From the Bahir to thirteenth-century Catalonia
Date
1194CE
1194–1270
Nahmanides joined tosafist Talmud study to Kabbalah, a mystical tradition born in Provence as an answer to the challenge of Aristotelian philosophy.
Sourced narrative
Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.
10 statements
01Sefarad's literary culture
Literary life among Christian Spain's Jews both extended the heritage of Muslim al-Andalus and absorbed of influences from Europe beyond the Pyrenees. An example is the Hebrew poetry of Todros ben Judah Abulafia (d. 1306), which carried on the Andalusi tradition while trying out new styles inspired by Christian Europe's troubadour verse. The best-known scholar of medieval Christian Spain, arguably, was Moses ben Nahman, or Nahmanides (1194 to 1270), born in Girona, Catalonia, who left for the Holy Land in 1267 and spent his last years in Jerusalem and Acre. He played a central part in the 1230s controversy over Maimonides' philosophical writings, and Aragon's king ordered him into a public disputation with the convert Pablo Cristiani at Barcelona in 1263. About 50 of his works survive.
02Talmud and Kabbalah
More than anyone, Nahmanides brought into the Sephardi world the Talmud scholarship pioneered by the French tosafists, and he fashioned a fresh blend of the Talmudic learning of Spain, northern France and Provence. Like the tosafists, he valued detailed study of the Talmud's wording as an end in itself, not chiefly as a means of fixing legal practice, which had been the center of the Sephardi approach. Kabbalah was the second field in which Nahmanides left a major mark, chiefly through his Bible commentary, which took its place beside those of Abraham ibn Ezra and Rashi among the classics. He was the first to weave Kabbalah into his biblical glosses: he often gave an interpretation 'by way of the plain meaning of Scripture' and then another introduced as 'by the way of Truth', that is, in the spirit of Kabbalah.
03What Kabbalah is
Kabbalah literally means 'tradition', something 'received', and names the mystical teachings that grew up in Provence and Spain during the 1100s and 1200s. Mysticism usually denotes a religious experience of communion with the divine that transforms the individual's consciousness and leads to disclosure of 'secret', 'hidden' knowledge. The mid-twelfth century saw a new Jewish mystical literature emerge in Provence.
It was probably no accident that the same Provençal region saw a quarrel over Jewish philosophy and Maimonides' writings, and in a sense Kabbalah answered philosophy's challenge. For Aristotelians like Maimonides, the commandments chiefly served an educational purpose, since a self-sufficient, all-powerful God did not 'need' ritual or prayer. Kabbalah offered the opposite view: the words of prayer and the performance of commandments had a real effect within the divine realm itself and literally kept the universe going.
One of the earliest Kabbalistic works was the strange, obscure Sefer ha-Bahir ('Book of Clarity', ironically), composed in twelfth-century Provence in the guise of an ancient midrash on each Bible verse. For all its obscurity it had a large effect on later Kabbalistic literature: it listed ten 'potencies' of God, matching the ten 'Let there be' phrases of the creation story, an idea Kabbalah later developed into the sefirot.
Later Kabbalah developed the idea of ten potencies (or spheres), the sefirot, into an elaborate scheme of linked powers that jointly constituted the divinity. Kabbalah presented a mythical universe in which 'God', the divine realm, was the stage for the interplay of the ten sefirot, all contained within the one God.
Nahmanides, Jonah Gerondi (died 1263) and others advanced this Kabbalistic lore in Catalonia during the thirteenth century, south of the Pyrenees. Another Kabbalistic school took shape in Castile in the late thirteenth century.
Context
Rashi's sons and students carried on the systematic study of the Talmud, taking his commentary as their starting point. These further glosses are the tosafot, and their authors, at work in France and Germany during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are the tosafists. Just as with Rashi's commentary, nearly every printed Talmud includes the tosafot, and as early as the thirteenth century their method was brought to Sephardi Jewry by Nahmanides of Girona.
§ 01Geography
Where it happened
§ 04Network
Connections
§ 05Bibliography
Further reading
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941).
Classic study of Jewish mysticism · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212
Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. A. Arkush (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1987).
The origins of the Kabbalah · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212
Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
New perspectives on the Kabbalah · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212
§ 06Apparatus
Sources on this page
- 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204inspect
- 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
- 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204inspect
- 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204inspect
- 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204inspect
- 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 204inspect
- 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
- 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
- 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 205inspect
- 10Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 193; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 193inspect
- Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
- Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
- Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
- Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
- Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.