Ramban [Nahmanides]

Knowladge of God and the early kabbalah Jonathan Dauber

Disputation_of_Barcelona  (July 20–24, 1263)

"Does he mean to say that the sages of the Talmud believed in Jesus as the messiah and believed that he is both human and divine, as held by the Christians? However, it is well known that the incident of Jesus took place during the period of the Second Temple. He was born and killed prior to the destruction of the Temple, while the sages of the Talmud, like R. Akiba and his associates, followed this destruction. Those who compiled the Mishnah, Rabbi and R. Nathan, lived many years after the destruction. All the more so R. Ashi who compiled the Talmud, who lived about four hundred years after the destruction. If these sages believed that Jesus was the messiah and that his faith and religion were true and if they wrote these things from which Friar Paul intends to prove this, then how did they remain in the Jewish faith and in their former practice? For they were Jews, remained in the Jewish faith all their lives, and died Jews - they and their children and their students who heard their teachings. Why did they not convert and turn to the faith of Jesus, as Friar Paul did? ... If these sages believed in Jesus and in his faith, how is it that they did not do as Friar Paul, who understands their teachings better than they themselves do?"^[7]

 Nachmanides also argued that since the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, the world had still been filled with violence and injustice, and among all religions, he claimed that the Christians were the most warlike. He asserted that questions of the Messiah are of less dogmatic importance to Jews than most Christians imagine, because it is more meritorious for the Jews to observe the precepts of the Torah under a Christian ruler, while in exile and suffering humiliation and abuse, than under the rule of the Messiah, when every one would perforce act in accordance with the Law.

 At the end of the disputation, James I awarded Nachmanides a prize of 300 gold coins and declared that never before had he heard "an unjust cause so nobly defended."^[8] On the Shabbat after the debate, the king also attended the Sinagoga Major de Barcelona, arguably one of the oldest synagogues in Europe,^[9][10] and addressed the Jewish congregants there, "a thing unheard of during the Middle Ages".^[11]

Since the Dominicans claimed victory, Nachmanides left Aragon never to return again and in 1267 he settled in Palestine. There he founded a synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem, the Ramban Synagogue.^[12] It is the oldest synagogue in Jerusalem.