Therefore we have here two contradicting views as to the...

Therefore we have here two contradicting views as to the medieval jurists’ state-of-mind: The modern separatist disapproval of writing in the lingua franca and imitating foreign patterns, and the medieval acknowledgment that deep integration into the vernaculars is unavoidable and hence not viewed negatively.

Obviously, as a matter of method, we believe that when trying to comprehend the relation of Halakhah to a foreign legal system through its jurisprudence, self-accounts and their state-of-mind should be preferred to later and external interpretations.[^82] For Sa’adya, whether to approve the qiyas or not is an epistemological question that is dependent on the metaphysics of the divine law. The Sa’adyian phenomenology of the divine law is indeed an original jurisprudence.

In that sense, one may perhaps speak of two basic models - vertical versus horizontal - on whose basis the different legal theories are formulated. According to the horizontal model, and consistent with the synthetic approach to the sources of religious knowledge, the basic…