Nahmanides

Oded Yisraeli is Full Professor in Kabbalah in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author, in Hebrew, of The Interpretation of Secrets and the Secrets of Interpretation (2005) and of Temple Portals: Studies in Aggadah and Midrash in the Zohar (2013, published in English 2016).

"Oded Yisraeli has written a penetrating intellectual portrait of a towering figure in all his developing complexity. This is a work of lasting significance."—David Berger, Yeshiva University"Refusing to reduce his perspective on Nahmanides—talmudist, polemicist, poet, community leader, exegete, and kabbalist—to one discipline or another, Yisraeli portrays a figure who leads, explores, and changes course over a remarkable lifetime. The most important rabbi of the thirteenth century, Nahmanides has finally gotten his biographical due."—Joel Hecker, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College"Yisraeli writes with complexity yet with clarity, guiding the reader through dense texts. The emphasis on creating abiographical portrait gives the book the coherence needed to be an important analysis of acritical figure in Judaism's intellectual tradition." —Jonathan Fass, Jewish Book Council

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Historical Context and Biographical Sketch2. The Early Period: Talmudic and Halakhic Scholarship3. In the Eye of the Storm: The Maimonidean Controversy and the Pivot to Theology4. The Biblical Turn: Nahmanides's Scriptural Interpretation5. Between Concealment and Disclosure: The Kabbalah of Nahmanides6. Satisfying the Divine Need: Divine Service in Nahmanides's Thought7. In the Thick of Jewish-Christian Polemics: The Barcelona Disputation and Nahmanides's Eschatology8. Nahmanides in the Land of Israel: Continuity and CreativityAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex