In October 942, in a town called Suf on the left bank of the Tigris, perhaps a few days ride north of Baghdad, a Jewish scholar of about sixty died. His name was Saadia, and in Arabic Sa’diya, and the title he held in the last years of his life was gaon of Baghdad, the presiding authority of the academies of the Abbasid east. Almost nothing about his burial is recorded, and almost nothing about his childhood is recorded either. What is recorded, and what has been argued over for a thousand years, is the body of work he left behind: a Judeo-Arabic translation of the Torah, a pioneering Hebrew grammar, a commentary on Sefer Yezira, a philosophical treatise that became the founding document of medieval Jewish philosophy, and a set of fierce polemics written against the Karaites at the moment when the oral tradition of Judaism was under its most sustained intellectual assault.<\/p>\n
What makes Saadya interesting to a journal devoted to masoretic scholarship is not primarily that he was a great philosopher or a great gaon. It is that he was the first person to take the masoretic text as an object of serious study and to write about it systematically, in a vernacular his readers actually spoke. Before him, the Tiberian scribes who had fixed the consonants, the vowels and the marginal notes of the Bible had left no theoretical writing about their craft. Saadya supplied it. He described how the text was transmitted, he criticised rivals who tampered with scrolls, he defended the reading of the points against a living opponent who claimed to represent the authority of Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher, and then he translated the whole Torah into Arabic so that the arguments could be had by people who could not read Hebrew. The masorah as a discipline, as opposed to the masorah as a craft, begins with him.<\/p>\n
Saadia was born, according to the near-contemporary Judeo-Arabic biographical notice, in the town of Dilaz in the Fayum, the fertile oasis region of Upper Egypt, in about the year 882. That date is conventional rather than certain. Several of the details attached to his early life come down to us through a single short Arabic biography of disputed authorship, and the rest through Hebrew notices written a century or more later by people repeating what they had been told. Historians of Saadya therefore work with a thinner and later source base than they might wish, and much of the confident detail in popular accounts — the exact year of his appointment, the exact sequence of his travels — would not be accepted for a figure of the same importance in Greek or Roman history.<\/p>\n
The Egypt he grew up in was a Jewish province with a long institutional memory. Fustat and the villages of the Fayum maintained synagogues, schools, and a documentary record that later filled the Cairo Geniza. Egypt was also, by the ninth century, a place where Karaites were present: the Itre’ishite communities, which had migrated eastward from Persia, were established there by the early ninth century, and Egyptian Karaites were active enough to attract Saadya’s attention later in his career. The polemical literature he wrote was not written in a vacuum but against a movement physically present in the country of his birth.<\/p>\n
The name of his principal teacher is given as Joseph ben Judah ibn Sahl, a Rabbanite scholar of Fustat known to us mainly from legal writing. Saadya also names among those from whom he learned the figure of Abu al-Hayyuj al-Fakhkhar, the grammarian usually called Huyay the Ephrasian, author of the earliest systematic works on Hebrew grammar in Arabic. That claim is one of the most interesting cruxes in the early history of Hebrew linguistics. Huyay is generally dated to the eighth century and Saadya was born in 882; on a literal reading, the young Saadya cannot have been taught by a man dead for a generation. Scholars have proposed that Saadya was citing a received grammatical tradition rather than naming a personal teacher, that two figures named Huyay have been conflated, or that he was claiming the authority of a school rather than the memory of a man. The claim is instructive either way, because it shows Saadya asserting that the science of Hebrew letters had a pedigree he could inherit.<\/p>\n
He left Egypt, and the chronology of his movements is one of the areas where the sources are least helpful. One reconstruction has him travelling through North Africa before settling in the east; another has him moving directly through Syria and down to Babylonia. He did reach Iraq before the period of his documented activity. The conventional date for his appointment as head of the academy at Sura is 928, which would make him about forty-six, and there is an older reconstruction placing it as early as 921. The precise year is disputed. What is not disputed is that he held the position, and that the position was the highest intellectual office available to a Rabbanite Jew in the Abbasid world.<\/p>\n
It is worth pausing on what that office was, because “head of the academy” understates it. A gaon was the presiding scholar of a talmidic institution, a school of advanced Torah study training the scholars who would become communal rabbis, judges and teachers across Iraq, Iran, Yemen and the Mediterranean. Two academies, Sura and Pumbedita, had for centuries been the institutional centre of Babylonian Jewry, and their authority derived in part from their association with the exilarch, the hereditary official who represented the exiles under the caliph. A gaon was therefore not a private scholar but a public official, engaged in law, administration and the arbitration of disputes that carried political weight. That the leading authority of this institution should also be the leading textual critic and the leading philosopher of his generation is the first sign of how unusual Saadya was.<\/p>\n
Our one substantial narrative portrait of Saadya as a teacher comes from Judah ibn Tibbon, who in the twelfth century recalled studying under him, and whose preface to his Hebrew grammar preserves a famous anecdote. A foreign student delivered his oral exercises in Latin rather than in Hebrew, and Saadya, according to the story, refused to hear him and left the room in anger. Editors have read the anecdote both as evidence of genuine pedagogical harshness and as a moral tale told a century later about a strict master, and the truth is probably between the two. The historical point is that by the twelfth century students from as far away as Provence still sought out the memory of Saadya’s academy as a foundational experience.<\/p>\n
His career was interrupted by the caliphate. Al-Qahir billah, who reigned from 932 to 934, pursued a policy toward the Jewish communities of Iraq combining administrative pressure with religious humiliation, including distinctive black clothing and encouragement of a campaign of slave-marriage against the Jewish community itself. Saadya left, and the traditional account has him travelling west to the Maghreb before returning to Iraq. The period after his return is associated with the academy at Dair al-Jund, on the outskirts of Baghdad, where he worked until his death. Scholars debate whether he was formally reinstated at Sura or simply led a different institution, but the sequence — Sura, exile, return, Baghdad — is consistent across the sources.<\/p>\n
His death in 942 carries a significance that has little to do with chronology. Within a few decades the Abbasid caliphate would begin to fragment under Turkish and then Seljuq domination, the position of the Babylonian academies would become far more precarious, and the institutional world Saadya represented would eventually be destroyed in the twelfth century. His works are in effect what remains of that world. When modern scholars speak of “Talmudic Babylonia,” they are speaking primarily through documents, and the single most important body of Jewish writing from that vanished civilisation is what Saadya left.<\/p>\n
The controversy that dominated Saadya’s polemical life was with the Karaites, and it began long before he wrote a word. Anan ben David, a scholar active in the eighth century, probably in the 760s or 770s, proposed reforms including a new calendar. On his scheme, the thirty years referred to in Deuteronomy 1:39 should be counted from the death of the rebellious elders rather than from the entry into the land, placing the Karaite era in a specific year, usually given as 3142 BC. Anan also argued for a far more tolerant halakhic pluralism than the Rabbanites permitted, allowing Karaite men to marry Rabbanite women, and he attracted followers expelled from the Rabbanite community who formed settlements of their own.<\/p>\n
What Anan actually founded, and what became of his movement, remains a matter of serious debate. It used to be assumed that his descendants established a sect with continuous institutional existence. Daniel Lasker’s work on Karaite halakha and organisation has done much to complicate the picture, showing that “Karaism” in the ninth and tenth centuries was a contested term covering groups with sharply divergent practices, and that what looks like a unified movement from a distance was, up close, a field of competing claims. The scholars of the East whom Saadya confronted were not all descendants of Anan, and not all would have accepted him as an authority.<\/p>\n
Saadia’s Kitab al-Radd ‘ala Anan, the Book of Refutation of Anan, is generally dated to the decade before or shortly after his arrival in Iraq, probably in the 920s. It survives in a single manuscript, the so-called Rampolla Codex in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and was first published by Salomon Munk in the nineteenth century. Its structure is a sequence of numbered arguments, each stating the position of Anan or his followers and then refuting it. The arguments draw on the Bible, on rabbinic legal texts, on logical demonstration, and not infrequently on anecdote and contemporary political circumstances.<\/p>\n
The core of the refutation is a claim about chronology. Saadya argues that Anan’s scheme is late, arbitrary and inconsistent with the biblical text it claims to honour. He argues that the halakhic positions attributed to Anan are not derived from the written Torah at all but from the Oral Tradition, so that Anan accepts the authority he is trying to overthrow even while protesting against it. He argues that the chain of rabbinic teachers from Ezra onwards is continuous and coherent, and that a movement claiming direct access to scripture without that chain claims a discontinuity the historical record does not support. The argument is not subtle, but it is formidable, and it established a form of polemic that later Karaite and Rabbanite writers alike had to answer.<\/p>\n
The political dimension is important and sometimes underplayed. Saadya wrote into a situation in which the legal and political protection of the Rabbanite community was genuinely in doubt, which is why his writing consistently links legal practice to textual authority: the argument that the Oral Tradition is ancient is not merely philological but a claim about the institutional continuity a community needs in order to survive.<\/p>\n
The most vivid single episode in his polemical career is a correspondence preserved in the appendix to Sefer ha-Emunot ve-ha-Deot. A Karaite who was, or claimed to be, a disciple of Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher wrote to Saadya, and Saadya replied. The exchange turns on the pointing of a Hebrew form conventionally transcribed heviqqesh, “he sought,” in Deuteronomy 1:37. Saadya asks his correspondent about its reading and receives an answer citing his teacher’s tradition. He then turns the exchange against him, arguing that the reading his opponent accepts is in fact the older and more widely attested one, and that the authority the Karaite claims from Ben Asher can be made to prove Saadya’s case.<\/p>\n
The rhetorical brilliance of the exchange is that it borrows the opponent’s own premises. Saadya does not simply assert the correctness of his reading; he asks a leading question and lets the Karaite’s answer convict him. Modern editors differ over some details, including the precise word and punctuation, and the recensions differ from one another, so the exchange should be read as a literary and polemical artefact rather than a stenographic record. Its significance for masoretic scholarship is nonetheless real. It is a text of the ninth or tenth century in which the correct vocalisation of the Hebrew Bible is the entire subject of the argument, and in which the authority of Ben Asher is the decisive issue. There is no earlier parallel.<\/p>\n
Saadia also attacked a group with no sectarian identity at all: the so-called codex deviants, who tampered with scrolls by adding or removing words, letters and accents. The appendix to the Emunot discusses them, and the discussion is one of the earliest statements in Jewish literature of the principle that a manuscript’s authority derives from its agreement with the received tradition and not from its mere antiquity. A manuscript may be old and still corrupt; a recent manuscript may be correct; the test is collation. This is a modern-sounding principle, stated here two centuries before the modern masoretic critics began applying it systematically to codices.<\/p>\n
The wider context of Saadya’s polemics is the rise of a new kind of Jewish argument. Before the tenth century, Jewish disagreement about halakhah was conducted within a shared framework of received texts and authorities, and the parties argued about interpretation. Saadya’s opponents, and in some respects Saadya himself, argued about the framework itself: whether received texts had authority, what counted as evidence, and whether scripture could be read without a tradition of interpretation. That shift is one of the defining developments of the medieval period, and Saadya was on the side of it that won.<\/p>\n
The Tafsir al-Tawrat, usually called simply the Tafsir, is Saadya’s translation of the Torah into Judeo-Arabic with commentary attached. It is probably the work he was engaged on for much of the period between leaving Egypt and taking up his Iraqi post, and it is the work by which he would matter most to a masoretes journal. The translation is not a fresh rendering made from scratch. It rests on an existing Hebrew text, and the elaborate commentary apparatus exists to justify that text against rivals.<\/p>\n
The choice of language is the first thing requiring explanation, and it is one of the most consequential decisions in the history of biblical transmission. Saadya wrote in Judeo-Arabic: Arabic, in the vernacular forms his readers would have spoken, written in Hebrew letters. Both halves of that decision matter. Arabic was the language of daily life, of commerce, of the court and of the mosque, and of the great philosophical and scientific works then circulating; writing in it made Saadya’s work available to Jewish scholars raised in Arabic who would never have followed an argument conducted in classical Hebrew. Writing in Hebrew letters kept the work inside Jewish book culture, so that it could be copied, read aloud and taught by people for whom Arabic script carried no particular authority.<\/p>\n
This was a deliberate, programmatic choice, and Saadya explains it. In the preface to Sefer ha-Emunot ve-ha-Deot he says he has mixed Hebrew and Arabic so that the work can be read both by the scholar and by the simple, and that no one should be excluded from it. The Emunot itself is such a hybrid: chapters and passages move between the two languages in a pattern that is designed rather than accidental. The same impulse informs the so-called Books of the Balance, halakhic works usually attributed to him that render legal material into Judeo-Arabic for readers without a full Talmudic education. Their authorship is disputed, but the programme they represent is certainly his.<\/p>\n
For the history of Bible reading the effect was large. Before Saadya, a Jew who did not know Hebrew had essentially no access to the Torah except through oral teaching; the Tafsir gave such readers a text. Judeo-Arabic Bibles of this kind circulate widely in the Geniza material of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the traffic in them is one of the clearest indications of how much the medieval Jewish reading public wanted scripture in a language it could understand. Saadya did not invent the Judeo-Arabic Bible, but his version was the one argued for, theorised about and defended by an authority of the first rank, and it became the model against which later translators worked.<\/p>\n
The text-critical interest of the Tafsir lies in its Hebrew base. Saadya says in his introduction that he took his consonants from the Tiberian masoretic codices and worked with them with care, and that for the vowels he relied on the received tradition associated with Aharon ben Moshe. That second admission is the source of the later accusation that Saadya appropriated Ben Asher’s work, and it is also why the Tafsir is so valuable: it gives us a tenth-century document in which a scholar states on the record where his reading came from, and gives his reasoning for it in detail.<\/p>\n
When the consonantal text of the Tafsir is collated against the great masoretic codices of later centuries, it behaves in general as a member of the Ben Asher family rather than the Ben Naphtali family. That is significant and slightly surprising, since Saadya was a declared opponent of the Ben Asher circle in the controversy of the responsa, and it is one of the puzzles that has occupied editors. The explanation usually offered is chronological rather than ideological: Saadya’s Hebrew text may simply be older than the fully developed Ben Asher tradition, or the Ben Asher circle may have adopted readings his older witnesses already carried. Modern collation work treats the Tafsir as one of the standard external controls for the printed and scribal tradition.<\/p>\n
The survival of the work is fragmentary, and its survival is itself a story about the transmission of Jewish manuscripts. The most substantial single witness is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in the Marshall Collection of Hebrew manuscripts, generally catalogued among the Huntington manuscripts, and it preserves a substantial run of text that was enormously valuable to editors for most of the twentieth century. Additional fragments have turned up in the Firkovich collection at the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, and others are scattered across the Cairo Geniza.<\/p>\n
The history of the Geniza belongs in this story. The community that deposited the material there appears to have regarded it as expendable paper; the trove of some 200,000 fragments was gathered and moved to Cambridge by Raphael Shapland and then, decisively, catalogued by a Cambridge team in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, among them Archibald Sayce, who first recognised the scale of the deposit. What was for centuries the attic of a synagogue has become one of the primary evidence bases for medieval Jewish textual practice, and Saadya’s Judeo-Arabic Bibles are among its most cited contents.<\/p>\n
The major modern edition of the Genesis portions is the work of Moshe Bar-Asher, who spent decades collating the witnesses and produced an edition regarded as the standard text of the translation. The programme has continued through scholars associated with the Jerusalem academy, and the remaining portions have been edited on the same model. The Tafsir is no longer a set of fragments whose importance has to be argued for, but a text with editions, a critical apparatus and a place in the standard reference literature.<\/p>\n
Saadia’s Kitab al-Hayui, known to Hebrew readers as the Agron, was the first Hebrew grammar written by a Jew, and it was written in Arabic. The grammar itself is lost. What survives is quotations in later works, a partial Hebrew translation, and a Latin text long known as the Paraphrasia attributed to Johannes Reuchlin, which was for a long time assumed to be a translation of Saadya’s Agron and was shown by Kroner to be something else. The loss of the grammar is one of the great disappointments of Hebrew linguistics, and everything known about it is reconstructed from second-hand witnesses.<\/p>\n
What can be said with reasonable confidence is that the Agron was innovative in method. Saadya described Hebrew in terms borrowed from Arabic grammar, setting the two languages side by side and analysing the Hebrew consonants by their points of articulation, a comparative framework well in advance of its time. He treated the vowels systematically, which no one had done, and organised the whole system into a single scheme of diagrams and tables. Henry Malter argued in 1921 that Saadya invented the Hebrew vowel signs, the points, in their systematic form, and that the assumption of their greater antiquity was mistaken. That thesis has not been generally accepted, but it frames a real and still-open dispute.<\/p>\n
The dispute is worth stating clearly, because Saadya sits at its centre. One tradition, associated with David Kimhi in the eighth century, held that the points go back to the time of Ezra’s scribes and were transmitted continuously. A second, associated with Saadya and with the Tiberian school of Aharon ben Moshe in the tenth century, held that the vowel signs were systematised much later, and that Saadya and Ben Asher were responsible for them. The Kimhi position was for centuries accepted as orthodox and the tenth-century position treated as an eccentricity, until the comparative study of the manuscripts made the late systematisation hypothesis considerably more attractive. Geoffrey Khan’s work on the Tiberian pronunciation tradition has done much to refine this picture in recent decades.<\/p>\n
Saadia also wrote a short book on the difficult and doubtful verses of the Bible, a work on the seven rules of interpretation, a treatise on prophecy, a book on the unity and attribute of God, and a short discussion of the tradition of the prophets. Several further works have been attributed to him, including a Book of Luminaries, whose authorship is generally doubted. It is a general feature of his reception that almost anything written in Judeo-Arabic philosophy in the tenth or eleventh century tends to acquire his name, which makes his corpus unusually difficult to fix.<\/p>\n
His philosophical masterpiece is the Sefer ha-Emunot ve-ha-Deot, the Book of Beliefs and Opinions, completed in 932 and therefore among the earliest of his writings to have a secure date. It is arranged in ten chapters, each taking a pair of opposing positions, setting them out in Arabic and Hebrew, and resolving them. It gives the standard Jewish creed, the thirteen principles of the Mishnah, in a new arrangement, and argues for the eternity of the Torah and of the oral tradition against the Karaite position. It rejects the atomism of the Mu’tazilites in favour of a created world with a beginning, arguing from the constitution of the world and the nature of time.<\/p>\n
The most discussed argument in the work is a sequence of four proofs of the existence of the Creator. The first is physical, resting on the observed constitution of the world and its evident temporality. The second is teleological, resting on the order and regularity of nature. The third is juridical, resting on the legal character of the Creator as the source of obligation. The fourth is metaphysical, resting on the necessary conjunction of existence and non-existence. It is a systematic piece of philosophical work by any standard, and it was widely read and widely imitated for the next seven hundred years.<\/p>\n
One chapter attacks the doctrine of the ten sefirot, arguing that if the sefirot were real entities the world would be polytheistic, in a reductio running directly against the emergent Kabbalah of his time. The work also rejects the notion that the Mishna’s opening chapter is a theological mystery requiring esoteric interpretation, insisting that it is a list of principles of belief to be read plainly. There is an irony here for a journal concerned with masoretic scholarship: Saadya insists that scripture and its received tradition be read in their ordinary sense, and defends that insistence against exactly the kind of esoteric reading that later made masoretic minutiae seem doctrinally significant.<\/p>\n
His commentary on Sefer Yezira, part philological gloss and part philosophical treatise, does something similar in a different register. It explains the text’s difficult vocabulary, largely from the older rabbinic exegetical tradition, and applies it to a cosmology in which the attributes of God are described as balanced, in pairs, rather than as ten separate divine powers. Ibn Ezra would use Saadya’s Yezira material repeatedly, and anyone reading the Jewish Neoplatonic and Jewish Aristotelian cosmology of the twelfth century is reading, in part, in a tradition Saadya established. His standing in the history of Jewish philosophy is thus not an exaggeration but a plain description: the first systematic Jewish philosopher in the modern sense, and the one who supplied the framework Maimonides would argue with for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
The question of Saadya’s relationship to Aharon ben Moshe ben Asher, head of the Tiberian masoretic school, is the central problem of his reception in masoretic studies, and it has not been settled. The traditional story, preserved in later sources, is that Ben Asher travelled to Egypt, saw Saadya’s work, and returned to Tiberias with a corrected version, so that the two were rivals whose dispute concerned Saadya’s appropriation of the Tiberian system. A second story has Saadya, with Ben Asher’s help, correct a mistake in his own vocalisation, an episode Saadya himself recounts in the appendix to the Emunot. Both stories are about Saadya, and both are uncertain.<\/p>\n
What is not uncertain is that the two men are linked, and that the link runs through the points. Saadya’s system of vowels is preserved in part in the marginal masorah of the Ben Asher masorah parva tradition, including in the great Leningrad Codex, which is to say that the system Ben Asher’s circle standardised is visible in the writings associated with Saadya and is credited, in the tradition, to him. Modern scholars are divided over the direction of dependence. Some hold that Saadya worked from Ben Asher’s material; others argue that Saadya is the earlier of the two in the relevant respects, and that Ben Asher’s system was elaborated later in response to him. The evidence does not currently settle the question, and any account presenting it as settled goes further than the sources allow.<\/p>\n
Saadia was revered by the writers who came after him, and not merely as a gaon. Ibn Ezra quotes him frequently, particularly on cosmology and on Sefer Yezira, and without the reservations he brings to many of his other authorities. Maimonides cites him as a philosopher, and in the Introduction to the Mishnah draws on Saadya’s reasoning about the antiquity of the oral tradition — precisely the argument Maimonides needed, and precisely the argument Saadya had made first. How far Saadya influenced Maimonides directly, as against through intermediaries, is debated; the general direction of the influence is not.<\/p>\n
His translation had a long life as a working text. It was used by Karaite scholars who had every reason to dispute it, and quoted by them when it suited; it was used by Rabbanite readers in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and the Maghreb; and fragments of it turn up across the whole Geniza material. That a text written by the chief opponent of the Karaites could be used by the Karaites is a useful corrective to the idea that medieval Jewish polemic produced sealed camps: Saadya’s Tafsir was too useful to be quarantined.<\/p>\n
His rediscovery in Europe was slow. He was known to the Christian Hebraists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chiefly through fragments and the reports of Jewish scholars, and the Kabbalistic anthology circulating under his name was long treated as his authentic work, which it almost certainly is not. The decisive moment came in the nineteenth century, when the Emunot was printed and translated into European languages by scholars including Marcus Jastrow and Solomon Munk, and when the Rampolla Codex was identified and the Refutation of Anan made available to readers who had previously only heard of it. Karl Heinrich Graetz’s edition and study of the Emunot, and Abraham Geiger’s work on the historical setting of Saadya’s writings, established the modern picture of his career.<\/p>\n
The Jewish bibliographers of the same period built the catalogue the twentieth century would use. Gedaliah ben Jacob Kroner and Gedaliah Jellinek assembled the manuscript evidence, Jacob Reif and Israel Friedlander catalogued the Geniza material, and Abraham Shalom Yahuda worked on the Judeo-Arabic sources. Benjacob’s biographical dictionary and Moritz Steinschneider’s catalogues of printed and manuscript Hebrew books both treated Saadya at length and remain usable as finding aids. Henry Malter’s Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works, published in Philadelphia in 1921, is still the standard single-volume account in English and still the first thing most readers consult, despite being nearly a century old and superseded in detail on a number of points.<\/p>\n
Modern work has carried the study further in several directions. The editions of the Tafsir by Moshe Bar-Asher and his colleagues have transformed what is known about the translation and its Hebrew base. Haggai Ben-Shammai’s studies in Jewish palaeography and the Judeo-Arabic literary culture of the geonic period have clarified the institutional context in which Saadya worked. Daniel Lasker’s reconstruction of Karaite halakha has changed the picture of the opponents. Michael Sokoloff’s dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic supplies much of the lexical apparatus without which the Emunot cannot be read at all, since Saadya’s Judeo-Arabic is technical in a way that readers routinely underestimate. The study of the Tiberian pronunciation tradition has revised the standard account of when and by whom the vowel points were systematised, and has moved Saadya from the periphery of that question to its centre.<\/p>\n
What remains uncertain is the daily life of the scholarship. It is possible that Saadya trained students whose names have not survived, and possible that the academy at Dair al-Jund was more significant than the sources suggest. It is certain that the surviving fragments of his Tafsir were copied by many hands over many centuries in many places, and that those hands are themselves evidence for how the text was used. What is not uncertain is the achievement: a scholar who looked at the masoretic text, argued about it in public, defended it against the most serious challenge it faced, and then made it legible to readers who could not read the language it was written in. That is the moment the masorah stops being a guild practice and becomes a subject of argument.<\/p>\n
In October 942, in a town called Suf on the left bank of the Tigris, perhaps a few days ride north of Baghdad, a Jewish scholar of about sixty died. His name…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":578,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[572,575,578,576,577,569,175,24,570,568,574,571,573],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripture-interpretation","tag-abbasid","tag-anan-ben-david","tag-ben-shammai","tag-hebrew-grammar","tag-henry-malter","tag-judeo-arabic-bible","tag-karaite","tag-masoretic-text","tag-rabbanite","tag-saadya-gaon","tag-sefer-ha-emunot","tag-sura-academy","tag-tafsir"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}