes as obligatory, permitted or forbidden the so-called "traditional commandments."
He was on the one hand too closely dependent on Greek thought and on the other had only a limited knowledge of Jewish thought and tradition. The Bible he knew only in the Greek translation, not in the original Hebrew; and of the Halaka, which was still in the making in Palestine, he knew still less. It was different with Saadia.
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