hat
"all wisdom is of the Jews," a view often repeated by Hellenists, by the
"Righteous Brethren" among the Arabs, and later by the Christian monks
of Europe.

The academies of the Jews have always been pervaded by a scientific
spirit. As they influenced others, so they permitted the science and
culture of their neighbors to act upon their life and work. There is no
doubt, for instance, that, despite the marked difference between the
subjects treated by Arabs and Jews, the peculiar qualities of the old
Arabic lyrics shaped neo-Hebraic poetry. Again, as the Hebrew acrostic
psalms demonstrably served as models to the older Syrian Church poets,
so, in turn, Syriac psalmody probably became the pattern synagogue
poetry followed. Thus Hebrew poetry completed a circuit, which, to be
sure, cannot accurately be followed up through its historical stages,
but which critical investigations and the comparative study of
literatures have established almost as a certainty.

In the ninth century a bold, venturesome traveller, Eldad ha-Dani,[23] a
sort of Jewish Ulysses, appeared among Jews, and at the same time
Judaism produced Sa'adia, its first great religious philosopher and
Bible translator. The Church Fathers had always looked up to the rabbis
as authorities; henceforth Jews were accepted by all scholars as the
teachers of Bible exegesis. Sa'adia was the first of the rabbis to
translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Arabic. Justly his work is said to
"recognize the current of thought dominant in his time, and to express
the newly-awakened desire for the reconciliation of religious practice,
as developed in the course of generations, with the source of religious
inspiration." Besides, he was the first to elaborate a system of
religious philosophy according to a rigid plan, and in a strictly
scientific spirit.[24] Knowing Greek speculations, he controverts them
as vigorously as the _Kalam_ of Islam philosophy. His teachings form a
system of practical ethics, luminous reflections, and sound maxims.
Among his contemporaries was Isaac Israeli, a physician at Kairwan,
whose works, in their Latin translation by the monk Constantine,
attained great reputation, and were later plagiarized by medical
writers. His treatise on fever was esteemed of high worth, a translation
of it being studied as a text-book for centuries, and his dietetic
writings remained authoritative for five hundred years. In general, the
medical science of the Arabs is und