In Judaism, the Torah is central and best transmitted through the Hebrew of the Masoretes. Over Late-Antiquity, Jews tended to live among people who did not speak much Hebrew . . . which came to include many Jews themselves. As a result their services made use of freeform translations, the Targumim when in Aramaic. Which wasn't Syriac but, then, not all Christians were speaking the language of Edessa Callirhoë amongst one another either.
Under Islam, many cities which had been speaking Aramaic shifted to Arabic. Saadya Gaon duly translated the Torah and much other Tanakh into Arabic. Question: did Arabic-speaking Jews exist before Gaon? Answer: duh, of course they did. Next question: what did they use in services?
Meanwhile among the Muslims came al-Jahiz, against the Christians. Muslims had their own interaction with the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures-plural. Most Muslims went with an oral-tradition riffing on a text they didn't much respect for its own sake. At worst it's the Israiliyyat, such as Ibn Ishaq provided - not always approved by the ahl al-sunna, although some like Ibn Jarir al-Tabari thought better of the genre. And then there's al-Biqai. Nathan Gibson sees al-Jahiz as a parallel of Martin Luther or Saint Jerome, approving a Hebrew text of [second] Isaiah. Better than Greek, surely. Although Peshitta was fairly faithful to the MT as I recall. UPDATE 4/13/23 Or the Syriac.
Gibson knows al-Jahiz was a sharp fellow but doubts he could read much Hebrew direct. More likely is that a Jew had translated excerpts from Isaiah, perhaps just the poetic bits. Like we Catholics do for Easter lectionary.
BACKDATE EASTER WEDNESDAY
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