At every stage in the code and commentary, he was rationalizing. But in addition he wrote his Guide of the Perplexed to show that Jewish beliefs were not just a set of arbitrary assertions imposed by divine command and rabbinical authority, but could be deduced and proved by reason too. Here he was following in the steps of Saadiah ben Joseph (882-942), the famous and controversial gaon of the Sura academy, the first Jewish philosopher since Philo to try to place Judaism on a rational basis. Maimonides did not agree with everything in Saadiah Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, but it
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