Saadia is remembered as the greatest of the gaonim â?? those leaders of the Babylonian academies who added so much to the richness of Jewish life and thought. They were all great intellectuals, and Saadia, who flourished in the first half of the 10th century in Muslim Bagdad, was the greatest of them all.
Saadia was a scrupulous scholar of the Hebrew language and of language in general. He wrote grammar books and dictionaries. Living in the midst of the Abbasid caliphate, he understood the need for Jews living under the crescent of Islam to read Arabic. Thus he translated most of the Hebrew Scriptures into Arabic. Many hundreds of years later, Moses Mendelssohn would translate the Hebrew Bible into German for the same reason.
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