139Chapter 9
Concepts of Scripture in Nahmanides
Aaron W. Hughes
Introduction: Cultural and Intellectual Background
R. Moses ben Nahman (1194 – 1270), customarily referred to as Nahman-
ides or the Ramban, is one of the towering fi gures of premodern Judaism.
Scholar, commentator, halakhist, communal leader, and spokesperson, his
career represents the creative intersection of the three primary trends of
medieval Judaism: rationalism, traditionalism, and mysticism. Like the
great Maimonides, with whom he is frequently compared and oft en too
neatly juxtaposed, he was a product of the rich Iberian-Jewish intellectual
tradition.1 However, whereas Maimonides is oft en regarded as the last
great representative of the rationalist school associated with the so-called
Golden Age of Muslim Spain, Nahmanides was born in a Christianized en-
vironment, whose Jewish community was infl uenced less by Arabic learn-
ing than it was by the Jewish cultures of northern Europe. Nahmanides,
thus, is at the vanguard of the new direction taken by Jewish culture in
Christian Spain.
In order to put Nahmanides’s life and thought in sharper focus, it is
necessary to situate him against the larger intellectual and social backdrop
that characterized the diversity of Jewish communities in the thirteenth
century. Th is was a time of exchange and interchange between numerous
Jewish cultures in northern Spain and France. Exhibiting diff erent intellec-
tual customs and local knowledges, these cultures were neither necessarily
compatible nor reconcilable with one another. Th e rationalism associated
with al-Andalus, the mysticism of Provence, and the Tosafi st tradition of
northern France all implied diff erent sets of traditions and concomitant
understandings of Judaism and Jewish texts.