Moïse ben Naḥman de Gérone. Commentaire sur la Torah

The commentary cannot be understood without its author, whose biography is attested by sources both Jewish and Christian. Naḥmanide, also known as Rabbi Moïse ben Naḥman Girondi, Bonastruc ça Porta, and by his acronym Ramban, was born in Gérone in 1194 and died in the Land of Israel around 1270; he was a major medieval Jewish scholar, Catalan rabbi, philosopher, physician, kabbalist, and biblical commentator. His Grecized name, "Naḥmanides," literally means "son of Naḥman."

His family roots place the figure at the heart of the Catalan rabbinical elite. He was the grandson of Isaac ben Reuben de Barcelone and a cousin of Jonas Gerondi (Rabbeinu Yonah); his brother was Benveniste de Porta, the bailiff of Barcelone. This kinship with a high royal official sheds light on the social standing of a family integrated into the structures of the Crown of Aragon.

Naḥmanide did not derive his livelihood from the Torah. In addition to his rabbinical duties, first in Gérone and then in Barcelone, he appears to have practiced medicine. His public career was marked by two decisive episodes. The most notable episodes of his career were his unsuccessful attempt, around 1232, to reconcile the factions clashing over Maïmonide's Guide des égarés, and his famous 1263 disputation in Barcelone with Pablo Cristià. This disputation, held before King Jacques Ier d'Aragon, was the event that altered the course of his life. As one of the leading rabbinical scholars in Spain, Naḥmanide was summoned by King Jacques Ier d'Aragon and compelled to take part in a public disputation with Christians before the king and other notables; although victorious in his argumentation, he was forced to flee Spain in 1263 following the debate and settled in Acre in Palestine.

The dating and spelling of his Christian opponent's name are the subject of scholarly correction. The 1263 disputation in Barcelone pitted him against Pablo Cristià, OP, often erroneously called "Pablo Christiani." Toward the end of his life, his family is documented: he was the father of a family comprising, in addition to his daughters, a son who died young, a son named Salomon, and another named Naḥman.

One of the most solidly established facts about the Perush ha-Torah concerns the time and place of its principal composition. Unlike many medieval exegetical works that are the fruit of prolonged academic maturation, Naḥmanide's commentary is largely the work of exile and old age.

According to the Britannica, following the disputation, Naḥmanide settled in Acre in Palestine, where he reorganized the Jewish establishment and, though advanced in years, undertook his most celebrated scholarly work, a commentary on the Pentateuch. The Chabad account specifies the intense communal reconstruction activity that framed this writing: the Ramban immediately embarked on a campaign to improve the situation of his coreligionists in the Holy Land, both spiritually and materially; he reorganized the communities, founded schools, rebuilt synagogues, delivered lectures and public discourses, and it was there that he wrote his celebrated commentary on the Torah, as well as other works.

Naḥmanide's settlement in Jerusalem constitutes a historical fact of considerable memorial significance. He established a synagogue in the Old City that exists to this day, known as the Ramban synagogue; his reinstatement of Jewish communal life in Jerusalem — interrupted by Crusader repression — is notable in that it marked the beginning of nearly 700 consecutive Jewish years in Jerusalem. Acre subsequently became the principal center of his teaching. Naḥmanide then settled in Acre, where he was very active in the dissemination of Jewish learning, which had been greatly neglected in the Holy Land; he gathered around him a circle of disciples, and people came in great numbers, even from the region of the Euphrates, to hear him.

The purpose of the commentary can thus be understood within this missionary and pedagogical context. It was to awaken the interest of the Jews of Israel in the exposition of the Bible that Naḥmanide wrote the greatest of his works, the aforementioned commentary on the Torah. Dissemination was ensured by the author himself: he sent copies of these works to his native land. It should nonetheless be noted that the writing of the commentary, begun late in life, rests upon decades of prior study; certain passages were likely revised or completed over the years, as indicated by reworkings discernible in the manuscript tradition.

The genius of the Perush ha-Torah lies in its capacity to articulate several levels of reading on a single page. Naḥmanide never renounces the literal sense, but he refuses to be confined by it. Naḥmanide often explained the peshat, the plain meaning of the text, but he also sometimes offered longer philosophical commentaries and interpolated mystical interpretations.

The commentary is constructed largely in critical dialogue with its predecessors. He was familiar with the commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra, and he discusses their explanations with care, often expressing disagreement. This dialectical posture — borrowing, examination, refutation — gives the text its argumentative density and makes it, in effect, a history of exegesis as much as a commentary.

The most innovative and most delicate dimension of the commentary is its recourse to Kabbalah. Naḥmanide included several kabbalistic interpretations in his commentary, which he introduced as "according to the way of truth"; he endeavored to circumvent the restrictions on the public teaching of this doctrine by formulating them so briefly and cryptically that they could only be understood by those already familiar with kabbalistic symbolism. This deliberate discretion — the sod, the "secret" — accounts for the subsequent legacy of an extensive literature of super-commentaries aimed at deciphering these allusions. The introductory formula "al derekh ha-emet" (according to the way of truth) thus became, for succeeding generations, the signal of an esoteric reading.

A precise example illustrates this mystical texture. For Genesis 2:1 — "The heavens and the earth were completed, with all their host" — Naḥmanide explains "all their host" as an allusion to the formation of angels within the work of creation, adding likewise that the souls of men are included in the host of the heavens. Beyond the sod, the work unfolds a rich moral and anthropological reflection. In his work, the Ramban also expounds a broad range of ethical and philosophical questions. The structuring themes of the commentary have been identified by its modern translators: his approach to Creation, the universal wisdom contained in the Torah, the nature of the human personality, the ethical stature of the Patriarchs, and much more.

Naḥmanide's biblical commentary is the culmination of a career first devoted to the Talmud and halakha. The tradition transmitted by hagiographic sources highlights a prodigious precocity, which the historian receives with the caution appropriate to this type of account. According to Chabad, at the age of sixteen he had mastered the entire Talmud with all its commentaries, and at this early age wrote a defense (Milḥamot ha-Shem) of the work of the great codifier and talmudist Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, against the attacks of Zeraḥiah ha-Levi, author of the Sefer ha-Maor. The attribution of this youthful polemical work to Naḥmanide is, for its part, well established by scholarship; the age of sixteen belongs more to edifying Memory than to the archive.

The choice not to live from study is presented as an ethical principle. Wishing to derive no profit from the Torah, the Ramban became a practicing physician in his native city; for many years he lived in Gérone, supporting himself as a physician, and devoting most of his time to the study of the Talmud and Kabbalah, and to his literary work, writing commentaries on the Talmud.

This formation explains the commentator's singular character: he is a consummate jurist approaching the narrative and law of the Torah. His familiarity with talmudic dialectic nourishes the rigor of his refutations of Rashi and Ibn Ezra; his practice of kabbalah, attested by modern scholarship as well as by tradition, irrigates the allusions of the sod. Historiography further underscores a notable trait: he was an influential member of the kabbalistic community, although he left few writings on kabbalah. The commentary on the Torah constitutes, in this regard, the principal public vehicle of his esoteric thought. As for the famous tradition according to which he is also credited with having sent a copy of the Zohar from the Land of Israel to Spain, thus being the first to introduce this holy book to the West, it belongs to transmitted Memory rather than to the archive: modern scholarship situates the dissemination of the Zohar in Castile at the end of the thirteenth century, after Naḥmanide.

Very early on becoming one of the pillars of the Jewish exegetical canon, the commentary enjoyed considerable manuscript circulation before appearing among the first Hebrew books printed in the fifteenth century. The interpretations of Naḥmanide, together with those of Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra, have served as fundamental classical commentaries on the Holy Scriptures across generations. Its place is today institutional in editions of the Hebrew Bible: Naḥmanide's commentary on the Torah is one of the standard commentaries printed alongside the Hebrew text, like those of Rashi and Ibn Ezra.

The authority of the work extended across mystical schools. Rabbi Moïse ben Naḥman (1194–1270) was an eminent kabbalist, Talmudist, and spiritual leader of Gérone, in Spain; his commentary was praised by the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Louria. This Lurianic endorsement secured the text a lasting diffusion in kabbalistic circles of the modern era.

The comparative scope of the commentary has been underscored: like Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, it has been the mentor of countless readers who drew from it rich treasures of reflection and instruction. In the contemporary period, the reference work for dissemination in the English language is the critical edition and translation by Rabbi Charles B. Chavel. Bibliographic sources attest that this translation, produced and annotated with an index by Rabbi Charles Chavel, aims to unlock the rich treasures of Ramban's interpretation of the Torah. The same undertaking gave rise to a five-volume edition, now a classic in the English-speaking world.

As for the intrinsic value that justified this uninterrupted transmission, the editors summarize it thus: a penetrating analysis that at once illuminates and inspires.

The Perush ha-Torah of Moïse ben Naḥman reads as the summation of a lifetime. A work of old age, conceived in the singular light of a rediscovered Land of Israel, it unites the jurist, the physician, the polemicist of Barcelone and the kabbalist of Gérone in a single voice. His method — fidelity to the peshat, critical dialogue with Rashi and Ibn Ezra, ethical and philosophical reflection, esoteric allusions of the "way of truth" — made him a model of integral exegesis, in which the literal sense and the mystical secret do not exclude one another but are arranged in hierarchy.

The history of its reception confirms this ambition: integrated into the canon of commentaries printed in the margins of the sacred text, praised by the masters of Lurianic kabbale, translated and annotated in the modern era, the commentary has never ceased to be studied. It remains, according to the convergent judgment of the sources, one of the three great classical voices of Jewish exegesis, alongside Rashi and Ibn Ezra. Beyond the erudition, it is perhaps its existential anchorage — a scholar in exile writing to reawaken the faith of a weakened community — that explains the singular fortune of this book in Jewish Memory.