The First Great Jewish Philosopher (to the Jews)

This is the third in a series of occasional essays by David Wolpe on lesser-known figures in Jewish history. The first, on the biblical king Josiah, and the second, on the talmudic figure Bruriah, are available here.

Most Jews, it is safe to say, recognize the name of Maimonides. But how many recognize the name of the godfather of Judeo-Arabic culture, the first to translate the Torah into Arabic, the first to write a Hebrew grammar as well as a Hebrew dictionary, and the first to be acknowledged as a philosopher by the Jewish people?

All of this and more describes the towering achievement of Rabbi Saadya Gaon (882-942): poet, scholar, polemicist, head of a great Babylonian academy, and altogether one of the most accomplished individuals in Jewish history. He was, in the rabbinic phrase that Abraham ibn Ezra applied to him in the 12th century, rosh ha-m’dabrim b’khol makom, the primary authority in every area. Or, in the words of an early-20th-century study of his work, “the first Jewish scholar whose universal mind embraced all the branches of Jewish learning known in his time.”