ABSTRACT
As Abba Mari continued in Languedoc to pursue his goal of a more hierarchical curriculum with quite limited access to philosophic works, Rashba and his court in Barcelona were drawn further into the religious life of Languedocian Jewry. While the controversy over philosophic study traversed many political boundaries, to some extent it overlapped with the regions in which the parties to the conflict lived. The main divide, of course, was between Catalonia and Languedoc. It was in Barcelona, the ancestral seat of the counts of Catalonia and the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon, that Rashba grew up and was educated. Medieval Catalonian Jewish scholars studied more than one overarching interpretation of Judaism. Some Catalonian Jewish scholars did pursue philosophy, as both a basic inquiry into the nature of things and a guide to the interpretation of Judaism. Many Catalonian Jewish scholars at this time, however, were quite cool, if not outright hostile, to the Maimonidean synthesis of the philosophic tradition with Judaism. Kabbalah, on the other hand, had begun to flourish in Catalonia. Rashba himself was a discreet follower of this emerging theosophy and exegesis, as he had inherited this orientation from his teacher and predecessor, Naḥmanides. 1
