Kabbalistic Revolution: Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain

Kabbalistic Revolution

Jewish Cultures of the World

Edited by Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University

Published in association with the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University

Advisory Board

Yoram Bilu, Hebrew University

Jonathan Boyarin, Cornell University

Virginia R. Dominguez, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University

Jack Kugelmass, University of Florida

Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota

Aron Rodrigue, Stanford University

Mark Slobin, Wesleyan University

Yael Zerubavel, Rutgers University

Kabbalistic Revolution

Reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain

Hartley Lachter

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, And London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lachter, Hartley, 1974–

Kabbalistic Revolution : reimagining Judaism in Medieval Spain.

p. cm — (Jewish cultures of the world)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–6875–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6876–8 (e-book)

1. Judaism—Spain—History. 2. Judaism—History—12th century. 3. Judaism—History—13th century. 4. Mysticism—Judaism—History—12th century. 5. Mysticism—Judaism—History—13th century. 6. Cabala. I. Title.

BM354.L38 2014

296.1'609460902—dc23

2014004942

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2014 by Hartley Lachter

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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For Jessica

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Kabbalistic Writing in Late Thirteenth-Century Castile

Chapter 1. Masters of Secrets: Claiming Power with Concealed Knowledge

Chapter 2. Secrets of the Cosmos: Creating a Kabbalistic Universe

Chapter 3. Secrets of the Self: Kabbalistic Anthropology and Divine Mystery

Chapter 4. Jewish Bodies and Divine Power: Theurgy and Jewish Law

Chapter 5. Prayer Above and Below: Kabbalistic Constructions of the Power of Jewish Worship

Conclusion

Postscript—Cultural Logics: Kabbalah, Then and Now

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

This book is the fruit of many years labor, and I have had the good fortune to work with teachers and colleagues from whom I have benefitted immensely. This project began in the form of my doctoral dissertation, written under the guidance of Elliot Wolfson at New York University. Since completing my degree, the project had taken new form, and Professor Wolfson has provided me with invaluable mentorship and advice over the years, including reading a full draft of this book before publication. I am deeply grateful. I would also like to thank Shaul Magid, Joel Hecker, and Boaz Huss for reading through the manuscript and offering me many helpful insights, and Irven Resnick, who provided helpful suggestions for the first chapter. Conversations with colleagues over the years have added in many great and small ways to the formulation of the arguments of this book, and for that I would like to thank Daniel Abrams, David Biale, Robert Chazan, Jonathan Dauber, Glenn Dynner, Marc Epstein, Pinchas Giller, Joel Hacker, Harvey Hames, Yuval Harari, Moshe Idel, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Jeffrey Kripal, Daniel Lasker, Tony Levy, Shaul Magid, Alan Mittleman, Elke Morlok, David Myers, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jonathan Ray, Robert Sagerman, Sandra Valabregue-Perry, and Kocku von Stuckrad. I also thank the participants in the Departmental Seminar at Ben Gurion University where I was invited to present some of the central claims of this book. Responsibility for all errors that remain is exclusively my own.

Access to sources in manuscript was essential for researching this book. I would like to thank Dr. Piet van Boxel, Hebrew curator at the Bodlian Library at Oxford; Ilana Tahan, lead curator of Hebrew Manuscripts at the British Library; Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard, director of Special Collections at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary; and the staff at the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National Library at Hebrew University. Their assistance and helpful advice was invaluable to me. My colleagues in the Religion Studies department at Muhlenberg College, Sharon Albert, Jessica Cooperman, William Gruen, Peter Pettit, Kammie Takahashi, and Susan Schwartz, have been supportive professional allies to whom I am deeply grateful. I would also like to thank my editors at Rutgers, Matti Bunzl, Jeffrey Shandler, and Marlie Wasserman, for their unfailing support. Brian King’s meticulous and thoughtful copy editing improved the writing of this book in countless ways.

My family has been a source of invaluable support during my work on this project. To my parents, Sid and Sandra Lachter, and my in-laws, Leslie and Bernice Cooperman, I am deeply indebted for the encouragement and countless hours of babysitting that they provided. My two daughters, Zoe and Mollie, gave me the necessary comic relief essential to productive labor. My wife, Jessica Cooperman, has discussed every aspect of this project with me, offering many important observations. Without her keen intellect, sharp historical sensibility, and unstinting support and devotion, this project would not have been possible.

Introduction

Kabbalistic Writing in Late Thirteenth-Century Castile

The Jewish esoteric discourse that developed between the late twelfth and late thirteenth centuries known as Kabbalah had a profound influence on the history of Judaism, as well as on the intellectual history of the West. The kabbalistic worldview, which claims a secret oral tradition stemming from the revelation at Sinai that reveals the mysteries of the Godhead and the theurgic impact of Jewish ritual, became a dominant paradigm according to which many Jews conceptualized the meaning of Jewish life. In the last three decades of the thirteenth century, a remarkable and unprecedented proliferation of kabbalistic texts and discourse took place in Spain, especially in the region of Castile.¹ It was during this period that hundreds of texts were composed, ranging from short explications of specific points of kabbalistic doctrine to lengthy compositions that offer systematic treatments of Kabbalah and its interpretation of scripture, rabbinic rituals, and liturgy. Most significantly, it was during this crucial period in Castile that the texts that eventually came to be known as the Sefer ha-Zohar, or Book of Splendor, were composed and began to circulate. The aim of these kabbalists was bold and transformative in scope, seeking to reimagine the traditional forms of Jewish life and the circumstances of Jewish historical experience in terms of an esoteric doctrine with a complex and daring theosophy.

According to the kabbalistic tradition, the transcendent divine essence known as ein sof (the endless) or ayyin (the nothing) created the cosmos through a process of emanation in which a series of ten sefirot (luminosities) mediate the continuum of being that connects the physical universe to God. According to this model, the sefirot, which are described with strikingly paradoxical and apophatic language as the ten that are simultaneously one and infinite, channel the divine shefa (overflow) into the world, sustaining the fabric of being and bringing blessing to humanity. Due to the exile of the Jewish people from their land, as well as a history of Jewish violation of covenantal law, the interconnections between the sefirot, according to the kabbalists, are damaged, and the lowest sefirah, Shekhinah or the divine feminine presence, accompanies the Israelites in their exile, sharing and embodying their longing for reintegration into the Godhead. The kabbalists claim, however, that their esoteric teachings concerning this theosophy enable Jews to repair the damage to the sefirot by means of the performance of Jewish law and ritual as well as the study of Jewish texts through a kabbalistic lens. In short, the Kabbalah is a claim to secret knowledge that presents a bold and forceful reformulation of Judaism as the mechanism whereby the very being of the cosmos is maintained.

Chart of the Sefirot

The historical impact of these writings is hard to overstate. Though the extent of the immediate impact of these texts in Spain and elsewhere is difficult to gauge precisely, within a few centuries the Zohar became accepted as a canonical text in virtually all Jewish communities, taking its place alongside the Bible and the Talmud.² The transformative writings of Isaac Luria’s school, as well as the messianic movement surrounding Shabbetai Zvi and the development of Hasidism, were all deeply indebted to the writings and worldview of the Castilian kabbalists. Along with the Zohar, the writings of Joseph Gikatilla and Moses de Leon attracted the attention of Christian Hebraists and were translated into Latin starting as early as the fifteenth century, making a lasting impression on Renaissance thought as well as later schools of European philosophers, esotericists, and scientists.

An important desideratum in the scholarship on Kabbalah is why this particular period in Castile, from the 1270s through the early 1300s, was so remarkably prolific and boldly creative. This study will explore this question by considering the function that kabbalistic discourse served in the particular historical circumstance of Castile and the Iberian peninsula. It will be argued that the kabbalists sought to address the tenuous political status of Jews in Western Europe, as well as the rise of Aristotelianism and Christian anti-Jewish argumentation,³ by claiming to reveal a secret doctrine hidden among the sages of Israel since the revelation at Sinai in which Jews are placed at the very center of the cosmic-divine drama. By appealing to a secret form of traditional knowledge, the kabbalists argued that the observance of traditional Jewish law and ritual empowers them to maintain the very being of the cosmos and bring harmony to the Godhead. Reinterpreting rabbinic Judaism in this way, the kabbalists of medieval Castile sought to bring about nothing short of a kabbalistic revolution initiating a shift in Jewish self-perception through an audacious claim regarding the cosmic importance of Jews and their religious life.

A particularly remarkable aspect of the development of Kabbalah toward the end of the thirteenth century is that the kabbalists’ formulation of Judaism was adopted by erudite Jewish men who would have been well aware of the apparent novelty of many of the ideas presented in kabbalistic texts. This can be partially explained by the fact that thirteenth-century Kabbalah bears many striking affinities to images and motifs found in rabbinic literature and other Jewish sources from late antiquity. In this respect I am in agreement with Moshe Idel, who postulates a long series of links connecting medieval Kabbalah with a genuine ancient tradition which is an esoteric interpretation of Judaism.⁴ Nonetheless, the learned Jewish readers among whom these texts first circulated would have recognized that Kabbalah as a discursive form, or as a way of talking about and imagining the meaning of rabbinic Judaism, also differs in many respects from sources commonly regarded as authoritative in traditional Jewish circles.⁵ My intent is not to provide a history or genealogy of kabbalistic thought or to claim that Kabbalah represents entirely new ideas or a radical break with rabbinic Judaism. Rather, I wish to consider the social and cultural implications of the proliferation of kabbalistic texts as a new form of discourse during the period in question. How did Kabbalah gain such momentum so quickly? And why were these particular texts appealing to so many in Castile? Or, to formulate the question in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s work,⁶ by what strategies did medieval kabbalists succeed in constructing symbolic and cultural capital? I believe these questions can be illuminated by considering the purposes that Kabbalah served and the conception of Jewish identity that it sought to advance. By adopting a more historically and culturally contextualized perspective, this book will ground thirteenth-century Kabbalah more firmly in the environment and time period in which it took shape.

Reading Kabbalah in Context

The study of Jewish mysticism in the academy has had, generally speaking, two major foci—the phenomenology of ideas and historical criticism. While it has been widely accepted by most scholars that there should be a reciprocal interchange between these two domains of research,⁷ the tendency has been to pursue these interests separately, which has often led to a diminished interest in the social, political, and cultural location of kabbalistic ideas and texts. Classical historical criticism focused largely on how historical context allowed for influence among Jews, Christians, Muslims, philosophers, Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, traditionalists, and kabbalists. The model has been one in which ideas and symbols are imagined to migrate across presumed cultural and religious boundaries through a process similar to that of contagion wherein the values, thinking, and symbolism of a majority culture infect a weaker minority community, resulting in a kind of syncretism in which the modes of discourse of the minority assume an almost unwitting imitation of the majority. Such an approach can easily lead to a search for parallels as the explanation for the development of novel elements in Jewish discourse—an approach that Samuel Sandmel has rightly dubbed Parallelomania.⁸ However, methodological developments in recent decades in the fields of religious studies, sociology, anthropology, and the observations of New Historicism have called into question many of the assumptions of earlier scholarship regarding the stability of the boundaries of communities, identities, and books. There is a growing interest in considering the ways that the production of texts is part of a strategy for imagining and constructing identity within cultural contexts in which identity is always fluid and contested. As Boaz Huss has argued, kabbalistic texts should be regarded not as the Jewish manifestation of a universal mystical phenomenon, but instead as cultural products that were created as a result of political demands within particular historical, economic, and social contexts.⁹ Harvey Hames has similarly argued that [o]ne cannot divorce text from context, and the kabbalists were not living in a vacuum. . . . If they wrote texts and preached, partook in disputations and spread their teachings, it was because they saw in them the potential to reform Jewish life and practice, and reinforce the bond between God and Israel and they were reacting to particular circumstances and to similar stimuli as were their Christian contemporaries.¹⁰ The production of kabbalistic discourse is a cultural practice¹¹ taking form in the public sphere, despite the frequent claim within these texts that such discourse is a secret matter. It is therefore useful to consider the ways that kabbalists sought to function as historical actors, rather than exclusively as subjects of historical circumstance, by producing kabbalistic texts. When viewed from this perspective, the rich and diverse corpus of kabbalistic literature produced in Spain provides a valuable reservoir of data for understanding how Jews endeavored to construct a meaningful self-conception in a particular time and place.¹²

One important working assumption is that in studying kabbalistic literature the data in question are not personal experiences, states of mind, or God, but rather, discourse. As Kocku von Stuckrad rightly reminds us, "The only thing religious studies should be interested in is analyzing the public appearance of religious propositions,"¹³ which is to say, the study of religion should focus on "communication and action.¹⁴ In a similar vein, Gershom Scholem notes that from a historian’s point of view, the sum of religious phenomena known as mysticism consists in the attempts of mystics to communicate their ‘ways,’ their illuminations, their experience, to others.¹⁵ Elliot Wolfson’s observation that Kabbalah is a form of poesis that does not distinguish sharply between sign and experience opens a path for the discursive study of this literature: It [is not] anachronistic to say that kabbalists were aware of the plight of human consciousness that has been documented in a particularly poignant way by modern philosophers pondering nature from a post-Kantian constructivist perspective: All knowledge is mediated, and hence nothing can be known without the intermediary of a sign. . . . To be sure, kabbalists posit an indissoluble link between words and things.¹⁶ The study of Kabbalah as a historically situated, discursive phenomenon is thus consistent with how kabbalists understand the nature of experience and the presuppositions that inform the production of kabbalistic writing. Since, as Wolfson observes, kabbalists embrace the notion that immediate experience is, upon reflection, a complex lattice of semiotic signs informing the mind having the experience,¹⁷ the production of kabbalistic discourse is not simply a faint echo of the real" object we seek to uncover. For the contemporary scholar, no less than for the kabbalists themselves, there is nothing to seek beyond the text.

From the perspective of the history of ideas, it is thus important to consider how certain discourses, such as the one conventionally referred to as Kabbalah, manage as historical phenomena to develop and acquire legitimacy and authority. If a particular kind of discourse becomes more vocal at a specific time and place, it is reasonable to regard this as evidence that such discourse is serving a perceived strategic purpose for those involved in its production and dissemination and that the cultural context is one in which an opening for such discourse exists. Talal Asad has noted that when considering the development of religious modes of discourse, we must bear in mind the sense in which power constructs religious ideology, establishes the preconditions for distinctive kinds of religious personality, authorizes specifiable religious practices and utterances, [and] produces religiously defined knowledge.¹⁸ If religious discourse acquires its force and meaning at least in part through the dynamics of power that inform and give shape to the broader social environment, our understanding of that discourse is enhanced by considering the political, social, religious, and intellectual context in which it takes shape. In other words, as Asad argues,

It is not just that religious symbols are intimately linked to social life (and so change with it), or that they usually support dominant political power (and occasionally oppose it). It is that different kinds of practice and discourse are intrinsic to the field in which religious representations (like any representation) acquire their identity and their truth. From this it does not follow that the meanings of religious practices and utterances are to be sought in social phenomena, but only that their possibility and their authoritative status are to be explained as products of historically distinctive disciplines and forces.¹⁹

The contextualization of Kabbalah is thus an endeavor to reveal the multiple ways in which this discourse constructs meaning, serves strategic interests, and bolsters contested identities within specific contextual parameters that make such discursive production possible and useful. Echoing a more complex version of Michel Foucault’s claim that discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power,²⁰ Asad draws our attention to the ways that discursive constructs acquire force and meaning within the confines of particular social realities. As an important development in Jewish cultural production in the Middle Ages, Kabbalah, like any form of religious discourse, reflects the reciprocal interchange of power and ideas, literatures, and life circumstances.

In his recent work on Lurianic Kabbalah, Shaul Magid has observed, drawing upon the work of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, that Lurianic literature is a form of discourse that "illustrates a ‘cultural poetics,’ showing that texts often create a prism simultaneously refracting realia and constructing an idealized vision of what the author would like the real to be."²¹ In other words, while the production of texts is always, in a sense, informed by their context, such literary activity is also part of an endeavor to project a context in which the proposed worldview is both viable and authoritative. The contextualization of Kabbalah is thus more than a consideration of how external factors or historical forces find their way into the literature and leave their mark on it, or somehow create it. The examination of Kabbalah with an eye toward context suggests attentiveness to the kinds of social and intellectual dynamics that allow kabbalistic discourse to develop and an appreciation of the ways in which kabbalistic texts themselves seek to construct a conception of reality in which their discourse speaks from a position of authority. Thus, while it is important to take into consideration the historical and intellectual environment in which the kabbalists were working and writing, the texts written by kabbalists constitute the most important body of evidence for piecing together the world that kabbalists simultaneously navigated and constructed. My primary intention is thus not to provide a comparative analysis of medieval Kabbalah in relation to non-Jewish literature from the same time period and location. As Yoseph Hayim Yerushalmi has noted, the study of Jewish life in medieval Christendom can quickly devolve into the history of what the Christians said against the Jews.²² The internal products of Jewish culture, Yerushalmi argues, provide a much richer picture of how Jews understood themselves since most of what they created, they created for their own needs.²³ My objective in this book is to examine late thirteenth-century Castilian Kabbalah with an attunement to the kinds of evidence that these compositions provide regarding the ways that medieval kabbalists sought to construct an empowered Jewish identity. Through an exploration of the formulation of Judaism reflected in these texts, I wish to uncover how these kabbalists understood the world and created a way of imagining their place in it through the production of a new Jewish cultural form.

By considering the political strategies implicit in the kabbalists’ claims to esoteric knowledge and by exploring the conception of Jewish selfhood and identity that kabbalistic texts seek to create, we can thus better appreciate the ways in which Kabbalah engaged a wide variety of interests and concerns for Jews living on the Iberian peninsula. I should emphasize that I would not argue that the historical and sociocultural contextualization of this phenomenon implies that the kabbalists were simply addressing current political anxieties, and that noting the possible strategies at play in kabbalistic discourse somehow explains the phenomenon in its entirety. However, I would also argue that the existence of affinities between late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century kabbalistic texts and earlier materials scattered throughout a wide variety rabbinic and postrabbinic sources does not sufficiently account for the rapid development of kabbalistic literary activity in medieval Spain. By situating this phenomenon within its broader context, we uncover what Talya Fishman refers to in her research on the penitential practices of the Hasidei Ashkenaz as the proximate cause,²⁴ or the more temporally immediate concerns that drove medieval writers to extract particular strands from the staggering array of options presented in late antique and early medieval Jewish sources. The production of a substantial body of kabbalistic literature in medieval Spain, in some cases by Jews who composed impressive oeuvres comprising more than a thousand folios of exclusively kabbalistic material, is an important phenomenon representing a shift in Jewish cultural practice. Greater emphasis on the issue of context sheds light on these texts and reveals an important development in the history of Jewish culture and identity.

A Place on the Map

The kabbalistic texts that serve as the central focus of this study function much like maps guiding their readers through complex divine territory and empowering them to navigate their own situation by providing knowledge of a transcendent divine topography. Jonathan Z. Smith has used the idea of the map as a fruitful device for thinking about the function of analytical models in the study of religion and as a way of understanding the content of religious discourses themselves. Religious worldviews and their myths, Smith argues, take on meaning by providing a way, within a particular historical context, of coping with a given reality. Building on the work of Kenneth Burke, Smith notes that religious myths and their attendant maps constitute a strategy for dealing with a situation.²⁵ Smith has identified a few kinds of maps of the world that are reflected in a variety of religious discourses. He refers, for instance, to what he calls the locative map, which seeks to reveal the underlying order of reality and provide a guide for orienting the self to the divine in a way that is in harmony with the firmly ordered boundaries of the sacred. As Smith puts it, the locative is a map of the world which guarantees meaning and value through structures of congruity and conformity.²⁶ It is the locative view of the world that Mircea Eliade described in his many studies, but Smith argues that it might be a mistake to regard Eliade’s imperial structures as the only, or even the predominant, religious view of the world. There are also the utopian maps, which reject the prevailing orders of congruity and seek to escape reality for the no-place or utopia. Such religious discourses present a rebellion against presumed sacred schema. And then there is what Smith refers to as the disjunctive maps, which neither deny nor flee from disjunction, but allow the incongruous elements to stand.²⁷ In these modes of religious thinking, the paradoxical and ineffable become the primary locus of meaning, and contradictions and tensions are understood to be freighted with sacred significance. Building upon the phrasing of Paul Ricoeur, Smith notes that it is the perception of incongruity that gives rise to thought, and thus disjunctive maps are ones that point out the tensions in the human condition, in order to play between incongruities and to provide an occasion for thought.²⁸

Below I wish to consider the ways that medieval Kabbalah provides a rich body of evidence for considering how Jewish cultural production shifted to cope with the situation of medieval Jewish life. The kabbalistic texts examined in this book present a combination of the locative and disjunctive that helps these texts acquire force and meaning for the Jews who wrote, read, and preserved them. Medieval Kabbalah describes Jewish esoteric knowledge as the superior form of truth, and Jewish religious praxis is regarded as that which literally maintains the very fabric of reality and stability of the cosmos. Yet, it would not have escaped the attention of the Jewish readers of these texts that they and their coreligionists in the medieval Christian West were not graced with unassailable political agency, but instead faced tenuous and at times dangerous circumstances. That is to say, medieval Jews were not confronted with mere chaos in need of order—that is, a locative map—they were grappling with a contradiction between the discourse of their culture and the reality of their condition. An important element that informs the composition and circulation of at least some late thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature is, I would argue, a desire to navigate this incongruity by constructing a worldview that enables Jews to imagine themselves as masters of secrets, with the capacity to bring harmony to the Godhead and sustenance to the world while at the same time embracing the tensions of mystery and paradox as central feature of reality, both cosmic and divine.²⁹ As Smith has argued persuasively in his comments on the object of the study of religion:

Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate one’s situation so as to have space in which to meaningfully dwell. It is the power to relate one’s domain to the plurality of environmental and social spheres in such a way as to guarantee the conviction that one’s existence matters. . . . What we study when we study religion is the variety of attempts to map, construct and inhabit such positions of power through the use of myths, rituals, and experiences of transformation.³⁰

Bearing this observation in mind, I wish to consider below some of the ways that medieval kabbalists sought to address the Jewish situation in terms of how they conceptualize Jewish esoteric knowledge and how they place Jews and Jewish religious praxis in relation to the divine. By exploring the interplay between locative and disjunctive modes of discourse in kabbalistic literature, we will gain valuable insight into the struggle with Jewish identity presented in these texts

The development of Kabbalah as a distinctive and influential form of Jewish religious discourse finds its roots in an engagement across the perhaps overly constructed boundaries of Jews and Christians, philosophers and esotericists, traditionalists and kabbalists. The formation of each group is an ever-shifting negotiation of the conception of the self in relation to the other,³¹ and the assertion of claims to authority in light of the possibilities of certain discourses created by competing regimes of power and truth. As Elliot Wolfson has observed, building on Jacques Derrida’s comment that the same is the same only in being affected by the other, only by becoming the other of the same,³² a clear picture of Jewish self-understanding requires an attunement to the dynamics of self and other since the referentiality of self cannot be demarcated in isolation from an intricate mesh of social interconnectivity.³³ In this way we can see the transformative development of Kabbalah as yet another indicator of the ways in which Jewish identities in the frontier context of Castile were, as Jonathan Ray puts it, as much a product of the prevailing historical processes and social dynamics of the age as they were of the discrete traditions of the Jewish community.³⁴

The kabbalistic conception of Judaism that arose in during this period reflects an attempt to situate the place of Jews in a complex cultural, intellectual, and political landscape. The frontier conditions of Castile and the cosmopolitan and diverse collection of scholars in the court of King Alfonso X created a space for kabbalists to advance their particular vision of an esoteric Jewish tradition. As Kocku von Stuckrad has pointed out, Religious identities are shaped through communicative processes. They are not found but negotiated.³⁵ The religious identity proffered by kabbalists in Castile accords well with the increased interest in esotericism, and well-established secret ideas are recast in these texts as a distinctively Jewish mytho-poesis. The fact that this trend of kabbalistic esoteric discourse became such an influential strand of both Judaism and Western esotericism as a whole is instructive for helping us to appreciate the complexities and diversities of the European intellectual heritage and the important role that claims to secret knowledge of the transcendent have played in the construction of Western identities.

The chapters below explore how the kabbalists constructed a conception of the world that enabled a meaningful, indeed powerful, way of imagining Jews and Judaism. The discussion begins in the first chapter with an analysis of kabbalistic claims to esoteric knowledge and the ways in which the notion of the secret is employed by kabbalists to assert the supremacy of Jewish wisdom. I argue that the use of esoteric claims is informed at least in part by the increased cultural capital within the broader society associated with the retrieval of ancient, lost, and esoteric forms of knowledge, and the association of Jews with the transmission of such knowledge, as well as the pressures created by Christian missionary and polemical discourse and the perceived threat of the spread of rationalism. The second chapter considers how the kabbalists make use of their claims to secret knowledge to support a particular way of imagining God and the world. Through an examination of kabbalistic images and ideas regarding the emergence of the ten sefirot within God and the creation of the universe, it will be shown how kabbalistic ontology confounds the boundaries between the divine realm and the created world in order to set the stage for reimagining Jewish identity and religious praxis. Kabbalistic anthropology, or how the human self is conceived, is examined in the third chapter, describing the ways in which Jews are depicted in these texts as unique, godlike beings who sustain the fabric of being through the endowment of the divine soul in their bodies. The fourth chapter describes how the kabbalists deploy the notion of theurgy, or the capacity for human actions to influence the divine realm, as part of a forceful articulation of the centrality and power of the Jewish people. The kabbalists radically enhance the stakes of Jewish religious praxis by depicting it as necessary for maintaining divine unity and the very fabric of the cosmic order. The study concludes with an analysis of depictions of the theurgic efficacy of prayer, considering how the kabbalists construe Jewish liturgical practices as a means whereby Jews fulfill their role as the earthly ministers of divine power. Taken together, the texts explored present a rich diversity of voices that coalesced around a particular approach to Jewish identity through the production of an important emerging facet of Jewish culture—the writing of kabbalistic texts. A comparison between this phenomenon and some contemporary forms of Kabbalah, especially those that have had an impact on popular culture, is briefly considered in the postscript.

A Note on Sources

This study will focus on kabbalistic texts produced in Spain, mainly in the region of Castile-Leon, during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Kabbalists whose works will be of particular importance include Joseph Gikatilla, Moses de Leon, Joseph of Hamadan, David ben Yehuda he-Hasid, and to a lesser extent, Joseph ben Todoros ha-Levi Abulafia and Isaac ibn Sahula. Occasional reference will also be made, as a point of comparison, to kabbalists who lived and worked either earlier in the thirteenth century (such as Ezra and Azriel of Gerona, Nahmanides, Asher ben David, and the circle of the Iyyun texts, or Books of Contemplation), or those who lived contemporaneously with the kabbalists in question but outside of the region of Castile, mainly in Catalonia and Aragon (prominent examples would include Bahya ben Asher from Segovia and the students of Nahmanides living in the region of Catalonia), where kabbalists were somewhat more conservative.³⁶ Notably absent from this list is Abraham Abulafia, an important kabbalist and most prominent example of ecstatic Kabbalah. While the significance of his contribution to the history of Kabbalah is not to be underestimated, Idel has questioned Scholem’s characterization of Abulafia’s Kabbalah as the culminating point in the development of two opposing schools of thought in Spanish Kabbalism,³⁷ pointing out that Abulafia was present in Spain for only three or four years before leaving in the mid 1270s, as a result of which, all of Abulafia’s important writings were composed outside of Spain.³⁸ Given this fact, the present study does not employ Abulafia’s writings as a major source of evidence, though in the notes occasional references are made to interesting parallels.

While the central claims of this book could be supported by focusing exclusively on works that we can locate definitively in Castile and attribute to known authors during the period in question, this would exclude much of the anonymous, unpublished material that comprises a large corpus of intriguing—if also somewhat problematic—sources for considering the development of kabbalistic literature as a cultural phenomenon. The most significant anonymous text addressed in this book is the Sefer ha-Zohar. As Daniel Abrams has persuasively argued, the Zohar is not a book in the conventional sense, and it would be a mistake to construct any argument on the basis of a presumption that this text, in the printed form that it assumed in the sixteenth century, represents an identifiable authorial product that we can easily locate.³⁹ Starting with Jacob Emden, followed by Adolph Jellinek, Heinrich Graetz, and most notably, Gershom Scholem, the writing of the Zohar has been closely associated with Moses de Leon.⁴⁰ Yehuda Liebes has argued that, although there is certainly a stronger connection between de Leon and the Zohar than any other single kabbalist, we can better account