Nina Caputo's study reads Rabbi Moses Nahmanides' reflections on Judaism and redemption as emerging out of a complex and intense encounter with Catalonian Christian culture and society. Nahmanides, as Caputo portrays him, confronted Christian views of history and scripture, sometimes embracing and sometimes refuting them, and this open but critical approach to foreign sources corresponds to the way he understood the role of Jewish communal leaders.
In Chapter 1, Caputo illustrates how Nahmanides' engagement with Christianity was significant to his conception of Judaism, and to the way in which he fashioned himself as an intellectual leader in the Maimonidean controversy during the third decade of the thirteenth century. Caputo suggests that we consider the whole dispute as an interplay between power and authority among medieval Jewish communities. The proclamation by Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier and his disciples of a general ban (against study of philosophy writings for any Jew under the age of thirty) throughout all the Jewish communities of Europe reflected an attempt to establish universal standards for Judaism. This attempt is understood by Caputo in light of contemporary European political and religious events such as the struggle between different interpretations of Christian orthodoxy, the Albigensian crusade in Provence, and the bans regarding certain doctrines of Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris.
Caputo claims that in Nahmanides' eyes, a strictly defined and universal orthodoxy is a Catholic idea. As opposed to such “Catholicism,” he elevated the process of debate and deliberation in Judaism to a cultural virtue. Jewish leaders must guide their own generation according to geographic, temporal, and changeable circumstances by continual reinterpretation of Jewish sources. Maimonides was, in Nahmanides' view, a positive and significant leader who acted within the framework of the encounter between Jews and Greek philosophy. On the other hand, French Jews, who had followed an opposite cultural trajectory, produced a culture based exclusively on Talmudism. The contemporary conflict over Maimonides' writings was, therefore, according to Nahmanides, one of many legitimate old disputes over modes of interpretation that need not be treated with mutual bans. In his opinion, all parties had abandoned the rules of leadership that had preserved the unity of the Jewish nation in the past. By his own endeavor to compromise between the opposing camps, Nahmanides emerged as a true leader.
In Chapter 2, Caputo demonstrates that Nahmanides' approach to interpretive innovation finds expression in his biblical exegesis. On the basis of the midrashic concept of the preexistent Torah, Nahmanides concludes that the Torah, as a literary document, does not only preserve the historical memory, but also represents the superstructure and telos of the history of Israel from its beginning until redemption. The methodological implementation of this theory requires the exegete first to explicate the narrative structure of the Torah and then to employ other means, such as kabbalistic symbolism, in order to uncover deeper hidden meanings.
Using this method, Nahmanides concluded (based on talmudic texts) that the six days of creation and the Sabbath represent and prefigure the epochs of human history, consisting of 6,000 years of unredeemed history followed by 1,000 years of messianic redemption, and that his generation was situated near the end of the 6,000 unredeemed years of history. He believed that his generation, living at such a critical time, was prepared for the understanding of previously concealed meanings of the Bible. He sought to comprehend the upheavals and catastrophes of his own fateful time by means of a typological approach to biblical interpretation. Caputo follows in the footsteps of Amos Funkenstein in claiming that the inspiration for this approach grew from a familiarity with Christian biblical typological interpretation.
In Chapter 3, Caputo discusses Nahmanides' report on the Disputation of Barcelona (1263), in which he participated as the spokesman of the Jews. Caputo focuses on the strategies that Nahmanides employed in order to retell and document the disputation as a means to establish his version of the debate in Jewish public memory. She examines Nahmanides' Hebrew account of the events, primarily with an eye toward understanding the nuances of his narrative style, and without attempting to resolve the much-discussed question of its historical value. Nahmanides portrayed himself as a powerful and noble Jew at home in the royal court, but also as a tough and independent-minded Jewish leader. By contrast, he fashioned Pablo Christiani, his formerly Jewish but now Christian adversary, as a Jewish apostate, poorly trained in rabbinic law and lore, who had been seduced by the promise of power and fame to betray his faith. According to Nahmanides' narrative, Pablo, in order to gain prominence within Christian society, used his poor knowledge of rabbinic literature, but misled his senders by presenting rabbinic sermons (=aggadot) as literally true and binding.
By portraying his adversary as a Jew rather than a Christian, Nahmanides made a clear distinction between apostates and born Christians. Those who were born into Christianity were not blamed for their belief. By contrast, converts from Judaism to Christianity were idolaters who not only had betrayed their faith for power and honor, but also had lured other Jews to idol worship.
In Chapter 4, Caputo draws on Nahmanides' commentary on redemption in the Disputation of Barcelona, his Sefer ha-Geulah, and his commentary on the Bible as means of observing the complexities of messianic discourse in thirteenth-century Catalonia. Caputo claims that both Jewish and Christian intellectual and spiritual leaders there fully embraced the notion that knowledge about when and how redemption would occur was available to their generation. Caputo argues that Nahmanides' attribution of a precise date to the time of Jewish redemption was not merely a defensive, reactionary line of argument made necessary by the success of Christian polemics, but also became a consistent theme in all of his writings. Although Nahmanides never formulated his view on redemption in systematic philosophical terms, his historical sensibility was the fruit of a protracted discourse among and between Jews and Christians. Caputo compares Nahmanides' and Arnau of Vilanova's (1238–1311) interpretations on Daniel 12 and concludes convincingly that the latter was influenced by the former.
In the final chapter, Caputo deals with the language and literary characters of Nahmanides' writings and examines his report of the Disputation of Barcelona in conjunction with the literary traditions of Catalonia. Nahmanides apparently wrote a Catalan version of his account of the Disputation dedicated to the Bishop of Gerona, and presumably he would have had to provide his patron with a compelling and entertaining narrative. Evidently, there was an intersection between Jewish and Christian literature, and Nahmanides complied with the aesthetic and structural rules of contemporary Catalan literature.
As David Berger has already pointed out some flaws and errors in the book (Speculum 84 [2009]: 678–80), I will restrict myself to more general and structural comments. The structure and line of argumentation of Caputo's study are not always clear. While Caputo promises to show how Nahmanides' engagement with Christianity was significant to his conception of Judaism and to the way in which he fashioned himself as a leader, she focuses on his engagement with Christianity in some places and on his fashioning himself as a leader in other places, but usually leaves it to the reader to connect the separate discussions.
Though many of Caputo's arguments are not new, some of the more innovative and original ones are based on marginal or occasional remarks in Nahmanides' writings and thus rest on unstable ground. Some rest on anachronistic speculation, such as the description of Nahmanides as if he were a liberal Jew who saw an ideal in a “model of normative Judaism capable of preserving the unique historical and cultural character of dispersed Jewish communities, while providing a single Judaism as the solid ground supporting all of them” (36).
Nonetheless, this is a refreshing study that attempts to demonstrate that Nahmanides' engagement with Christianity and Catalonian culture provided the main framework of his writings. As such, Caputo's research is valuable and offers a new and broad perspective for understanding the significance of this engagement to Nahmanides' biblical commentaries and to the literary character of his writings.
