Who Wrote Iggeret Ha-Ramban?

Iggeret HaRamban (HaMussar) is arguably the most well-known and widely published and commonly studied piece of medieval Hebrew literature. Its single page appears in over 50 manuscript compendia of various sorts and hundreds of printed ethical collections and prayerbooks. In the 1960s, Tuvia Preschel discovered that the essence of the text was composed by R. Moshe of Évreux, a senior colleague of Nahmanides from Northern France, as published in the medieval compendium Kol Bo. According to Preschel, the letter was misattributed to Nahmanides. Chevel, Ta-Shma and other scholars accepted the relationship but rejected Preschel’s conclusion. maintaining instead that Nahmanides himself reworked the earlier text. In 2007, an earlier version of Iggeret HaRamban was published for the first time, extant in only a handful of manuscripts. Analysis of this version reveals considerable evidence that the letter is a deliberate forgery, including copying phrases from a corrupted version of Nahmanides’ other famous letters. The author replaced a Talmudic dictum in the original R. Moshe of Évreux letter with magical segulah activated by weekly recitation of the letter. This revision helped the letter go “viral”. Kabbalistic and folkloric excesses were eventually removed by a later editor, who produced the streamlined and, in a sense, restored version which attained immense popularity. The motivation for forgery is unclear here. It may have been financial or might have served a polemical purpose in casting Nahmanides firmly within the mystical camp to claim his visage and authority for that side. If a goal was to propagate the lofty ethical teachings of the original letter to a wider audience as a work of pseudepigraphy, it was a resounding success.