Lunel לוניל

Lunel is a small town between Nîmes and Montpellier, and no one would guess its size from its place in the history of Torah. In the twelfth century the yeshiva of Rabbi Yonatan ha-Kohen stood here, and from here the questions went to Egypt to the Rambam—those he answered to "the sages of Lunel".

Here too lived the Tibbonids. Rabbi Yehuda ibn Tibbon translated from the Arabic books that did not exist in Hebrew; his son Shmuel, at the request of the sages here, translated the Moreh Nevuchim; his grandson Moshe finished the translation of nearly all the rest of the Rambam. One street of one small town—and half the Jewish philosophical shelf.

And a third thing: from here, from Lunel, Rabbi Abba Mari at the start of the fourteenth century wrote the letter to the Rashba with which the second great dispute over philosophy began. The town that translated these books also gave the man who asked that they be restricted—and that is not a contradiction but a measure of how seriously reading was taken here.