Rashi and Ibn Ezra in Naḥmanides’s Early Writing

Abstract Moses Naḥmanides’s complex relationship in his commentary to the Torah with the two great Jewish Bible commentators who preceded him—Rashi and Ibn Ezra—is well known. As he declares in the introductory poem to the commentary, he does not treat them equally. He grants Rashi “the right of the first-born,” relegating Ibn Ezra to second place, and that his relationship with Ibn Ezra will be far more fraught—one of “open rebuke and hidden love.” This article maintains, however, that neither Naḥmanides’s stated preference for Rashi nor his sharp criticism of Ibn Ezra reflects his original exegetical stance. At the outset of his interpretive career, it was in fact Ibn Ezra who commanded Naḥmanides’s special admiration. Ibn Ezra’s commentary—not Rashi’s—served as the point of departure for Naḥmanides’s earliest exegetical work. Rashi’s influence entered Naḥmanides’s corpus only gradually, forming part of the larger cultural transformation he experienced as his intellectual orientation shifted from Andalusia to northern France.