The Ramah's Complex Campaign Against Rambam
🎓 The highly-regarded Toledo authority waged an uphill battle against what he viewed as problematic ideas and positions in Rambam's works—until he found support among the rabbis of northern France.
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One of the persistent threads of the Maimonidean controversies is that those raising the alarm were rarely outside the ambit of the selfsame philosophical culture to which Rambam belonged, and can hardly merit being termed anti-rationalists. On the contrary, most came at their complaints from a place of great respect for Rambam, and from a rather moderate stance on the spectrum of medieval thought. A possible exception is the Raavad (R. Avraham ben David of Posquières, c. 1125–1198), whose hasagot (critical glosses) on the Mishneh Torah, made already in the 1190s, are famously acerbic and even openly hostile. Even so, Raavad’s decision to devote his scholarly energy to glossing Rambam’s code reflected the inherent value and importance that Raavad recognized in the work: it was worthy of his scorn. Ramah, too, would find himself exchanging tense words over his concerns about Rambam’s positions, but represents a more typical stance for a controversialist, one of manifest moderation and paradoxical ire.
R. Meir ha-Levi ben Todros Abulafia ha-Nasi
To say that R. Meir ha-Levi (Ramah) ben Todros Abulafia ha-Nasi (c. 1170 - 1244) was a consummate Sefardi rabbi and the preeminent authority of Spain in the first half of the long thirteenth century is still, somehow, an understatement. Member of an illustrious family of authorities honored with the title nasi (“prince,” “lord”), Ramah was also a precocious Talmud prodigy who commanded attention and respect already as a young man in his twenties. Much of his voluminous commentary on the Talmud has, sadly, been lost,1 but Dr. Israel M. Ta-Shma, the eminent halachic historian, considered it to be the culmination of Sefardi parshanut ha-Gemara (Talmud commentary) before that earlier methodology was supplanted by Ramban’s more Tosafist-tinged approach. Many of his responsa have similarly been lost, and his best-known work today is his exacting and important work on the Masoretic text of Tanach, Masoret Seyag la-Torah. But in his time and place, Ramah’s authority and knowledge was impeccable and towering. He was a consummate Sefardi intellectual of the old school, with knowledge of Arabic, a propensity for writing belletristic prose and poetry in the Sefardi style, and an abiding interest in astronomy and other rationalist pursuits.
Significantly for the literature of the Maimonidean controversies, Ramah created a largely unique form for preserving the events and documents of the controversies that would serve as a model for future controversialists, especially R. Abba-Mari ben Moshe ha-Yarchi, who we’ll meet in a few weeks in the early fourteenth century. In general, letters, both public (written for a community and intended for public reading and debate) and private (addressed to individuals, though sometimes intended for a public function), were the prevalent medium through which our knowledge of the controversies is preserved. They form a sort-of “Republic of Letters,” preserved in the model of the slim, but still substantial, compilation by Ramah, titled Kitab al-Rasail (The Book of Letters).
In this compilation, Ramah provided a programmatic introduction that laid out his views and the course of the controversy. He then reproduced the letters in full, including the initial letter by him to Lunel, followed by two letters of response by the Provençal rabbis and his subsequent reply, then his letter to the rabbis of northern France and several more replies of R. Shimshon bar Avraham from France. Each letter was copied out with its full openings and signature(s), and preceded by a headnote provided by Ramah, apparently later, in the course of editing the letters into a compilation. These headnotes appear in Judeo-Arabic. Significantly, Ramah chose to include some, though not all, letters that presented him in a negative light; this precedent would serve historians well, as a largely complete picture of the correspondence was preserved. Many important letters from the various Maimonidean controversies were preserved in other ways, but Kitab al-Rasail would provide the model for the much larger and more elaborate compilation from the 1304-1307 controversy edited by R. Abba Mari.
Ramah’s Campaign in Provence
The Mishneh Torah, completed in 1179 and written in the universally-readable (among educated medieval Jews) language of Hebrew, penetrated Europe faster than Rambam’s other works. As mentioned above, Raavad’s fierce response was written in the 1190s, during which it came to the attention of the twenty-something Ramah, who was born around 1170. By 1202 or shortly thereafter, Ramah had taken up his pen to give expression to his concerns. As he lays them out in the (later) introduction to Kitab al-Rasail, Ramah’s concerns were both theological and halachic. Theologically, he was most concerned with the same sections that bothered the Gaon of Baghdad, R. Shmuel ben Eli, namely, the implication that resurrection was spiritual and not bodily:
This concern early on dominated the understanding of the nature of Ramah’s objections. Already in the fourteenth century, an early manuscript of Kitab al-Rasail omits the sections of the work dealing with Ramah’s halachic concerns, highlighting instead the resurrection debate, which was the copyist’s (or patron’s) chief interest. However, in Ramah’s introduction and in the full text of the letters, much as in Raavad’s dual focus on Rambam’s anti-anthropomorphic stance and on his omission of sources, the halachic concerns are no less central; they are substantive and set out at length. Some are even fundamental, as in Ramah’s objection to Rambam’s ruling on the circumcision of an androgynos, a person who has both male and female genitalia. Rambam rules (in Hilchot Milah 3:6) that a blessing is not recited on such a circumcision, as it is a matter of safek, doubt. Ramah objects, like the Raavad here, that in matters of safek de-Oraita (doubt about matters mentioned in the Torah), the accepted rule is that we say the blessing. Though he explains the support for Rambam’s position in detail, this disagreement pertains to the determination of the underlying authority with which the commandment is imbued, which has potentially far-reaching implications. Although Ramah’s objections are remembered as largely ideological, it is important to emphasize that they were methodological and halachic as well.
Ramah began by writing to R. Yonatan ha-Kohen of Lunel, the foremost authority in Provence, head of the Lunel yeshiva, and a student of the Raavad. The scholars of Lunel were known to have corresponded with Rambam in Egypt, so they were well-positioned to elicit a response from the master himself. In addition, perhaps due to R. Yonatan’s scholarly lineage, Ramah pegged him as a sympathetic ally. He expected a supportive response from Lunel, unlike the one he had reportedly received in his adopted hometown of Toledo, which was much in the thrall of rationalism. (His fellow Sefardi, the Barcelonan R. Sheshet Benvensite, would respond even more harshly and personally to Ramah’s objections to Rambam.)
The response, however, came from the pen of R. Aharon ben Meshullam of Lunel, prominent son of the great Provençal authority R. Meshullam ben Yaakov. Far from favorable, it was an incendiary attack—not without nods to the young man’s standing and potential—on Ramah and everything he stood for:
ומדוע לא יראת לדבר ברבינו משה. ואם פקח האלקים עיניך בחכמה, אינך כבן עזאי וכבן זומא… אמנם אתה נפיל בן ענק… ואראך כי הטעות בך, ואתה תולה ברבך. אבל לא אשיבך על תשובת דבריך אשר באת לחלוק כנגדו ועליו תתגבר, כי לא חדשת לנו בהם דבר.
Why are you not hesitant to speak against our rabbi Moshe? If G-d has opened your eyes in wisdom, you are hardly like Ben Azzai or Ben Zoma [distinguished young pupils from among Chazal]… Granted, you are a dwarf who is the son of giants [a deprecating reference to Ramah’s renowned lineage]… I will show you that the error lies with you and that you are laying into your master. But I shall not reply to your statements that you came to criticize him with and to overcome him, because you have not brought us anything new with them.
First letter of R. Aharon ben Meshullam, Kitab al-Rasail, ed. J. Brill (Paris, 1871), p. 31-32
R. Aharon vindicated Rambam’s theological position with a sophisticated response and also replied, point by point, to Ramah’s halachic objections.
Ramah’s Campaign in France
After some months of recovery, a chastened but ultimately undeterred Ramah resumed his campaign by contacting more promising allies: a group of seven distinguished Tosafists from northern France, including among them the famed brothers Ri (R. Yitzchak of Dampierre) and R. Shimshon of Sens. While the Jewish communities of medieval southern France had, after a period of cultural domination from the north, been early recipients of Rambam’s works, Franco-Germany retained, in the early thirteenth century, its distinctive culture with little interest in or contact with rationalist currents from the Islamicate world. It was R. Shimshon ben Avraham of Sens who responded to Ramah, this time with a heated response from Tzarfat (northern France).
The Tzarfati rabbis were not only inclined to agree with Ramah about his core concerns but actually to espouse them more forcefully. However, they were also unfamiliar with the real cultural power of such ideas in Spain and, increasingly, in southern France, and as such did not take direct action. R. Shimshon, who made aliyah in 1211, passed through Cairo, where on the one hand, he failed, unlike other Tosafists in this small movement, to pay a visit to R. Avraham Maimuni, the son of Rambam’s later years; but on the other, R. Shimshon also did not engage R. Avraham in the matter, as attested by R. Avraham, whose attitude towards R. Shimshon was not adverse. Despite some indications that R. Shimshon maintained his Maimonidean concerns and took them up in his new home in Akko (Acre), where he died, the debate fizzled out without much ado.
When, decades later, Ramban reached out to Ramah to enlist his help in the growing Maimonidean conflict of the 1230s, Ramah demurred, stating plainly that his efforts then were fruitless, and he expected no better now. More importantly, Ramah had become reassured about Rambam’s theological stance on bodily resurrection after having access to the Maamar al Techiyat ha-Meitim. When news of Rambam’s death reached Ramah, he was moved to write an elegy for the great Eagle. Largely salutatory, the elegy retains a note of ambivalence that acknowledges the past conflict fomented by Ramah. On the one hand, Ramah expresses poetic contrition:
מִי־יִתְנַנִי כַדְרוֹר אָעוּף אֵלַי | קִבְרוֹ וְעֵינֵי לַדְּמָעוֹת יִשְׁרְקוּ
אַשְׁקָה בְדְמְעוֹתַי עֲפָרוֹ כַּאֲשֶׁר | פַּלְגֵי תְעוּדוֹתָיו לְבָבִי שְׁקְקוּIf only I were a sparrow, I would fly over / his grave, my eyes streaming with tears;
I would water his dust with my tears as / my heart teems with rivulets of his achievements.
On the other hand, he hints of the controversy of his own making just a few lines later:
הַאִם עֲוֹנוֹת מֵי מְרִיבָה נִפְקְדוּ | הַיּוֹם וְעוֹדָם אַחֲרֵינוּ יִדְלְקוּ
Have the sins of the waters of bitterness (mei meriva) been accounted for / today, while they are still ablaze behind us?
Ramah, Elegy for Rambam, published by Haim Brody, “Elegy of R. Meïr Halevy on Maimonides,” Tarbiz 6, no. 3 (1935): 245-253.
Reads and Resources
A superb resource on this controversy, along with that of the 1230s, is Dr. Bernard Septimus’ Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah (Harvard, 1982). It’s an academic tome and quite dense, but wonderfully written. It’s one of the single volumes that most influenced my academic scholarship.
For Hebrew readers, Jehiel Brill’s Paris 1871 edition of Kitab al-Rasail—still the only print edition—is available on HebrewBooks.org.
Some of the commentary, cleverly titled Yad Ramah (יד רמ”ה) or else Sefer Peratei Peratin (Book of Minute Details), survives in manuscript, often fragmentary; some parts have been printed, and otherwise unknown parts are preserved in Shita Mekubetzet on Nezikin, as well as in other, lesser-known compendia
Fascinating history! I've been learning about the Ramah's debates with the Rambam for over a decade (I own the book!), but you really expand here on the backstory beautiful. Thank you!