Moshe Halbertal. Between Torah and Wisdom: Rabbi Mena[hdotu ]em ha-Meiri and the Maimonidean Halakhists of Provence. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000. 239 pp. (Hebrew).

Abstract

In this exciting book, Professor Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University and the Shalom Hartman Institute uncovers with brilliant conceptual clarity the religious world of the philosophically inclined rabbinic scholars of southern France. With impressive erudition, Halbertal surveys most of the relevant thirteenth- and fourteenth-century primary source material, both in print and in manuscript, with an emphasis on the writing and thought of Menaḥem ha-Meiri of Perpignan (d. 1315). Meiri was the leading talmudist of a proud and self-consciously independent southern French Jewish community at the turn of the thirteenth century and the author of an encyclopedic commentary on the Talmud, Bet ha-Beḥirah. Halbertal argues that the history of medieval Jewish thought has been impoverished significantly on account of an inadequate appreciation of the impressive degree to which southern French talmudists, like Meiri, integrated philosophy and halakhah in their writing and thought. In this Halbertal is undoubtedly correct, and his book is therefore an unusually important contribution to Jewish intellectual history. (A conceptual core of Halbertal's work appeared as “R. Menaḥem ha-Me'iri: bein Torah le-Ḥokhmah,” Tarbiz 63 (1995): 63–118, but issues and themes treated there are examined here with much greater scope and depth.)