Nachmanides (Ramban)

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (1194–1270), widely known by the acronym RaMBaN and as Nachmanides, was one of the foremost Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages — a rabbi, biblical commentator, philosopher, and physician from Girona, in the Crown of Aragon. His Torah commentary remains one of the most studied works of Jewish biblical exegesis to this day.

The Disputation of Barcelona

In 1263, Nachmanides was compelled by King James I of Aragon to publicly defend Judaism against a Jew who converted to Christianity, Pablo Christiani, in the Disputation of Barcelona. Although Nachmanides was widely regarded as having won the debate, his forthright arguments provoked the anger of the Dominican Order, and he was eventually forced to leave Spain to avoid persecution.

Arrival in the Land of Israel

In 1267, at the age of 73, Nachmanides made the long and difficult journey to the Land of Israel. He arrived to find Jerusalem's Jewish community devastated — reduced, by his own account, to only a handful of families — the legacy of decades of Crusader-era violence and upheaval. Rather than settle elsewhere, he set about rebuilding. He gathered a Torah scroll from nearby Shechem (Nablus), established a synagogue in Jerusalem's Old City — still standing today and known as the Ramban Synagogue — and worked to revive organized Jewish communal and religious life in the city.

Nachmanides's decision to spend his final years rebuilding Jewish Jerusalem, rather than seeking refuge and honor elsewhere in the Jewish world where he would have been welcomed, is a striking testament to the enduring centrality of the Land of Israel to Jewish identity — even for a scholar of the highest standing, and even when the physical Jewish presence in the land had been reduced to its lowest ebb.