3 - Territorial Belonging and the Law

Summary

Rabbi Mosheh ben Naḥman (Nahmanides) was the originator of a remarkable legal theory that converted the traditional Judaic mode of belonging to the law into a conception of territorial jurisdiction. This monumental effort by the thirteenth-century jurist and thinker sought to revive a biblical idea that intimately associated the sovereignty of god with sacred geography, a radical suggestion that challenged the ethnic dimension of Jewish law and promoted its universalization within the Land of Israel as a land law. The accompanying analysis reveals a previously undiscussed aspect of Nahmanides’s antinomianism and contextualizes his legal theology in the conceptual vocabulary of Crusader propaganda and European legal reality.