The Rabbi Who Saved Maimonides Twice: The Untold Ramban Story

Welcome to Torah with Rabbi Heschel Greenberg: Lesson IV in our series on the History of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewry

How did the Jews of Spain go from the most powerful, culturally integrated community in the medieval Jewish world to the ashes of the Inquisition — and why does that story turn on one 13th-century rabbi almost nobody remembers today?

In this class — the final one focused specifically on Sephardic Jewry — Rabbi Greenberg traces the arc from the Golden Age under Muslim rule through the slow decline of Jewish life under the Reconquista, and lands on the towering figure of the Ramban (Nachmanides): the scholar who was simultaneously Maimonides’ sharpest critic and his most effective defender, and who held Spanish Jewry together through two existential crises — an internal civil war over Maimonides’ legacy, and a forced public debate for the future of Judaism itself. The class closes with the tragic unraveling of Spanish Jewry from 1391 to the expulsion of 1492, and a modern lesson Rabbi Greenberg draws from it about assimilation and Jewish identity.

🔎 In this video we explore: Why Jewish tax collectors and moneylenders went from indispensable to resented as the Reconquista progressed How the Ramban became the central figure of 13th-century Jewry — both banning-adjacent critic and greatest defender of Maimonides’ most controversial writings The real story of the 1263 Disputation of Barcelona, where the Ramban was granted free speech, humiliated his opponent, and still had to flee for his life over what he wrote down afterward How the Maimonidean Controversy escalated from a rabbinic ban into the burning of 24 wagonloads of Talmud manuscripts in Paris Why the Inquisition targeted Jews who had converted more fiercely than those who refused The unproven but startling claims that both Torquemada and Christopher Columbus may have had Jewish ancestry Where Sephardic Jews scattered after 1492 — and why they stayed distinctly Sephardic wherever they landed

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS

📚 Sources discussed: Ramban (Nachmanides) — Torah commentary, Talmud commentary, Milchamot Hashem, Iggeret HaRamban; Rambam (Maimonides) — Mishneh Torah, Sefer HaMitzvot, Guide for the Perplexed; Rashba (Rabbi Shlomo Ben Aderet) — Torat HaBayit, Responsa; Rif (Rabbi Yitzchak Alfasi); Ra’avad (Rabbi Abraham Ben David); Rabbi Zerachia HaLevi (Ba’al HaMaor); Rabbi Meir HaLevi Abulafia; Rabbi Yona of Gerona — Shaarei Teshuva; Rabbi Aharon HaLevi — Bedek HaBayit; Don Isaac Abarbanel