ר' אברהם בן נתן הירחי

Rav Avraham ben Natan (c. 4915/1155–4975/1215), known as the Ra’avan HaYarchi, was a chacham of Provence and Spain and the author of Sefer HaManhig. He was born in Lunel, and the name HaYarchi is drawn from it — yareach is the moon, as lune is in French — the epithet also serving to distinguish him from Rav Eliezer ben Natan, who is likewise called the Ra’avan. While still young he set out on his travels through Provence, France and Ashkenaz. At Dampierre he learned in the yeshiva of Rav Yitzchak ben Shmuel, whom he calls “our holy rabbeinu,” and from his son Rav Elchanan; among his other rebbeim were Rav Yedidiah of Melun and Rav Chaim ben Chananel HaKohen of Paris. At about the age of forty he reached Toledo, his name already preceding him, and was appointed to the beit din there together with Rav Yitzchak b’Rav Meir ibn Migash and the Ramah, Rav Meir HaLevi Abulafia. He returned to Provence for a time, came back to Toledo in 4971/1211, and lived there until his passing.

Sefer HaManhig, which he also called Manhig Olam, he began in Toledo in 4964/1204, dedicating it to his patron Yosef ibn Shushan and to his sons. It is arranged along the order of the year, treating the beit knesset and the tefillot, Shabbat and the yamim tovim, and it gives great weight to the minhagim of the various kehillot and to the reasons behind them; a good number of the practices he explains are kept to this day. Woven into it is a body of teshuvot gathered from his written and spoken rulings, some still carrying his closing greeting, and passages drawn from the Rif, from Rav Yitzchak ibn Ghiyat, and from Rav Yitzchak ben Abba Mari, a relative of his. He quotes at length from both Talmuds and from most of the halachic and aggadic midrashim, including collections since lost, so that the sefer helps in establishing the text of those works. He also records shul practices he saw with his own eyes in Provence and northern France, in Burgundy and Champagne, in the southwest of Germany, and in England and Spain: among them the French custom of children bringing their Christian nurses to the shul courtyard on Purim, where relatives loaded them with gifts — a practice many opposed, since the Jewish poor lost by it, and Rashi is said to have spoken against it. The sefer was first printed in Constantinople in 5279/1519, three hundred and fifteen years after it was written.

He also wrote a peirush on masechet Kallah Rabbati, of which only the first two chapters reached us, and those came to light only in 1866. In Spain he learned Arabic well enough to translate a teshuvah of Rav Saadia Gaon into Hebrew, and it is printed in HaManhig. His teshuvot are brought by the Rashba and by Rav David Abudraham, though they were never gathered into a sefer of shu’t of their own.