Yonah Gerondi

Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi (Hebrew: יוֹנָה בֶּן־אַבְרָהָם גִירוֹנְדִי, romanized: Yōnā bēn-ʾAvrāhām Gīrōndī, lit. 'Jonah son of Abraham the Gironan'; (1180-1264), also known as Jonah of Girona and Rabbeinu Yonah (רבינו יונה), was a Catalan rabbi and moralist, cousin of Nahmanides. He is most famous for his ethical work The Gates of Repentance (Hebrew: שערי תשובה).

Biography

Much of what is known about his life comes from a responsum by Solomon ben Simon Duran, one of his descendants.

Jonah Gerondi came from Girona, in Catalonia (present-day Spain). He was the most prominent pupil of Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier, the leader of the opponents of Maimonides' philosophical works, and was one of the signers of the ban proclaimed in 1233 against The Guide for the Perplexed and the Sefer ha-Madda. According to his pupil, Hillel ben Samuel, Gerondi was the instigator of the public burning of Maimonides' writings by order of the authorities at Paris in 1233, and the indignation which this aroused among all classes of Jews was mainly directed against him. Subsequently (not forty days afterward, as a tradition has it, but in 1242) when twenty-four wagon-loads of Talmuds were burned at the same place where the philosophical writings of Maimonides had been destroyed, Gerondi saw the folly and danger of appealing to Christian ecclesiastical authorities on questions of Jewish doctrine, and publicly admitted in the synagogue of Montpellier that he had been wrong in all his acts against the works and fame of Maimonides.

As an act of repentance he vowed to travel to Israel and prostrate himself on Maimonides' grave and implore his pardon in the presence of ten men for seven consecutive days. He left France with that intention, but was detained, first in Barcelona and later in Toledo. He remained in Toledo, and became one of the great Talmudical teachers of his time.