O thou, who makest guilt to disappear,
    My help, my hope, my rock, I will not fear;
    Though thou the body hold in dungeon drear,
      The soul has found the palace of the King!

Everything that Nachmanides wrote is warm with tender love.  He was an enthusiast in many directions.  His heart went out to the French Talmudists, yet he cherished so genuine an affection for Maimonides that he defended him with spirit against his detractors.  Gentle by nature, he broke forth into fiery indignation against the French critics of Maimonides.  At the same time his tender soul was attracted by the emotionalism of the Kabbala, or mystical view of life, a view equally opposed to the views of Maimonides and of the French school.  He tried to act the part of reconciler, but his intellect, strong as it was, was too much at the mercy of his emotions for him to win a commanding place in the controversies of his time.

For a moment we may turn aside from his books to the incidents of his life.  Like Maimonides, he was a physician by profession and a Rabbi by way of leisure.  The most momentous incident in his career in Barcelona was his involuntary participation in a public dispute with a convert from the Synagogue.  Pablo Christiani burned with the desire to convert the Jews en masse to Christianity, and in 1263 he induced King Jayme I of Aragon to summon Nachmanides to a controversy on the truth of Christianity.  Nachmanides complied with the royal command most reluctantly.  He felt that the process of rousing theological animosity by a public discussion could only end in a religious persecution.  However, he had no alternative but to assent.  He stipulated for complete freedom of speech.  This was granted, but when Nachmanides published his version of the discussion, the Dominicans were incensed.  True, the special commission appointed to examine the charge of blasphemy brought against Nachmanides reported that he had merely availed himself of the right of free speech which had been guaranteed to him.  He was nevertheless sentenced to exile, and his pamphlet was burnt.  Nachmanides was seventy years of age at the time.  He settled in Palestine, where he died in about 1270, amid a band of devoted friends and disciples, who did not, however, reconcile him to the separation from his Spanish home.  “I left my family,” he wrote, “I forsook my house.  There, with my sons and daughters, the sweet, dear children whom I brought up on my knees, I left also my soul My heart and my eyes will dwell with them forever.”

The Halachic, or Talmudical, works of Nachmanides have already been mentioned.  His homiletical, or exegetical, writings are of more literary importance.  In “The Sacred Letter” he contended that man’s earthly nature is divine no less than his soul, and he vindicates the “flesh” from the attacks made on human character by certain forms of Christianity.  The body, according to Nachmanides, is, with all its functions, the work