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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Legal Comparability and Cultural Identity: the Case of Legal Reasoning in Jewish and Islamic Traditions Rabbinic Attitudes towards Legal Reasoning ============================================= Generally, Jewish medieval jurists did embrace legal reasoning as a legitimate means in applying religious legal norms. In what follows we will first describe rabbinic criticism of legal reasoning and then the rabbinic embracement of legal reasoning.

Among Jewish medieval thinkers, only two are known to us as opponents of the use of legal reasoning – the head of the Suraian academy in the first half of the ninth century, Sa’adya b. Yosef Gaon (882-942 CE) and the Spanish physician, poet and philosopher Yehudah Halevi (1075-1141 CE).

We will portray Sa’adya’s arguments against the use of the qiyas .[^42] Traditionally, scholars who have dealt with his objection to the qiyas have tended to view his stance as deriving from the heated debates he had with the Karaite and from his endeavors to defend traditionalism.[^43] Sa’adya condemns the Karaite enthusiasm with the qiyas as resulting from secondary rather than from substantive considerations*.* [^44] Accordingly, he suggests that the Karaite’s stance is caused by their mistaken response to the incompleteness of the revealed law and consequently the bound legal knowledge – “The reason that stimulated the opponents [=Karaites] to believe in intellectual capacity (al-ra’y) and analogy (qiyas), is that they found things which required knowledge whether permitted or forbidden, and which are not written in the Torah, and likewise [matters which their] quantities and qualities are inexplicit.”[^45] Subsequently Sa’adya also notes the gnostic assumption: “Nevertheless, they know that it is impossible to say of the Creator, may He be exalted and praised, that he left the people perplexed.

On the contrary, there is no doubt that He placed before them that which could lead them to their quest.”[^46] Yet it is still doubtful whether these quotations reflect Sa’adya’s principled objection to qiyas . Unlike the above polemic context, in a treatise dedicated to jurisprudential analysis Sa’adya expands the discussion of the qiyas , from which discussion emerges a deeper and richer picture of his objections.

According to our proposed reading, his objection to application of judicial analogy derives from his rationalistic theology, and not from the debate with the Karaites.