Rabbi Abba Mari of Lunel—Minchat Kenaot רבי אבא מארי מלוניל — מנחת קנאות
at his request the Rashba proclaimed the ban on philosophy before the age of twenty-five
Seventy years after Montpellier the dispute returned, and again it began in Provence. Rabbi Abba Mari of Lunel saw sermons reading allegorically not the hard passages but the patriarchs themselves—and wrote to Barcelona, to Rabbi Shlomo ben Adret, the Rashba.
The Rashba answered with a ban: in 1305 in Barcelona a cherem was proclaimed on reading the Greek books of nature and of the divine before the age of twenty-five—books of medicine were excepted. The other side proclaimed its own cherem in answer. A year later the king of France expelled the Jews from his domain, and both sides departed with everyone else.
Abba Mari's merit is that he preserved the letters. Minchat Kenaot is his collection; and in it stand also the letters of those who did not support the ban—among them Rabbi Menachem ha-Meiri, who lived nearby and wrote that the ban cut into living flesh. We do not settle the dispute; we say that it happened and what it was about.
On the timeline
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Sources
Rishonim
- Minchat Kenaot of Rabbi Abba Mari — the letters of both sides, gathered by himself
- The responsa of the Rashba on the ban of 1305 — the exact words of the cherem and what was excepted
Basis: documents and evidence.