POLEMICS and the propagation of doctrines constitute an important area of Sa'adyah's wide-ranging literary activity. Although he was not the first to engage in polemical writing in the geonic era, he certainly enlarged the scope of polemics and elaborated various literary models for this purpose. Quite a few of Sa'adyah's works were intended primarily as polemics, but in keeping with his usual practice he did not restrict them to a single topic and often incorporated a wide range of subjects, even when these contributed little to his polemical argument or did so only indirectly. Conversely, he introduced polemical motifs, both explicit and implicit, into works in other genres, even where a modern reader might consider them irrelevant.

Sa'adyah began composing polemical works as a young man and continued for many decades. He was certainly well suited to this line of activity, which demanded intellectual and rhetorical vigour and a powerful and combative personality. We should also bear in mind his sense of mission, his image of himself as the member of his generation chosen to fulfil the promise that God never leaves the nation without a leader ‘to counsel and instruct her and cause her condition to improve’. Seeing the circumstances of the Jews and Judaism in his day, and realizing that his people were faced with challenges that no one else could help them meet, Sa'adyah took the role on himself in accordance with the proverb, ‘Where there are no [worthy]men, strive to be a man.’ Only in one instance (Sefer hagalui) does a personal note dominate his polemic, and here, too, he writes out of a deep conviction that his personal good is synonymous with the public good, as we shall presently see.

Sa'adyah's polemics may be viewed as a series of concentric circles. In this chapter, I will survey them moving from the outermost—his debates with members of other religions—to the innermost circle: his struggles over the leadership of Rabbanite Jewry in Babylonia.

Religious Debates

To the best of our knowledge, Sa'adyah did not devote any separate work to the criticism of other religions or to the refutation of criticisms levelled at Judaism by adherents of other religions.