From Saadia to Yahuda: Reviving Arab Jewish Intellectual Models in a Time of Partitions

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Numerous intellectuals associated with the Hebrew Haskalah and the Arabic al-Nahda movements sought to "return" to key historical figures in Jewish and Arab culture—a project that allowed for the reinterpretion of a historical figure's work and image. Within twentieth-century Arab Jewish thought, we find a growing interest and engagement with the Arab Jewish legacy of the medieval Muslim world. The legacies of medieval writers like Saadia Gaon, Moses Ibn Ezra, Yehuda Halevi, and Maimonides became sites of exploration, investigation, and symbols of an Arab Jewish and Sephardi heritage. In this essay, we investigate the role of Saadia Gaon in Abraham Shalom Yahuda's scholarly and political work. We examine the different ways in which Yahuda shaped Saadia as a political and intellectual model vis-à-vis the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars of Yahuda's generation and the al-Nahda circles.