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| Imprint of the personal seal of the Ramban, found at Tel Kissan, Israel. You can see an image of the actual seal here. |
It was in his twilight years that the great Ramban (R. Moshe ben Nachman, “Nahmanides” in Christian Renaissance parlance) left Girona, in the northeast of Spain, where he had resided all his life. Born c. 1194, he departed Spain for Israel in 1267, aged over seventy. The legacy he left behind was a rich, complex, and enduring one that would continue to shape Sefardi culture in Spain for generations to come. It consisted of a robust halachic tradition nurtured in the “school” of the Ramban, eventually settling at the great beit midrash (study hall) of Barcelona and encompassing the scholarship of the Rashba, Ritva, and Ran, to name but a few of the most prominent of Ramban’s protégés and students-of-students. In addition to this, an early school of Kabbalistic tradition runs through the intellectual legacy of the Ramban. Scholars debate whether and to what extent Ramban’s Kabbala was a part of the Gironese school, or whether it belongs to another strain altogether. It was, to be sure, one of the most important pre-Zoharic esoteric traditions circulating in Spain. Together this twin legacy of halachic rigor and esoteric wisdom would characterize Sefardi intellectual culture in the Christian period.
In some regards, there are lines of similarity to be drawn between the trajectories of the Ramban, the exemplar of Christian Sefard, and of R. Yehuda ha-Levi, the paragon of Muslim Sefarad. Both men were not only steeped in the local Sefardi culture of their time, they were celebrated representatives of it. Both turned away, in later life, from the institutions they had built and towards the faraway promised Land. And both men had deep spiritual stirrings that led them to undertake aliyah. However, the character of Ramban’s move is strikingly different from R. Yehuda ha-Levi’s. Ha-Levi’s aliyah—which has been described as a pilgrimage—was intensively documented, in a spiritual sense, in his poetry and embedded in his philosophy. There are also many physical documents, such as letters, attesting to his pilgrimage. It was a principled turning-away, a statement about the nature of life in Spain. Ramban, in contrast, despite deep feeling for Eretz Yisrael and a sustained exploration of its spiritual dimensions in his work, left Spain as a matter of necessity and less so as a turning-away. Ramban’s move occurred more abruptly, with less explicit literary exposition, though he left rich testimony to his aliyah in his works, as we’ll see.
