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Arabic language, in Hebrew letters, rendition of the Decalogue together with Petirat Moshe Rabbenu ve-Aaron ha-Kohen. Although his name does not appear on the work major catalogs attribute it to Rav Saadiah ben Joseph Gaon, who authored a popular Arabic midrash on the Decalogue.
R. Saadiah ben Joseph Gaon (882-942) of Sura was the greatest scholar and author of the geonic period and important leader of Babylonian Jewry. Saadiah was born in Pithom (Abu Suweir), in the Faiyum district in Egypt. Little is known about his family except that his opponents slandered his father because he was not a scholar and earned his living from manual labor. Perhaps there is some truth to his opponents' claim that his father was banished from Egypt and died in Jaffa, but no reason for this expulsion is given. It is noteworthy that Sherira Gaon refers to Saadiah's father with respect (Iggeret Rav Sherira Ga'on, ed. by B.M. Lewin (1921), 112). The information given on the members of his family, apart from his wife and children, is mere speculation. While there is no doubt that in his youth he already displayed outstanding talents both as an author and in communal activity, there is scant information about his teachers, whether in Jewish studies or in Greco-Arabic philosophy. The Arab writer Mas'udi states that when Saadiah was in Ereẓ Israel, he studied under Abu Kathir Yaḥya b. Zechariah al-Katib of Tiberius. However, earlier than that, when he still lived in Egypt, he had already written two books (see below) and corresponded with R. Isaac b. Solomon *Israeli of Kairouan. It is therefore certain that when he left Egypt he was already a learned scholar of Torah and secular sciences, and had left behind many disciples. There is no information about him between the years 905, when he wrote his responsum to Anan (see below), and 921; nor are the reasons for his departure from Egypt clear. From a fragment of a letter written in the summer of that year it is known that he was then in Aleppo, from where he proceeded to Baghdad, and, as stated above, it is known that he had been in Ereẓ Israel.
He wrote both in Hebrew and in Arabic a work, now known only from a few fragments, entitled "Sefer ha-Galui" (Arabic title, "Kitab al-Ṭarid"), in which he emphasized with great but justifiable pride the services which he had rendered, especially in his opposition to heresy. Saadia Gaon was a pioneer in the fields in which he toiled. The foremost object of his work was the Bible; his importance is due primarily to his establishment of a new school of Biblical exegesis characterized by a rational investigation of the contents of the Bible and a scientific knowledge of the language of the holy text. Saadia's Arabic translation of the Bible is of importance for the history of civilization; itself a product of the Arabization of a large portion of Judaism, it served for centuries as a potent factor in the impregnation of the Jewish spirit with Arabic culture, so that, in this respect, it may take its place beside the Greek Bible-translation of antiquity and the German translation of the Pentateuch by Moses Mendelssohn. As a means of popular religious enlightenment, Saadia's translation presented the Scriptures even to the unlearned in a rational form which aimed at the greatest possible degree of clearness and consistency.
His system of hermeneutics was not limited to the exegesis of individual passages, but treated also each book of the Bible as a whole, and showed the connection of its various portions with one another. The commentary contained, as is stated in the author's own introduction to his translation of the Pentateuch, not only an exact interpretation of the text, but also a refutation of the cavils which the heretics raised against it. Further, it set forth the bases of the commandments of reason and the characterization of the commandments of revelation; in the case of the former the author appealed to philosophical speculation; of the latter, naturally, to tradition. The position assigned to Saadia in the oldest list of Hebrew grammarians, which is contained in the introduction to Ibn Ezra's "Moznayim," has not been challenged even by the latest historical investigations. Here, too, he was the first; his grammatical work, now lost, gave an inspiration to further studies, which attained their most brilliant and lasting results in Spain, and he created in part the categories and rules along whose lines was developed the grammatical study of the Hebrew language. His dictionary, primitive and merely practical as it was, became the foundation of Hebrew lexicography; and the name "Agron" (literally, "collection"), which he chose and doubtless created, was long used as a designation for Hebrew lexicons, especially by the Karaites. The very categories of rhetoric, as they were found among the Arabs, were first applied by Saadia to the style of the Bible. He was likewise one of the founders of comparative philology, not only through his brief "Book of Seventy Words," already mentioned, but especially through his explanation of the Hebrew vocabulary by the Arabic, particularly in the case of the favorite translation of Biblical words by Arabic terms having the same sound. Saadia's works were the inspiration and basis for later Jewish writers, such as Berachyah in his encyclopedic philosophical work Sefer Hahibbur (The Book of Compilation).
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