In this exciting book, Professor Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University and the Shalom Hartman Institute uncovers with brilliant conceptual clarity the religious world of the philosophically inclined rabbinic scholars of southern France.With impressive erudition, Halbertal surveys most of the relevant thirteenth- and fourteenth-century primary source material, both in print and in manuscript, with an emphasis on the writing and thought of Menah- em ha-Meiri of Perpignan (d.1315). Meiri was the leading talmudist of a proud and self-consciously independent southern French Jewish community at the turn of the thirteenth century and the author of an encyclopedic commentary on the Talmud, Bet ha-Beh- irah.