Saadia Gaon Becomes Gaon of the Sura Academy

Two hundred and seventeen years after Jewish life flourished under Islamic rule in Al-Andalus beginning in 711, and a hundred and sixty eight years before Crusaders massacred the Rhineland's Jewish communities in 1096, both already recorded here, Babylonian Jewry's ancient academies entered a celebrated final flowering. In 928, despite opposition to a foreign born outsider leading a Babylonian institution, the Egyptian born scholar Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayyumi was appointed Gaon, head, of the academy at Sura, founded centuries earlier by Abba Arika, and under his direction the academy entered what contemporaries and later historians alike described as a renaissance in Jewish learning. Saadia's tenure was contested: the exilarch David ben Zakkai deposed him in 930 over a dispute concerning inheritance law, and Saadia was later restored to the post, holding it until his death in 942. Around and during his gaonate Saadia produced the first Arabic translation of the Hebrew Bible, a Hebrew grammar and dictionary, and The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, the first systematic philosophical defense of rabbinic Judaism's core doctrines, work that made him the most influential rabbinic authority of his age and shaped Judaism's intellectual engagement with Islamic philosophy for centuries afterward.