In the summer of 1305, Rabbi Solomon ibn Adret and his court in Barcelona prohibited the study of Greco-Arabic philosophy and science to Catalonian Jews below the age of twenty-five. In order to protect their community from any potential effects of this decree, a group of prominent Jewish scholars in the city of Montpellier prohibited the placement of any obstacle in the way of southern French Jews, of any age, wishing to pursue Greco-Arabic learning. The transgression of either injunction by Jews within its jurisdiction carried the severe penalty of excommunication or communal banishment. The leader of a more conservative philosophic group in Montpellier, frustrated by the brazen action of his southern French adversaries, declared their proclamation on behalf of Greco-Arabic learning “illegitimate ” and excommunicated its promulgators. At the time of this flurry of conflicting excommunications, philosophic perspectives were well incorporated into southern French Jewish culture; yet some more conservative Jewish thinkers felt that the character of philosophic interpretation in the South of France had become so extreme that it endangered the historical and normative fabric of Judaism. Abba Mari of Montpellier, the philosophically oriented thinker who sounded the alarm, cited the influence of the Muslim philosopher Averroes as critical to this treacherous exegetical turn that he hoped to reverse by encouraging the scholars of neighboring Catalonia to prohibit access to Greco-Arabic learning until an age at which aspiring philosophers generally would have achieved a traditional religious commitment. Abba Mari ultimately failed to achieve his goal of steering Jewish culture in the South of France along safer paths, but his efforts opened the window wide upon a whole world of Jewish intellectual and spiritual ferment.