Notes
N o t e s Preface 1. For the text see Adolf Neubauer, ed., Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles and Chronological Notes, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1887–95), 2:89–110; the passage cited above appears on 104. See also Neubauer’s introduction, x–xi. An additional section of the chronicle was published in Alexander Marx, “Sur le ‘Kitab al-Ta’rikh’ de Saadia,” Revue des études juives 88 (1929), 299–301. For arguments in support of Saʿadya Gaʾon’s authorship of the work, see Henry Malter, Saadiah Gaon: His Life and Works (Philadelphia, 1921), 172–73, 353–54; Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d rev. ed., 18 vols. (New York and Philadelphia, 1952–83), 6:430n74. An entry for a Kitāb al-tawārīkh by Saʿadya appears in a thirteenth-century booklist copied by the judge Elijah ben Solomon. See T-S K3.25–26 in Nehemya Allony, Ha-sifriya ha-yehudit bi-mei ha-benayim: Reshimot sefarim mi-genizat Qahir, ed. Miriam Frenkel and Haggai Ben-Shammai with Moshe Sokolow (Jerusalem, 2006), 55, lines 32–33. 2. See Yitzhak Avishur, ed., Ha-targum ha-qadum li-neviʾim rishonim be-ʿaravit yehudit (Jerusalem, 1995), 247. According to the colophon, 9–10, the manuscript of the translation was copied in 1354. On this edition, see Haggai Ben-Shammai, “A Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic Translation of the Former Prophets” (Hebrew), Tarbiẓ 67.2 (1998), 261–82. 3. See Joseph Derenbourg, ed., Oeuvres complètes de R. Saadia ben Iosef al-Fayyoûmî. Volume premier: Version arabe du Pentateuque (Paris, 1893), 260. In light of the prevailing assumption that Kitāb al-taʾrīkh was itself written by Saʿadya (see note 1, above), the fact that the text avoids this more literal formulation seems all the more deliberate. 4. See Bustān al-ʿuqūl: Gan ha-sekhalim, ed. and trans. Joseph Kafiḥ (Jerusalem, 1954), 31–32 (Arabic); The Bustān al-Uḳūl, ed. and trans. David Levine (New York, 1908), 29–30 (English). 5. On this work, see Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, N.J., 2008), 52–53; the passage cited appears on 57–58. 6. Bustān al-ʿuqūl, ed. Kafiḥ, 32 (Arabic); Bustān al-Uḳūl, ed. Levine, 30 (English). 7. Consider, for example, the view cited by Judah Halevi, according to which “the roots and principles of all sciences were handed down from us first to the Chaldeans, then to the Persians and the Medes, then to Greece, and finally to the Romans” (Kuzari 2:66). See Judah Halevi, Kitāb al-radd waʾl-dalīl fī al-dīn al-dhalīl (al-Kitāb al-Khazarī), ed. David Z. Baneth and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem, 1977), 79 (Arabic); Judah Halevi, The Kuzari : An Argument for the Faith of Israel, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (London, 1905), 124 (English). Abraham Maimonides employs a similar argument when urging his readers to embrace some of the practices of the Sufi mystics of his day: “The latter,” he insists, “imitate the prophets of Israel and walk in their footsteps.” See Abraham Maimonides, The High Ways to Perfection of Abraham Maimonides, ed. and trans. Samuel Rosenblatt, 2 vols. (New York and Baltimore, 1927–38), 2:320. And in the same vein, Judah al-Ḥarīzī claims that the Arabic maqamāt of al-Ḥarīrī are based on literary forms and techniques that were stolen from the Hebrew Bible. See Judah ben Solomon al-Ḥarīzī, Taḥkemoni, ed. Y. Toporovsky (Tel Aviv, 1952), 11. For an analysis of such claims, see Abraham Melamed, Raqaḥot ve- ṭabaḥot: Ha-mitos ʿal meqor ha-ḥokhmot (Jerusalem and Haifa, 2010), 94–120. 8. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967–94), 2:19. 9. See S. D. Goitein, “On Jewish-Arab Symbiosis” (Hebrew), Molad 2 (1949), 259– 66; Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages, 3d ed. (New York, 1974), 127–40. On this concept in Goitein’s work, see Steven Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton, 1995), 9; Gideon Libson, “Hidden Worlds and Open Shutters: S. D. Goitein Between Judaism and Islam,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and...
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