Nahmanides

Also known as Moses ben Nachman, Ramban, Bonastruc ça Porta

Catalan rabbi, philosopher, and biblical commentator whose flight to the Holy Land in 1267 — after the Disputation of Barcelona — refounded the Jewish community of Jerusalem in the last years of the kingdom of Acre.

Nahmanides was the leading rabbinic scholar of thirteenth-century Catalonia: physician at Girona, author of a great Talmudic and biblical commentary, leader of the kabbalistic school of his city, and the rabbinic disputant chosen by James I of Aragon to defend Judaism in the famous public Disputation of Barcelona in 1263. The disputation went well enough for him to publish a polemical account of it that the Dominicans then prosecuted; in 1267 he sailed for the Holy Land and never returned.

He arrived at Acre in late August 1267 and went up to Jerusalem within the month. The Holy City had been all but emptied of Jews by the Khwarazmian sack of 1244 and the subsequent Mamluk wars; Nahmanides records in a famous letter to his son that on his arrival he could find only two Jewish dye-makers living in the city. He set about restoring synagogue worship — the so-called Ramban Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter is traditionally said to date from his refoundation — and presided over an embryonic community there for the rest of his life.

He died at Acre in 1270 at the age of seventy-six, and his last years are the principal hinge between the great age of medieval Sephardi Jewish learning and the small but continuous Jewish community of Mamluk Palestine that succeeded the Frankish kingdom.

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