Nachmanides

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In the royal palace at Barcelona, on a July day in 1263, a Catalan rabbi nearing seventy stood before King James I of Aragon, the assembled Dominicans, and a convert from Judaism named Pablo Christiani, and asked for a guarantee he could speak freely. He got it. Over four sessions he then argued, in the king’s hearing, that the coming of the Messiah was not the foundation of Judaism — that a Jew could keep the whole Torah and never see the redeemer arrive in his lifetime. It was an extraordinary thing to say in a forum designed to convict him of error. The man was Moses ben Nachman, known to tradition as the Ramban, and the disputation he survived was the smaller of his two achievements. The larger was quieter: he had already, in the margins of a commentary on the Torah, made the new mysticism of the sefirot respectable.

A modern wall painting of Nachmanides (the Ramban) in Acre, Israel — photograph by Yuval Y, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A leader in Catalonia

Moses ben Nachman was born in Girona, in Catalonia, in 1194. The town gave him one of his names — Moses Gerondi, the Geronan — and the Catalan world gave him another: Bonastruc ça Porta, “good star near the gate,” the civic name under which the crown’s documents knew him. To later Jewish memory he is the Ramban, an acronym of Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, and to the Latin chroniclers Nahmanides, a Greek-styled patronymic. He is not to be confused with the Rambam, Maimonides, the philosopher of the previous generation whose acronym differs by a single letter and whose legacy would become one of Nachmanides’ central problems.

An imagined portrait of Moses ben Nachman on an early-twentieth-century postcard — Meir Kunstadt (d. 1935), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

By the standards the field uses for medieval lives, the documentary outline is unusually firm. He practiced medicine, a vocation that placed him among the learned professionals of Christian Iberia. He led the Jewish community of Catalonia and was, in the judgment of historians, the foremost rabbinic authority of his age in the peninsula. His formation was the formation of a great Talmudist: he studied the law in the northern French and Provençal traditions as well as the Spanish, and he wrote, before he was thirty, with a command that let him correct his predecessors. His novellae on the Talmud — the hiddushim — became foundational; his Milhamot ha-Shem (“Wars of the Lord”) defended the legal code of Isaac Alfasi against the criticisms of Zerahiah ha-Levi, and the title itself announces a temperament. He saw himself as a defender of received tradition, a man whose work was to guard a transmission rather than to reopen it.

That self-understanding sat behind his place in the great intellectual quarrel of his youth. The writings of Maimonides — above all the Guide of the Perplexed and the philosophical opening of the Mishneh Torah — had divided the Jewish world. To some, Maimonides had rescued the faith for a philosophical age; to others, he had dissolved its plain teachings into Aristotelian allegory, denying bodily resurrection in all but name and explaining away the literal sense of Scripture. By the 1230s the controversy had turned bitter enough that anti-Maimonidean rabbis in the north pronounced bans, and partisans of philosophy answered with bans of their own; at the extreme edge, copies of the Guide were reportedly handed to the Dominican inquisition and burned. Into this Nachmanides intervened as a moderating voice. He revered Maimonides as a giant of the law even where he distrusted the philosophy, and his open letter to the rabbis of northern France — it survives, opening with a confession that he had at first erred in judging the dispute — pleaded against excommunication and for restraint on all sides. He neither endorsed the philosophical program nor joined the war against it. He tried, and failed, to hold a middle.

Heir to the Gerona Kabbalists

The reason the middle mattered to him is the hinge of his significance. Nachmanides distrusted philosophy not because he had no esoteric doctrine of his own, but because he had a rival one. Girona in the first half of the thirteenth century was, in the phrase of a standard reference, a veritable seat of esoterism — the chief incubator of a new mystical theology that had crossed the Pyrenees from Languedoc. The tradition is the one historians call Provençal Kabbalah: a teaching, associated first with Isaac the Blind, son of the great talmudist Abraham ben David of Posquières, that read the opening of the Sefer Yetzirah as describing ten divine potencies, the sefirot, emanating from a hidden infinite. The raw symbolic material came largely from an older, mythic compilation, the Sefer ha-Bahir, which had surfaced in Provence around 1200; the Geronese achievement was to take that parabolic lexicon and render it into argument.

The two systematizers of the Gerona circle proper were Ezra ben Solomon and the younger Azriel of Gerona, who gave the term Ein Sof — “the Infinite” — its fixed technical sense and built a Neoplatonic account of how that hidden God unfolds into the world. Nachmanides belonged to this milieu, though scholars are careful about how. The conventional lineage runs from Isaac the Blind through his Geronese pupils to Nachmanides as the authority who lent the movement weight; the cautious reading, which the academy now prefers, treats him as adjacent to the inner circle rather than a charter member of it. The medieval witness Shem Tov ibn Gaon and the later kabbalist Menahem Recanati both suggest that Nachmanides received the tradition not directly from Isaac the Blind but through Isaac’s Geronese disciples. He was a Talmudist of the first rank who had also been initiated, by a living chain of teachers, into a secret.

What he did with that secret was unlike anything his teachers had done. Isaac the Blind had taught orally and warned against writing the doctrine down at all; a letter attributed to him — its interpretation now sharply contested — protests the open diffusion of the esoteric tradition. Azriel and Ezra wrote, but they wrote dedicated kabbalistic treatises for a small readership already inside the gate. Nachmanides took a third path. He planted the Kabbalah inside the most public, most widely copied genre of medieval Jewish letters: a running commentary on the Five Books of Moses, read in synagogue study and household alike.

The way of truth

His commentary on the Torah is a layered thing. It reads the plain sense of the verse with grammatical and narrative attention; it gathers the midrash; it argues, often combatively, with Rashi before him and with the rationalist Abraham ibn Ezra. And then, at certain verses, it shifts register and drops what the text itself calls a hint introduced al derekh ha-emet — “by way of truth.” These are the sodot, the secrets: compressed, deliberately obscure allusions to the doctrine of the sefirot, the configuration of the divine potencies, the inner life of the Godhead behind the words of Scripture. Nachmanides held that the Torah in its deepest stratum is woven entirely of the names of God, and that its mystical meaning could be transmitted only from mouth to ear, never learned from a book alone. So he wrote the secrets in a way calculated not to teach them. A reader without the oral key would pass over the phrase “and by way of truth” and find, where an explanation should be, a sentence that withheld more than it gave.

A page from Nachmanides’ commentary on the Torah, in the edition printed by Eliezer Toledano at Lisbon in 1489 — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This was something genuinely new. For the first time a figure of unimpeachable halakhic stature had woven the esoteric tradition into mainstream exegesis — not in a separate treatise for initiates, but in the open commentary, under the protection of his own authority. The historian Gershom Scholem held that no single act did more to legitimate Kabbalah than this: the prestige of the law’s greatest living defender now stood behind the new mysticism, vouching, by the mere fact of his attention, that the doctrine of the sefirot belonged to the tradition and not against it.

The shape of Nachmanidean Kabbalah is austere. Moshe Halbertal, who has made concealment the organizing theme of his study, observes that this Kabbalah contains no mythic personae, no intricate midrashic tapestries, no frame story — none of the narrative luxuriance that the later Zohar, ascribed within tradition to Shimon bar Yochai, would pour out across its pages. Nachmanides discloses a minimum and entrusts the rest to living instruction. Elliot Wolfson, parsing the technical vocabulary, distinguishes the derekh ha-emet, reserved for the realm of the sefirot, from a lower derekh ha-sod concerning the angelic world beneath. The secrets cluster around creation, the divine names, the meaning of sacrifice, the structure of the commandments — and, in the eschatological writings, around the soul.

There the most striking doctrine surfaces. In his commentary on Job and in Sha’ar ha-Gemul, the closing section of his great treatise on death and mourning, Nachmanides treats the transmigration of souls — gilgul — as the genuine resolution of the problem of the suffering righteous, and affirms a real Gehenna, a real reckoning, a real afterlife. He keeps the teaching guarded, in the manner of his circle, who held the doctrine of reincarnation as one of their closest secrets. The frame within which all of this is held is theurgic: human action performed below with the right intention, the directed kavvanah of prayer ascending through the gradations of the divine, reaches into and affects the inner life of God. The worshipper is not petitioning a distant sovereign but participating in the divine economy. It is worth saying plainly that the mystical writings are a small and deliberately obscured fraction of his output, which is overwhelmingly that of a jurist and exegete. He did not present himself as a mystic. He concealed the Kabbalah even as he carried it into the center of the tradition.

The disputation and the journey east

In 1263 the second self came forward into the light. Pablo Christiani, a Jew who had converted and joined the Dominicans, had developed a new line of attack: rather than denounce the Talmud as blasphemy, he proposed to prove from its own aggadic passages that the rabbis themselves had conceded the truth of Christianity. He secured a royal forum and an opponent. James I summoned Nachmanides, and the king — on this the accounts agree — granted him freedom to answer without restraint. The four propositions were fixed in advance and all favored the Christian side: that the Messiah had already come; that he was both human and divine; that he had suffered and died for humankind; and that with his coming the law of the Jews had lapsed.

A representation of the Disputation of Barcelona on display at the Museum of the Jewish People (Beit Hatfutsot), Tel Aviv — photograph by ביקורת, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Saló del Tinell in the Palau Reial Major at Barcelona, the great hall of the kings of Aragon where the 1263 disputation was held — photograph by JosepBC, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Against this Nachmanides made an argument as much about the status of texts as about the Messiah. When Christiani cited a midrash that the redeemer had been born on the day the Temple was destroyed, Nachmanides answered that he did not believe it — and grounded the refusal in a principle: the aggadah, the homiletical and narrative matter of the Talmud, was not binding doctrine, and a Jew was free to weigh it as he might a sermon. He pressed further, into the claim Christiani most needed: that the messianic redemption was not, for Judaism, the whole of the faith. A Jew who kept the commandments, he urged, lost nothing essential by the redeemer’s delay. He even ventured that the disputed prophecies of universal peace plainly remained unfulfilled, the world being still full of war.

Both sides claimed victory, as both sides in such a forum always did; the Dominicans recorded their account, and Nachmanides, afterward, wrote his own — the Vikuach, his narrative of the debate, which became the celebrated Jewish text of the encounter and a small monument of polemical literature. The writing was his undoing. Christiani marked passages in it as blasphemous against Christianity; a charge was brought; the king, who had treated Nachmanides with some favor, could not protect the book. The pamphlet was condemned, and its author faced exile. Pablo Christiani went on to obtain from Pope Clement IV a bull for the censorship of the Talmud and sat on the commission that combed it for offending lines.

Around 1267 Nachmanides left Catalonia for the Land of Israel. The choice was not forced to that destination — he could have gone to safer ground nearer home — and it reads as the culmination of a longing visible in his Torah commentary, where the settlement of the land is treated as a standing commandment. He found Jerusalem in ruins, its Jewish community all but extinguished after the upheavals of the century, and set about restoring it; a letter to his son survives in which he describes the desolation of the city and his work to gather a remnant for prayer. The synagogue he helped establish there carries his name to this day. He died in the Land of Israel about 1270, his burial place uncertain among several traditions.

The Ramban Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, named for Nachmanides, who helped restore Jewish prayer in the city after 1267 — photograph by Deror avi, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Afterlife of an authority

The reception of Nachmanides splits along the seam of his own double life. As a Talmudist he was canonized at once: his novellae entered the permanent apparatus of legal study, and Milhamot ha-Shem and Torat ha-Adam became standard. As a kabbalist his afterlife was stranger, because he had buried the doctrine on purpose. His grand-disciples and their successors produced an entire genre of meta-commentary devoted to decoding the sodot — Shem Tov ibn Gaon’s Keter Shem Tov, the supercommentary of Meir ibn Sahula, and others — a literature whose existence is the measure of how successfully he had concealed his meaning. To read Nachmanides’ Kabbalah at all required a second tradition built to recover it.

The deeper consequence was the one Scholem named. By lending the prestige of the halakhic mainstream to the theology of the sefirot, Nachmanides changed the standing of the entire enterprise. Where the Provençal masters had whispered and the Geronese systematizers had written for a closed few, the law’s foremost authority had quietly aligned himself with the new mysticism in the most public book he wrote. After him, Kabbalah was no longer a marginal speculation easily dismissed; it had been claimed by the center. The Castilian generation that produced the Zohar, and the later architecture of the divine — the worlds and the figure of the primordial human, the Adam Kadmon, the cascade of the four worlds — would unfold within a tradition Nachmanides had made safe to inherit. The ecstatic-prophetic stream of Abraham Abulafia, divergent in method, still worked in a climate his authority had helped create.

There is an irony at the root of it that the historiography has not stopped turning over. A man who held that the secret could pass only by living speech, who wrote his hints to keep the uninitiated out, did more than any open advocate to make the secret a public possession. The concealment was the legitimation. By refusing to explain the doctrine of the sefirot, and by attaching that refusal to the most trusted name in the law, he persuaded the tradition that here was something worth not being told.

→ Related: Kabbalah · Doctrine Of The Ten Sefirot · Provencal Kabbalah · Azriel Of Gerona · Isaac The Blind · Ein Sof · Maimonides · Talmud · Torah · Jewish Mysticism Zohar · Abraham Abulafia · Gershom Scholem · Shimon Bar Yochai · Adam Kadmon · Four Worlds