Being freed from Judeo-Christian idealism...

Being freed from Judeo-Christian idealism,[^20] we will focus on the significance of legal reasoning in medieval Rabbinic jurisprudence through a comparison to its role in Islamic jurisprudence. Generally, Rabbinic jurisprudence in the Middle Ages may be examined in reference to three axes. The first one pertains to the relationship between Talmudic and post-Talmudic reflections on legal concepts.

One focus of post-Talmudic efforts was to reconcile and harmonize Talmudic and post-Talmudic rulings. The second axis illustrates the complex relationships between a rationalism that celebrates human reasoning as an essential component of any legal activity, and traditionalism, which insists on taking the law as an outcome of divine revelation and therefore opposes reliance on human reasoning in legal matters.

The third axis is the Rabbinate-Karaite[^21] polemic, which reached its climax in the first half of the tenth century. There is some evidence to support the view that legal reasoning was indeed a controversial topic in the Rabbinate-Karaite polemics,[^22] though our analysis suggests a revision of this view and hence its moderation.

On the other hand, legal reasoning was at the heart of the rationalist-traditionalist tension, to which Jewish legal historians have paid very little attention.[^23] 2.1 The Qiyas (Legal Analogy) The Arabic term qiyas (قياس) in its legal sense can refer, in various contexts, to any of the three legal concepts – judicial analogy, general deduction or syllogism.[^24] Legal qiyas is at times considered the archetype of all forms of legal argumentation.[^25] In particular, it indicates the various types of argumentations that legal scholars use in their independent reasoning – ijtihād (اجتهاد‎),[^26] and for this reason it occupied a central place in the uṣūl al-fiqh literature.[^27] Following Shafi’ī’s[^28] discussion, qiyas revolve around the fundamental typology of (1) cause-based qiyas and (2) resemblance-based qiyas .

Cause-based qiyas is a means for extending an existing norm to cases which where is no explicit instruction or precedent in the known law.