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MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
MAJOR TRENDS IN
Jewish Mysticism
GERSHOM G. SCHOLEM
SCHOCKEN BOOKS »+ NEW YORK
MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM is based
on the Hilda Strook Lectures delivered by
Professor Scholem at the Jewish Institute of
Religion, New York
First SCHOCKEN PAPERBACK edition 1961
Reprinted from the Third Revised Edition
Third printing, 1967
Copyright 1941
by Schocken Publishing House
Jerusalem
Copyright 1946 by Schocken Books, Inc., New York
Copyright © 1954 by Schocken Books, Inc., New York
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-8991
Printed in the United States of America
TO THE MEMORY OF
WALTER BENJAMIN
(1892-1940)
The friend of a lifetime whose genius united the insight
of the Metaphysician, the interpretative power of the Critic
and the erudition of the Scholar
DIED AT PORT BOU (SPAIN)
ON HIS WAY INTO FREEDOM
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
MorE THAN TWENTY YEARS have passed since 1 began to devote
myself to the study of Jewish mysticism and especially of Kabbalism.
It was a beginning in more than one sense, for the task which con-
fronted me necessitated a vast amount of spade-work in a field
strewn with ruins and by no means ripe as yet for the constructive
labors of the builder of a system. Both as to historical fact and
philological analysis there was pioneer work to be done, often of
the most primitive and elementary kind. Rapid bird’s-eye syntheses
and elaborate speculations on shaky premises had to give way to
the more modest work of laying the secure foundations of valid
generalization. Where others had either disdained close acquaint-
ance with the sources of what they frequently rejected and con-
demned, or erected some lofty edifice of speculation, I found myself
constrained by circumstance and by inclination to perform the
modest but necessary task of clearing the ground of much scattered
debris and laying bare the outlines of a great and significant chapter
in the history of Jewish religion. Needless to say, like all spade-
work, the task gradually imposed on my mind a certain conception
of the subject-matter as a whole. As the innumerable and often
laborious investigations of detailed points neared completion, the
outlines became less blurred, and presently there emerged from the
confusing welter of fact and fiction a picture, more or less definite
though not at all points complete, of the development of Jewish
mysticism, its inner significance, its problems and its meaning for
the history of Judaism in general. In many details this gradually
unfolding conception differed not inconsiderably from the views
hitherto current in the literature published on the subject. I owe
a debt of gratitude to those among my predecessors in this field
whose footsteps I have followed, but honesty compels me to add
that on most points my later views have very little in common
with their own.
Having arrived at this stage of research, nothing could have been
more welcome to me than the invitation to serve as Stroock lecturer
at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York for the year 1938.
Of the nine lectures contained in this volume, in which I have
attempted to sum up some of the principal results of my investiga-
tions, seven were delivered there, six in English and one, the fifth,
in Hebrew. The remaining two, namely the second and third,
dealing with two additional important aspects of the development
of Jewish mysticism which could not be included in the schedule
of the original seven, were given upon other occasions.
All the lectures included in this volume are published in a con-
siderably enlarged version, with the exception of the last which is
reprinted almost in the original form. To have expanded the brief
account of Hasidism given here by a closer examination of specific
phenomena would have necessitated writing a new book. I have
therefore contented myself with an exposition of my general views
on the subject. All in all, it may be said that the purpose of this
book is not to give a complete historical account of Jewish mysticism
but an outline of its principal features in the form of an analysis
of some of its most important phases. A comprehensive critical
history of Jewish mysticism, with special reference to all the various
currents and cross-currents of Kabbalism, would require several
volumes. Since these lectures were not intended exclusively for re-
search students in this field but for the much wider circle of those
who take an interest in questions of Jewish history and religion,
I have laid greater stress on the analysis and interpretation of
mystical thought than on the historical links between the various
systems. Where it was possible without introducing too much philo-
logical detail I have nevertheless sketched the historical connections
at least in outline. Only in the lecture on the Book Zohar and its
author have I departed from this rule and attempted a more
thorough philological analysis. I have considered it my obligation
to do so both in view of the generally acknowledged importance
of the matter for the history of Judaism and because of the unfortu-
nate state of the discussion to date. Readers who take only slight
interest in such questions of literary and historical criticism will
miss little by skipping the fifth lecture. For similar reasons I have
placed the notes at the end of the book, in order not to burden the
text too much with references which have little meaning for those
outside the circle of students of Judaism familiar with the reading
of Hebrew texts.
This book challenges in some of its major theses not a few notions
about Jewish history and religion which are more or less generally
accepted by both Jews and non-Jews. If the great task of Jewish
scholarship in our generation, the task of rewriting Jewish history
with a deeper understanding of the interplay of religious, political
and social forces, is to be successfully carried out, there is urgent
need for a new elucidation of the function which Jewish mysticism
has had at varying periods, of its ideals, and of its approach to the
various problems arising from the actual conditions at such times.
I have endeavored to present my views on this subject as concisely
and at the same time as clearly as possible, in the hope of making
a serious contribution to a very important and very much needed
discussion. Among Hebrew writers, this discussion has now pro-
ceeded for a number of years; in the corresponding English litera-
ture on the subject it has been reopened by Salo Baron’s “A Re-
ligious and Social History of the Jews,” the publication of which
coincided with the delivery of these lectures. I, for one, sincerely
believe that such a discussion of our past has something to do with
our future.
I wish to take this opportunity to thank all those who have placed
me under an obligation by their assistance and advice. My greatest
debt is due to Mr. George Lichtheim, Jerusalem, for his translation
of the bulk of the manuscript. Professor Henry Slonimsky and Pro-
fessor Ralph Marcus, of the Jewish Institute of Religion, went
through the first draft; Dr. J. L. Magnes, President of the Hebrew
University, and Mr. Morton Smith, S.T.B. (Harvard), a research
student at the University, have read the final manuscript. To them
all 1 am more than obliged for their kind help and many valuable
suggestions as to the correct wording of these lectures. Mr. Hayim
Wirszubski, M.A., has assisted in the compilation of the Index.
I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Dr. Stephen S. Wise, President
of the Jewish Institute of Religion, not only for the invitation to
deliver these lectures, but also for his generous consent to their
publication in the present form, and to Mr. Salman Schocken
whose constant interest and help has made it possible to publish
them in this enlarged version. I should equally like to mention
the valuable suggestions I owe to discussions of many points of
detail with friends and colleagues, especially with Prof. I. F. Baer.
Finally, I wish to express my thanks to all those who have shown
me friendship and goodwill during my stay in America and made
me feel at home in the great desert of New York; above all to Prof.
Shalom Spiegel, of the Jewish Institute of Religion, for his unfailing
friendship and readiness to give of his time and help. To Prof.
Alexander Marx, of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,
to Mr. I. Mendelsohn and Dr. Abraham Halkin, of Columbia Uni-
versity Library, and to Dr. Walter Rothmann and Mr. Moses Marx,
of the Library of the Hebrew Union College, I feel greatly indebted
for the exceedingly liberal assistance they have extended to me
during my work in these three great collections of Kabbalistical
manuscripts in the United States. The many profitable hours I have
spent there have left their imprint on the final text of this book,
since I was able to make use of some important new material
which had previously escaped my notice or which was not included
in the collections of Europe and Palestine to which I had had access.
GERSHOM G. SCHOLEM
Jerusalem
The Hebrew University
May 1941
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
THE KIND RECEPTION ACCORDED, in many circles, to this book, which
deals with no easy subject indeed, has made necessary, after five
years, a second edition. I have revised style and matter and have
made some more substantial additions here and there, wherever the
context allowed me to do so. I should have preferred very much
to give an account of the beginnings of Kabbalism as from 1150 to
1250, all the more as it regards a problem having an extraordinary
bearing on the history of Judaism. But it appeared in the course
of the work that the subject needs a more thorough treatment than
could possibly have been given within the framework of these lec-
tures; I propose, therefore, to present the results of my studies in a
special publication.
G.G. S.
Jerusalem, February 1946
PUBEISHER’S NOTE TO°THE THIRD EDITION
THIs EDITION IS A REPRINT of the second, revised, edition. Misprints
have been corrected. A number of studies which appeared after the
second edition went to print have been added to the Bibliography.
October 1954
RUBLISHER’S. NOTE TO... LHE,..PAPERBACK, EDITION
THIS EDITION IS A REPRINT of the third edition. A selection of studies
in the field which appeared after the third edition has been added
to the Bibliography.
November 1960
CONTENTS
A FIRST LECTURE: GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH
MYSTICISM. pp: 1—39.
Purpose of these lectures. What is Mysticism? The paradoxical nature of
mystical experience. Mysticism as an historical phenomenon. Mythology,
Religion and Mysticism. Mystical interpretation of religious values. Jewish
Mysticism influenced by the positive contents of Judaism. The Kabbalistic
theory of the hidden God and His attributes. The Sefiroth. The Torah.
Kabbalism and language. Mysticism and the historical world. Cosmogony
and eschatology. Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalism. Allegorization and
symbolism. Philosophical and mystical interpretation of Halakhah and
Aggadah. Kabbalism and prayer. Mythical elements in Kabbalistic thought.
The resurrection of myth in the heart of Judaism. The absence of the
feminine element in Jewish Mysticism.
Alsecon LECTURE: MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH
J
GNOSTICISM pp. 40—79
The first period of Jewish Mysticism. Anonymity of the writings. Esoterism
of the Mishnah teachers. Throne-mysticism. Apocalyptic and mysticism.
The literature of the Hekhaloth-books. The Yorde Merkabah and their
organization. Conditions of initiation. The ecstatic ascent of the soul and
its technique. Magical elements. Dangers of the ascent. God as Holy King.
The hymns of the Merkabah mystics. Shiur Komah. Enoch, Metatron and
Yahoel. The cosmic curtain. Remains of Gnostic speculations on aeons.
The “Book of Creation.” Theurgy. Moral re-interpretation of the Merkabah.
\f THIRD LECTURE: HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY pp. 80—118
The rise of Hasidism in Germany. Mystical tradition and German Jewry.
The “Book of the Devout.” Jehudah the Hasid and his disciples. Eschatolog-
ical character of Hasidism. The new ideal of the Hasid: Ascetics, ataraxy
and altruism. Love of God. A Judaized version of monkish Cynicism. The
magic power of the Hasid. The Golem legend. Mysteries of Prayer. Oc-
cultist practices. Hasidic conception of penitence. The conception of God in
Hasidism. Immanence of God. Kavod, the Divine Glory. Traces of the
Philonic doctrine of the Logos. The Cherub on the throne. Holiness and
Greatness in God. The aim of prayer. The cosmic archetypes.
XII
CONTENTS
PP cms LECTURE: ABRAHAM ABULAFIA AND THE
DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM pp. 119-155
Emergence of Kabbalism. Types of Kabbalists. Kabbalistic reticence and
censorship. Vision and ecstasy. The conception of Devekuth—the Jewish
form of mystical union. Life and work of Abraham Abulafia. His theory of
ecstatical knowledge. The “science of combination.” The music of pure
thought. The mystical nature of prophecy. Prophetic Kabbalism. Mystical
transfiguration as the essence of ecstasy. Mystical pragmatism. Practical
Kabbalism and magic. Later developments of Abulafia’s doctrines. Transla-
tion of an autobiography written by a disciple of Abulafia.
FIFTH LECTURE: THE ZOHAR I. THE BOOK AND ITS
AUTHOR pp- 156—204
The problem of the Zohar. Literary character and composition of the
Zohar. The whole of the Zoharic “literature” consists of two major parts:
the bulk of the Zohar and the Raya Mehemna. The bulk of the Zohar the
work of one author. Evidence of unity. The language and style of the
Zohar. Its stage-setting. Pseudo-realism. Principles of literary composition.
Sources of the Zohar: the real and fictitious ones. Treatment of the sources.
The author’s predilection for certain Kabbalistic doctrines and dislike for
others. Absence of the doctrine of the Shemitahs, or units of cosmic devel-
opment. Stages in the composition. The Midrash Ha-Neelam as the oldest
constituent of the Zohar. The Midrash Ha-Neelam written between 1275
and 1281; the bulk of the Zohar between 1281 and 1286; the Raya Mehemna
and Tikkunim about 1300. The question of the personality of the author.
Moses ben Shemtob de Leon. The old testimonial on his authorship. Moses
de Leon and Joseph Gikatila. Comparison of Moses de Leon’s Hebrew writ-
ings with the bulk of the Zohar. Identity of the author of all these writings.
Other Kabbalistic pseudepigrapha written by Moses de Leon. Veiled refer-
ences to his authorship of the Zohar in Moses’ Hebrew writings. Moses de
Leon’s spiritual development and his motives in writing the Zohar. Pseud-
epigraphy a legitimate category of religious literature.
\C
x SIXTH LECTURE: THE ZOHAR II. THE THEOSOPHIC
DOCTRINE OF THE ZOHAR pp. 205-243
The difference between Merkabah Mysticism and Spanish Kabbalism. The
hidden God or En-Sof. The Sefiroth, the Realm of Divinity. Mystical con-
ception of the Torah. Symbolical realization of the Sefiroth. Some instances
of Kabbalistic Symbolism. God as a mystical organism. Nothing and Being.
CONTENTS XIII
The first three stages of the Sefirotic development. Creation and its relation
to God. Theogony and Cosmogony. Pantheistic leanings of the author of
the Zohar. The original nature of Creation. Mythical imagery in Kabbalistic
thought. The problem of sexual symbolism. The new idea of the Shekhinah
as a feminine element in God and as the mystical Community of Israel.
Man and his Fall. Kabbalistic ethics. The nature of evil. The Zohar and
Jacob Boehme. Psychology of the Zohar. Unity of theosophy, cosmology and
psychology.
/ SEVENTH LECTURE: ISAAC LURIA AND HIS SCHOOL pp- 244—286
The Exodus from Spain and its religious consequences. Kabbalism on its
way to Messianism. Apocalyptic propaganda by Kabbalists. The character
and function of the new Kabbalism. Its center in Safed, Palestine. Moses
Cordovero and Isaac Luria. Their personalities. Spread of Lurianic Kab-
balism. Israel Sarug. Characteristics of the Lurianic doctrine. Tsimtsum,
Shevirah and Tikkun. The twofold process of Creation. The withdrawal of
God into Himself as the starting-point of Creation. Meaning of this doctrine.
The primordial catastrophe, or Breaking of the Vessels. The origin of Evil.
Two aspects of the theory of the Tikkun, or restoration of harmony. The
mystical birth of the personal God and the mystical action of man. The
emergence of theosophic worlds, and their relation to God. Theism and
Pantheism in Luria’s system. Mystical reinterpretation of Messianism. The
doctrine of mystical prayer.Kawwanah. Man’s role in the Universe. Luria’s
psychology and anthropology. The Exile of the Shekhinah. The uplifting of
the holy sparks. Transmigration of the soul and its place in the Kabbalism
of Safed. Influence of Lurianic Kabbalism. A great myth of Exile and
Redemption.
oases LECTURE: SABBATIANISM AND MYSTICAL
HERESY pp. 287—324
The Sabbatian movement of 1665-1666. Sabbatai Zevi, the Kabbalistic
Messiah, and Nathan of Gaza, his prophet. Sabbatai Zevi’s illness and its
mystical interpretation by Nathan. Quasi-sacramental character of anti-
nomian actions. Lurianism adapted to the personality of the new Messiah.
Heretical turn of the movement after the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi. Im-
portance of Sabbatianism for Jewish history. A revolution of the Jewish
consciousness. Connection between heretical Kabbalism and “Enlighten-
ment.” The Sabbatian ideology. A religion of paradoxes. Historical and
mystical aspects of Redemption. Their clash after Sabbatai Zevi's apostasy.
XIV CONTENTS
Sabbatianism and Christianity. Influence of Marranic psychology on Sab-
batianism. Doctrine of the necessary apostasy of the Messiah. The problem
of antinomianism. Moderate and radical forms of Sabbatianism. Mystical
nihilism and the doctrine of the Holiness of Sin. The new conception of
God: the first cause, or the God of Reason, and the first effect, or the God
of Revelation. .
JINTH LECTURE: HASIDISM: THE LATEST PHASE pp. 325—350
Polish and Ukrainian Hasidism of the eighteenth century and its problem.
Kabbalistic and Hasidic literature. The transformation of Kabbalism into
a popular movement. The alternatives of Kabbalistic development after the
collapse of Sabbatianism. Return to esoteric forms of worship: Rabbi Sha-
lom Sharabi. Intensification of its popular aspects: Hasidism. Kabbalism '
purged of its Messianic elements. Sabbatianism and Hasidism. Rabbi Adam
Baal Shem—a crypto-Sabbatian prophet. New type of leadership in Sab- |
batianism and Hasidism. Mystical revivalism. What is novel in Hasidism? |
The essential originality of Hasidism not connected with mystical theosophy
but with mystical ethics. Zaddikism implied by the intrinsic nature of
Hasidism. Personality takes the place of doctrine. The figure of the Zaddik,
or Saint. The living Torah. The social function of the Saint as the center
of the community of men. Mysticism and magic in Hasidism. The Hasidic
story.
NOTES pp. 351—424
BIBLIOGRAPHY pp. 425—440
INDEX pp. 441—456
TABLE OF TRANSLITERATION
In the text of the lectures, the use of Hebrew letters has been avoided
throughout. The following is the transliteration of the Hebrew alphabet
used, apart from the exceptions given below, in the present volume:
N omitted 5 l
5 b a m
p> v 3 n
a & D ®
7 d y omitted
| h 5 P
5 w 5 f
? z 4 ts
n h D k
a) t a | r
5 y Vv sh
2 & rn t
= kh rn th
Biblical names are given in the form used in the Authorized Version.
Certain accepted terms are given in the transliterations generally current,
e.g., Zaddik.
rans. OG CORE
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM
1
It is the purpose of these lectures to describe and to analyse some
of the major trends of Jewish mysticism. I cannot of course hope to
deal comprehensively in a few hours with a subject so vast and at the
same time so intricate as the whole sweep and whirl of the mystical
stream, as it runs its course through the movements which are known
to the history of Jewish religion under the names of Kabbalah and
Hasidism. Probably all of you have heard something about these
aspects of Jewish religion. Their significance has been a matter of
much dispute among Jewish scholars. Opinion has changed several
times; it has fluctuated between the extremes of hostile criticism and
condemnation on the one hand, and enthusiastic praise and defense
on the other. It has not, however, greatly advanced our knowledge of
what may be called the real nature of mystical lore, nor has it en-
abled us to form an unbiased judgment as to the part this lore has
played and continues to play in Jewish history, or as to its impor-
tance for a true understanding of Judaism.
It is only fair to add that the exposition of Jewish mysticism, or
that part of it which has so far been publicly discussed, abounds in
misunderstandings and consequent misrepresentations of the subject
matter under discussion. The great Jewish scholars of the past cen-
tury whose conception of Jewish history is still dominant in our
days, men like Graetz, Zunz, Geiger, Luzzatto and Steinschneider,
had little sympathy—to put it mildly—for the Kabbalah. At once
strange and repellent, it epitomised everything that was opposed to
their own ideas and to the outlook which they hoped to make pre-
dominant in modern Judaism. Darkly it stood in their path, the ally
of forces and tendencies in whose rejection pride was taken by a
Jewry which, in Steinschneider’s words, regarded it as its chief task
2 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
to make a decent exit from the world. This fact may account for the
negative opinions of these scholars regarding the function of mysti-
cism in Jewish history. We are well aware that their attitude, so far
from being that of the pure scholar, was rather that of the combat-
ant actively grappling with a dangerous foe who is still full of
strength and vitality; the foe in question being the Hasidic move-
ment. Enmity can do a great deal. We should be thankful to those
zealous early critics who, though their judgment and sense of values
may have been affected and warped by their prejudices, nevertheless
had their eyes open to see certain important factors with great dis-
tinctness. Often enough they were in the right, though not for the
reasons they themselves gave. Truth to tell, the most astonishing
thing in reading the works of these critics is their lack of adequate
knowledge of the sources or the subjects on which in many cases
they ventured to pass judgment.
It is not to the credit of Jewish scholarship that the works of the
few writers who were really informed on the subject were never
printed, and in some cases were not even recorded, since there was
nobody to take an interest. Nor have we reason to be proud of the
fact that the greater part of the ideas and views which show a real
insight into the world of Kabbalism, closed as it was to the rational-
ism prevailing in the Judaism of the nineteenth century, were ex-
pressed by Christian scholars of a mystical bent, such as the English-
man Arthur Edward Waite’ of our days and the German Franz
Josef Molitor’ a century ago. It is a pity that the fine philosophical
intuition and natural grasp of such students lost their edge because
they lacked all critical sense as to historical and philological data in
this field, and therefore failed completely when they had to handle
problems bearing on the facts.
The natural and obvious result of the antagonism of the great
Jewish scholars was that, since the authorized guardians neglected
this field, all manner of charlatans and dreamers came and treated it
as their own property. From the brilliant misunderstandings and
misrepresentations of Alphonse Louis Constant, who has won fame
under the pseudonym of Eliphas Lévi, to the highly coloured hum-
bug of Aleister Crowley and his followers, the most eccentric and
fantastic statements have been produced purporting to be legitimate
interpretations of Kabbalism. The time has come to reclaim this
derelict area and to apply to it the strict standards of historical re-
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 3
search. It is this task which I have set myself, and in the following
lectures I should like to give some idea of the conclusions to which
I have come in trying to light up this dark ground.
I do not have to point out that what I am going to say can in the
nature of things be no more than a brief outline of the main struc-
ture of mystical thought, as it reveals itself in some of the classics of
Jewish mysticism—more often than not in an obscure guise which
makes it none too easy for modern minds to penetrate into its mean-
ing. Obviously it is impossible to give a summary of the subject with-
out at the same time attempting to interpret its meaning. It is a
dangerous task to summarize in a few chapters a religious movement
covering many centuries. In trying to explain so intricate a matter as
Kabbalism the historian, too, must heed Byron’s query: ‘““Who will
then explain the explanation?” For the rest, selection and abbrevia-
tion themselves constitute a kind of commentary, and to a certain
extent even an appreciation of the subject. In other words, what I
am going to present is a critical appreciation involving a certain
philosophical outlook, as applied to the life texture of Jewish his-
tory, which in its fundamentals I believe to be active and alive to
this day.
2
Since Jewish mysticism is to be the subject of these lectures, the
first question bound to come up is this: what is Jewish mysticism?
What precisely is meant by this term? Is there such a thing, and if so,
what distinguishes it from other kinds of mystical experience? In
order to be able to give an answer to this question, if only an incom-
plete one, it will be necessary to recall what we know about mysti-
cism in general. 1 do not propose to add anything essentially new to
the immense literature which has sprung up around this question
during the past half-century. Some of you may have read the bril-
liant books written on this subject by Evelyn Underhill and Dr.
Rufus Jones. I merely propose to rescue what appears to me impor-
tant for our purpose from the welter of conflicting historical and
metaphysical arguments which have been advanced and discussed in
the course of the past century.
It is a curious fact that although doubt hardly exists as to what
constitutes the phenomena to which history and philosophy have
given the name of mysticism, there are almost as many definitions
4 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
of the term as there are writers on the subject. Some of these defini-
tions, it is true, appear to have served more to obscure the nature
of the question than to clarify it. Some idea of the confusion en-
gendered by these definitions can be gauged from the interesting
catalogue of ‘Definitions of Mysticism and Mystical Theology”
compiled by Dr. Inge as an appendix to his lectures on “Christian
Mysticism.”
A good starting-point for our investigation can be obtained by
scrutinizing a few of these definitions which have won a certain
authority. Dr. Rufus Jones, in his excellent “Studies in Mystical
Religion” defines his subject as follows: “I shall use the word to
express the type of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate
awareness of relation with God, on direct and intimate conscious-
ness of the Divine Presence. It is religion in its most acute, intense
and living stage.’*{Thomas Aquinas briefly defines mysticism as
cognitio dei experimentalis, as the knowledge of God through ex-
perience In using this term he leans heavily, like many mystics be-
fore and after him, on the words of the Psalmist (Psalm xxxiv, 9):
“Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.” It is this tasting and
seeing, however spiritualized it may become, that the genuine mystic
desires. His attitude is determined by the fundamental experience
of the inner self which enters into immediate contact with God or
the metaphysical Reality. What forms the essence of this experience,
and how it is to be adequately described—that is the great riddle
which the mystics themselves, no less than the historians, have tried
to solve.
For it must be said that this act of personal experience, the sys-
tematic investigation and interpretation of which forms the task of
all mystical speculation, is of a highly contradictory and even para-
doxical nature. Certainly this is true of all attempts to describe it
in words and perhaps, where there are no longer words, of the act
itself. What kind of direct relation can there be between the Creator
and His creature, between the finite and the infinite; and how can
words express an experience for which there is no adequate simile
in this finite world of man? Yet it would be wrong and superficial
to conclude that the contradiction implied by the nature of mystical
experience betokens an inherent absurdity. lt will be wiser to
assume, as we shall often have occasion to do in the course of these
lectures, that the religious world of the mystic can be expressed in
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 5
terms applicable to rational knowledge only with the help of para-
dox. Among the psychologists G. Stratton, in his ‘‘Psychology of
Religious Life’ (1911), has laid particular stress on this essential
conflict in religious life and thought, even in its non-mystical form.
It is well known that the descriptions given by the mystics of their
peculiar experiences and of the God whose presence they experience
are full of paradoxes of every kind. It is not the least baffling of
these paradoxes—to take an instance which is common to Jewish
and Christian mystics—that God is frequently described as the
mystical Nothing. I shall not try now to give an interpretation
of this term, to which we shall have to return; I only want to
stress the fact that the particular reality which the mystic sees or
tastes is of a very unusual kind.
To the general history of religion this fundamental experience
is known under the name of unio mystica, or mystical union with
God. The term, however, has no particular significance. Numerous
mystics, Jews as well as non-Jews, have by no means represented
the essence of their ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and
soaring of the soul to its highest plane, as a union with God. To
take an instance, the earliest Jewish mystics who formed an organ-
ized fraternity in Talmudic times and later, describe their experi-
ence in terms derived from the diction characteristic of their age.
They speak of the ascent of the soul to the Celestial Throne where
it obtains an ecstatic view of the majesty of God and the secrets
of His Realm. A great distance separates these old Jewish Gnostics
from the Hasidic mystics one of whom said:* “There are those
who serve God with their human intellect, and others whose gaze
is fixed on Nothing. ... He who is granted this supreme experience
loses the reality of his intellect, but when he returns from such con-
templation to the intellect, he finds it full of divine and inflowing
splendor.” And yet it is the same experience which both are trying
to express in different ways.
This leads us to a further consideration: it would be a mistake
to assume that the whole of what we call mysticism is identical with
that personal experience which is realized in the state of ecstasy
or ecstatic meditation. Mysticism, as an historical phenomenon, com-
prises much more than this experience, which lies at its root. ‘There
is a danger in relying too much on purely speculative definitions of
the term. The point I should like to make is this—that there is no
6 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
such thing as mysticism in the abstract, that is to say, a phenomenon
or experience which has no particular relation to other religious
phenomena. There is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysti-
cism of a particular religious system, Christian, Islamic, Jewish
mysticism and so on. That there remains a common characteristic
it would be absurd to deny, and it is this element which is brought
out in the comparative analysis of particular mystical experiences.
But only in our days has the belief gained ground that there is such
a thing as an abstract mystical religion. One reason for this wide-
spread belief may be found in the pantheistic trend which, for the
past century, has exercised a much greater influence on religious
thought than ever before. Its influence can be traced in the mani-
fold attempts to abandon the fixed forms of dogmatic and institu-
tional religion in favour of some sort of universal religion. For the
same reason the various historical aspects of religious mysticism are
often treated as corrupted forms of an, as it were, chemically pure
mysticism which is thought of as not bound to any particular religi-
on. As it is our intention to treat of a certain definite kind of
mysticism, namely Jewish, we should not dwell too much upon such
abstractions. Moreover, as Evelyn Underhill has rightly pointed out,
the prevailing conception of the mystic as a religious anarchist who
owes no allegiance to his religion finds little support in fact. History
rather shows that the great mystics were faithful adherents of the
great religions.
Jewish mysticism, no less than its Greek or Christian counter-
parts, presents itself as a totality of concrete historical phenomena.
Let us, therefore, pause to consider for a moment the conditions and
circumstances under which mysticism arises in the historical deve-
lopment of religion and particularly in that of the great monothe-
istic systems. The definitions of the term mysticism, of which I have
given a few instances, lead only too easily to the conclusion that all
religion in the last resort is based on mysticism; a conclusion which,
as we have seen, is drawn in so many words by Rufus Jones. For
is not religion unthinkable without an “immediate awareness of
relation with God’? That way lies an interminable dispute about
words. The fact is that nobody seriously thinks of applying the
term mysticism to the classic manifestations of the great religions.
It would be absurd to call Moses, the man of God, a mystic, or to
apply this term to the Prophets, on the strength of their immediate
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 7
religious experience. I, for one, do not intend to employ a termin-
ology which obscures the very real differences that are recognized
by all, and thereby makes it even more difficult to get at the root
of the problem.
3
The point which I would like to make first of all is this: Mysti-
cism is a definite stage in the historical development of religion and
makes its appearance under certain well-defined conditions. It is
connected with, and inseparable from, a certain stage of the religious
consciousness. It is also incompatible with certain other stages which
leave no room for mysticism in the sense in which the term is
commonly understood.
The first stage represents the world as being full of gods whom
man encounters at every step and whose presence can be experi-
enced without recourse to ecstatic meditation. In other words, there
is no room for mysticism as long as the abyss between Man and God
has not become a fact of the inner consciousness. That, however,
is the case only while the childhood of mankind, its mythical epoch,
lasts. The immediate consciousness of the interrelation and inter-
dependence of things, their essential unity which precedes duality
and in fact knows nothing of it, the truly monistic universe of man’s
mythical age, all this is alien to the spirit of mysticism. At the same
time it will become clear why certain elements of this monistic con-
sciousness recur on another plane and in different guise in the
mystical consciousness. In this first stage, Nature is the scene of
man’s relation to God.
The second period which knows no real mysticism is the creative
epoch in which the emergence, the break-through of religion occurs.
Religion’s supreme function is to destroy the dream-harmony of
Man, Universe and God, to isolate man from the other elements
of the dream stage of his mythical and primitive consciousness. For
in its classical form, religion signifies the creation of a vast abyss,
conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental
Being, and Man, the finite creature. For this reason alone, the rise
of institutional religion, which is also the classical stage in the his-
tory of religion, is more widely removed than any other period from
mysticism and all it implies. Man becomes aware of a fundamental
duality, of a vast gulf which can be crossed by nothing but the voice;
8 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the voice of God, directing and law-giving in His revelation, and
the voice of man in prayer. The great monotheistic religions live
and unfold in the ever-present consciousness of this bipolarity, of
the existence of an abyss which can never be bridged. To them the
scene of religion is no longer Nature, but the moral and religious
action of man and the community of men, whose interplay brings
about history as, in a sense, the stage on which the drama of man’s
relation to God unfolds.
And only now that religion has received, in history, its classical
expression in a certain communal way of living and believing, only
now do we witness the phenomenon called mysticism; its rise coin-
cides with what may be called the romantic period of religion.
Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it
begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a
quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will
span it. It strives to piece together the fragments broken by the
religious cataclysm, to bring back the old unity which religion has
destroyed, but on a new plane, where the world of mythology and
that of revelation meet in the soul of man. Thus the soul becomes
its scene and the soul’s path through the abysmal multiplicity of
things to the experience of the Divine Reality, now conceived as the
primordial unity of all things, becomes its main preoccupation. To a
certain extent, therefore, mysticism signifies a revival of mythical
thought, although the difference must not be overlooked between
the unity which is there before there is duality, and the unity that
has to be won back in a new upsurge of the religious consciousness.
Historically, this appearance of mystical tendencies is also con-
nected with another factor. The religious consciousness is not ex-
hausted with the emergence of the classic systems of institutional
religion. Its creative power endures, although the formative effect
of a given religion may be sufficiently great to encompass all genuine
religious feeling within its orbit for a long period. During this
period the values which such a religious system has set up retain
their original meaning and their appeal to the feelings of the believ-
ers. However, even so new religious impulses may and do arise which
threaten to conflict with the scale of values established by historical
religion. Above all, what encourages the emergence of mysticism
is a situation in which these new impulses do not break through the
shell of the old religious system and create a new one, but tend to
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 9
remain confined within its borders. If and when such a situation
arises, the longing for new religious values corresponding to the
new religious experience finds its expression in a new interpretation
of the old values which frequently acquire a much more profound
and personal significance, although one which often differs entirely
from the old and transforms their meaning. In this way Creation,
Revelation and Redemption, to mention some of our most impor-
tant religious conceptions, are given new and different meanings
reflecting the characteristic feature of mystical experience, the direct
contact between the individual and God.
Revelation, for instance, is to the mystic not only a definite
historical occurrence which, at a given moment in history, puts an
end to any further direct relation between mankind and God. With
no thought of denying Revelation as a fact of history, the mystic still
conceives the source of religious knowledge and experience which
bursts forth from his own heart as being of equal importance for
the conception of religious truth. In other words, instead of the
one act of Revelation, there is a constant repetition of this act. This
new Revelation, to himself or to his spiritual master, the mystic
tries to link up with the sacred texts of the old; hence the new inter-
pretation given to the canonical texts and sacred books of the great
religions. To the mystic, the original act of Revelation to the com-
munity—the, as it were, public revelation of Mount Sinai, to take
one instance—appears as something whose true meaning has yet
to unfold itself; the secret revelation is to him the real and decisive
one. And thus the substance of the canonical texts, like that of all
other religious values, is melted down and given another form as it
passes through the fiery stream of the mystical consciousness. It
is hardly surprising that, hard as the mystic may try to remain within
the confines of his religion, he often consciously or unconsciously
approaches, or even transgresses, its limits.
It is not necessary for me to say anything further at this point
about the reasons which have often transformed mystics into
heretics. Such heresy does not always have to be fought with fire
and sword by the religious community: it may even happen that
its heretical nature is not understood and recognized. Particularly
is this the case where the mystic succeeds in adapting himself to the
‘orthodox’ vocabulary and uses it as a wing or vehicle for his
thoughts. As a matter of fact, this is what many Kabbalists have
10 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
done. While Christianity and Islam, which had at their disposal
more extensive means of repression and the apparatus of the State,
have frequently and drastically suppressed the more extreme forms
of mystical movements, few anaiogous events are to be found in
the history of Judaism. Nevertheless, in the lectures on Sabbatianism
and Hasidism, we shall have occasion to note that instances of this
kind are not entirely lacking.
4
We have seen that mystical religion seeks to transform the God
whom it encounters in the peculiar religious consciousness of its
own social environment from an object of dogmatic knowledge into
a novel and living experience and intuition. In addition, it also
seeks to interpret this experience in a new way. Its practical side,
the realization of God and the doctrine of the Quest for God, are
therefore frequently, particularly in the more developed forms of
the mystical consciousness, connected with a certain ideology. This
ideology, this theory of mysticism, is a theory both of the mystical
cognition of God and His revelation, and of the path which leads
to Him.
It should now be clear why the outward forms of mystical religion
within the orbit of a given religion are to a large extent shaped
by the positive content and values recognized and glorified in that
religion. We cannot, therefore, expect the physiognomy of Jewish
mysticism to be the same as that of Catholic mysticism, Anabaptism
or Moslem Sufism. The particular aspects of Christian mysticism,
which are connected with the person of the Saviour and mediator
between God and man, the mystical interpretation of the Passion
of Christ, which is repeated in the personal experience of the in-
dividual—all this is foreign to Judaism, and also to its mystics.
Their ideas proceed from the concepts and values peculiar to Juda-
ism, that is to say, above all from the belief in the Unity of God and
the meaning of His revelation as laid down in the Torah, the
sacred law.
Jewish mysticism in its various forms represents an attempt to
interpret the religious values of Judaism in terms of mystical values.
It concentrates upon the idea of the living God who manifests
himself in the acts of Creation, Revelation and Redemption. Pushed
to its extreme, the mystical meditation on this idea gives birth to
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 11
the conception of a sphere, a whole realm of divinity, which under-
lies the world of our sense-data and which is present and active in
all that exists. This is the meaning of what the Kabbalists call the
world of the ‘Sefiroth’. 1 should like to explain this a little more
fully.
The attributes of the living God are conceived differently and
undergo a peculiar transformation when compared with the mean-
ing given to them by the philosophers of Judaism. Among the latter,
Maimonides, in his “Guide of the Perplexed”, felt bound to ask:
How is it possible to say of God that He is living? Does that not
imply a limitation of the infinite Being? The words “God is living”,
he argues, can only mean that he is not dead, that is to say, that he
is the opposite of all that is negative. He is the negation of negation.
A quite different reply is given by the Kabbalist, for whom the
distinction, nay the conflict, between the known and the unknown
God has a significance denied to it by the philosophers of Judaism.
No creature can take aim at the unknown, the hidden God. In
the last resort, every cognition of God is based on a form of relation
between Him and His creature, i.e. on a manifestation of God in
something else, and not on a relation between Him and Himself.
It has been argued that the difference between the deus absconditus,
God in Himself, and God in His appearance is unknown to Kabba-
lism.’ This seems to me a wrong interpretation of the facts. On the
contrary, the dualism embedded in these two aspects of the one
God, both of which are, theologically speaking, possible ways of
aiming at the divinity, has deeply preoccupied the Jewish mystics.
It has occasionally led them to use formulas whose implied challenge
to the religious consciousness of monotheism was fully revealed only
in the subsequent development of Kabbalism. As a rule, the Kabba-
lists were concerned to find a formula which should give as little
offense as possible to the philosophers. For this reason the inherent
contradiction between the two aspects of God is not always brought
out as clearly as in the famous doctrine of an anonymous writer
around 1300, according to whom God in Himself, as an absolute
Being, and therefore by His very nature incapable of becoming the
subject of a revelation to others, is not and cannot be meant in the
documents of Revelation, in the canonical writings of the Bible, and
in the rabbinical tradition.’ He is not the subject of these writings
and therefore also has no documented name, since every word of
12 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the sacred writings refers after all to some aspect of His manifesta-
tion on the side of Creation. It follows that while the living God,
the God of religion of whom these writings bear witness, has in-
numerable names—which, according to the Kabbalists, belong to
Him by His very nature and not as a result of human convention—
the deus absconditus, the God who is hidden in His own self, can
only be named in a metaphorical sense and with the help of words
which, mystically speaking, are not real names at all. The favorite
formulae of the early Spanish Kabbalists are speculative paraphrases
like ‘Root of all Roots,’”’ “Great Reality,” ‘Indifferent Unity,’” and,
above all, En-Sof. The latter designation reveals the impersonal
character of this aspect of the hidden God from the standpoint of
man as clearly as, and perhaps even more clearly than, the others. It
signifies “the infinite” as such; not, as has been frequently suggested,
“He who is infinite” but “that which is infinite.” Isaac the Blind
(one of the first Kabbalists of distinguishable personality) calls the
deus absconditus “that which is not conceivable by thinking”, not
“He who is not etc.’ It is clear that with this postulate of an im-
personal basic reality in God, which becomes a person—or appears
as a person—only in the process of Creation and Revelation,
Kabbalism abandons the personalistic basis of the Biblical concep-
tion of God. In this sense it is undeniable that the author of the
above-mentioned mystical aphorism is right in holding that En-Sof
(or what is meant by it) is not even mentioned in the Bible and the
Talmud. In the following lectures we shall see how the main schools
of Kabbalistic thought have dealt with this problem. It will not sur-
prise us to find that speculation has run the whole gamut—from
attempts to re-transform the impersonal En-Sof into the personal
God of the Bible to the downright heretical doctrine of a genuine
dualism between the hidden En-Sof and the personal Demiurge of
Scripture. For the moment, however, we are more concerned with
the second aspect of the Godhead which, being of decisive import-
ance for real religion, formed the main subject of theosophical
speculation in Kabbalism.
The mystic strives to assure himself of the living presence of God,
the God of the Bible, the God who is good, wise, just and merciful
and the embodiment of all other positive attributes. But at the
same time he is unwilling to renounce the idea of the hidden God
who remains eternally unknowable in the depths of His own Self,
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 13
or, to use the bold expression of the Kabbalists “in the depths of
His nothingness.” This hidden God may be without special attri-
butes — the living God of whom the Revelation speaks, with whom
all religion is concerned, must have attributes, which on another
plane represent also the mystic’s own scale of moral values: God is
good, God is severe, God is merciful and just, etc. As we shall have
occasion to see, the mystic does not even recoil before the inference
that in a higher sense there is a root of evil even in God. The
benevolence of God is to the mystic not simply the negation of evil,
but a whole sphere of divine light, in which God manifests Himself
under this particular aspect of benevolence to the contemplation
of the Kabbalist.
These spheres, which are often described with the aid of mythical
metaphors and provide the key for a kind of mystical topography
of the Divine realm, are themselves nothing but stages in the reve-
lation of God’s creative power. Every attribute represents a given
Stage, including the attribute of severity and stern judgment, which
mystical speculation has connected with the source of evil in God.
The mystic who sets out to grasp the meaning of God’s absolute
unity is thus faced at the outset with an infinite complexity of hea-
venly spheres and stages which are described in the Kabbalistic texts.
From the contemplation of these ‘Sefiroth’ he proceeds to the con-
ception of God as the union and the root of all these contradictions
Generally speaking, the mystics do not seem to conceive of God as
the absolute Being or absolute Becoming but as the union of both;
much as the hidden God of whom nothing is known to us, and the
living God of religious experience and revelation, are one and the
same. Kabbalism in other words is not dualistic, although histori-
cally there exists a close connection between its way of thinking and
that of the Gnostics, to whom the hidden God and the Creator are
opposing principles. On the contrary, all the energy of ‘orthodox’
Kabbalistic speculation is bent to the task of escaping from dualistic
consequences; otherwise they would not have been able to maintain
themselves within the Jewish community.
I think it is possible to say that the mystical interpretation of
the attributes and the unity of God, in the so-called doctrine of the
‘Sefiroth’, constituted a problem common to all Kabbalists, while
the solutions given to it by and in the various schools often differ
from one another. In the same way, all Jewish mystics, from the
14 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Therapeutae, whose doctrine was described by Philo of Alexandria,”
to the latest Hasid, are at one in giving a mystical interpretation to
the Torah; the Torah is to them a living organism animated by a
secret life which streams and pulsates below the crust of its literal
meaning; every one of the innumerable strata of this hidden region
corresponds to a new and profound meaning of the Torah. The
Torah, in other words, does not consist merely of chapters, phrases
and words; rather is it to be regarded as the living incarnation of
the divine wisdom which eternally sends out new rays of light. It
is not merely the historical law of the Chosen People, although it is
that too; it is rather the cosmic law of the Universe, as God’s
wisdom conceived it. Each configuration of letters in it, whether it
makes sense in human speech or not, symbolizes some aspect of
God’s creative power which is active in the universe. And just as
the thoughts of God, in contrast to those of man, are of infinite
profundity, so also no single interpretation of the Torah in human
language is capable of taking in the whole of its meaning. It can-
not be denied that this method of interpretation has proved almost
barren for a plain understanding of the Holy Writ, but it is equally
undeniable that viewed in this new light, the Sacred Books made a
powerful appeal to the individual who discovered in their written
words the secret of his life and of his God. It is the usual fate of
sacred writings to become more or less divorced from the inten-
tions of their authors. What may be called their after-life, those
aspects which are discovered by later generations, frequently be-
comes of greater importance than their original meaning; and after
all—who knows what their original meaning was?
5
Like all their spiritual kin among Christians or Moslems, the
Jewish mystics cannot, of course, escape from the fact that the
relation between mystical contemplation and the basic facts of hu-
man life and thought is highly paradoxical. But in the Kabbalah
these paradoxes of the mystical mind frequently assume a peculiar
form. Let us take as an instance their relation to the phenomenon
of speech, one of the fundamental problems of mystical thought
throughout the ages. How is it possible to give lingual expression to
mystical knowledge, which by its very nature is related to a sphere
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 15
where speech and expression are excluded? How is it possible to
paraphrase adequately in mere words the most intimate act of all,
the contact of the individual with the Divine? And yet the urge of
the mystics for self-expression is well known.
They continuously and bitterly complain of the utter inadequacy
of words to express their true feelings, but, for all that, they glory
in them; they indulge in rhetoric and never weary of trying to
express the inexpressible in words. All writers on mysticism have
laid stress on this point.” Jewish mysticism is no exception, yet it
is distinguished by two unusual characteristics which may in some
way be interrelated. What I have in mind is, first of all, the striking
restraint observed by the Kabbalists in referring to the supreme
experience; and secondly, their metaphysically positive attitude to-
wards language as God’s own instrument.
If you compare the writings of Jewish mystics with the mystical
literature of other religions you will notice a considerable difference,
a difference which has, to some extent, made difficult and even pre-
vented the understanding of the deeper meaning of Kabbalism.
Nothing could be farther from the truth than the assumption that
the religious experience of the Kabbalists is barren of that which,
as we have seen, forms the essence of mystical experience, every-
where and at all times. The ecstatic experience, the encounter with
the absolute Being in the depths of one’s own soul, or whatever
description one may prefer to give to the goal of the mystical
nostalgia, has been shared by the heirs of rabbinical Judaism. How
could it be otherwise with one of the original and fundamental
impulses of man? At the same time, such differences as there are,
are explained by the existence of an overwhelmingly strong disin-
clination to treat in express terms of these strictly mystical experi-
ences. Not only is the form different in which these experiences are
expressed, but the will to express them and to impart the knowledge
of them is lacking, or is counteracted by other considerations.
It is well known that the autobiographies of great mystics, who
have tried to give an account of their inner experiences in a direct
and personal manner, are the glory of mystical literature. These
mystical confessions, for all their abounding contradictions, not only
provide some of the most important material for the understanding
of mysticism, but many of them are also veritable pearls of literature.
The Kabbalists, however, are no friends of mystical autobiography.
16 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
They aim at describing the realm of Divinity and the other objects
of the contemplation in an impersonal way, by burning, as it were,
their ships behind them. They glory in objective description and are
deeply averse to letting their own personalities intrude into the
picture. The wealth of expression at their disposal is not inferior
to that of their autobiographical confréres. It is as though they were
hampered by a sense of shame. Documents of an intimate and per-
sonal nature are not entirely lacking, but it is characteristic that
they are to be found almost wholly in manuscripts which the Kab-
balists themselves would hardly have allowed to be printed. There
has even been a kind of voluntary censorship which the Kabbalists
themselves exercised by deleting certain passages of a too intimate
nature from the manuscripts, or at least by seeing to it that they
were not printed. I shall return to this point at a later stage, when
I shall give some remarkable instances of this censorship.“ On the
whole, I am inclined to believe that this dislike of a too personal
indulgence in self-expression may have been caused by the fact
among others that the Jews retained a particularly vivid sense of the
incongruity between mystical experience and that idea of God which
stresses the aspects of Creator, King and Law-giver. It is obvious that
the absence of the autobiographical element is a serious obstacle to
any psychological understanding of Jewish mysticism as the psy-
chology of mysticism has to rely primarily on the study of such
autobiographical material.
In general, it may be said that in the long history of Kabbalism,
the number of Kabbalists whose teachings and writings bear the
imprint of a strong personality is surprisingly small, one notable
exception being the Hasidic movement and its leaders since 1750.
This is partly due to personal reticence, which as we have seen was
characteristic of all Jewish mystics. Equally important, however,
is the fact that our sources leave us completely in the dark as regards
the personalities of many Kabbalists, including writers whose influ-
ence was very great and whose teachings it would be worth while
to study in the light of biographical material, were any available.
Often enough such contemporary sources as there are do not even
mention their names! Frequently, too, all that these writers have
left us are their mystical tracts and books from which it is difficult,
if not impossible, to form an impression of their personalities. There
are very few exceptions to this rule. Among hundreds of Kabbalists
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 17
whose writings are known to us, hardly ten would provide sufficient
material for a biography containing more than a random collection
of facts, with little or nothing to give us an insight into their per-
sonalities. This is true, for example, of Abraham Abulafia (13th
century), of Isaac Luria (16th century) and, at a much later
period, of the great mystic and poet Moses Hayim Luzzatto of
Padua (died 1747), whose case is typical of the situation 1 have
described. Although his mystical, moralizing and poetical works fill
several volumes and many of them have been published, the true
personality of the author remained so completely in the shadow as
to be little more than a name until the discovery and publication,
by Dr. Simon Ginzburg, of his correspondence with his teacher and
his friends threw an abundance of light on this remarkable figure.”
It is to be hoped that the same will gradually be done for other
great Jewish mystics of whom today we know very little.
My second point was that Kabbalism is distinguished by an
attitude towards language which is quite unusually positive. Kab-
balists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding
language as something more precious than an inadequate instru-
ment for contact between human beings. To them Hebrew, the holy
tongue, is not simply a means of expressing certain thoughts, born
out of a certain convention and having a purely conventional char-
acter, in accordance with the theory of language dominant in the
Middle Ages. Language in its purest form, that is, Hebrew, accord-
ing to the Kabbalists, reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of
the world; in other words, it has a mystical value. Speech reaches
God because it comes from God. Man’s common language, whose
prima facie function, indeed, is only of an intellectual nature,
reflects the creative language of God. All creation—and this is an
important principle of most Kabbalists—is, from the point of view
of God, nothing but an expression of His hidden self that begins
and ends by giving itself a name, the holy name of God, the per-
petual act of creation. All that lives is an expression of God's lan-
guage, — and what is it that Revelation can reveal in the last resort
if not the name of God?
I shall have to return to this point at a latter stage. What I would
like to emphasize is this peculiar interpretation, this enthusiastic
appreciation of the faculty of speech which sees in it, and in its
18 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
mystical analysis, a key to the deepest secrets of the Creator and
His creation.
In this connection it may be of interest to ask ourselves what was
the common attitude of the mystics toward certain other faculties
and phenomena, such as intellectual knowledge, and more particu-
larly rational philosophy; or, to take another instance, the problem
of individual existence. For after all, mysticism, while beginning
with the religion of the individual, proceeds to merge the self into
a higher union. Mysticism postulates self-knowledge, to use a Pla-
tonic term, as the surest way to God who reveals Himself in the
depths of the self. Mystical tendencies, in spite of their strictly
personal character, have therefore frequently led to the formation
of new social groupings and communities, a fact which is true also
of Jewish mysticism; we shall have to return to this fact and to the
problem it involves at the end of these lectures. At any rate, Joseph
Bernhart, one of the explorers of the world of mysticism, was jus-
tified in saying “Have any done more to create historical movement
than those who seek and proclaim the immovable?’
6
It is precisely this question of history which brings us back to the
problem from which we started: What is Jewish mysticism? For
now the question is: What is to be regarded as the general character-
istic of mysticism within the framework of Jewish tradition? Kab-
balah, it must be remembered, is not the name of a certain dogma
or system, but rather the general term applied to a whole religious
movement. This movement, with some of whose stages and tenden-
cies we shall have to acquaint ourselves, has been going on from
Talmudic times to the present day; its development has been un-
interrupted, though by no means uniform, and often dramatic. It
leads from Rabbi Akiba, of whom the Talmud says that he left the
‘Paradise’ of mystical speculation safe and sane as he had entered it—
something which cannot, indeed, be said of every Kabbalist—to the
late Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the religious leader of the Jewish
community in Palestine and a splendid type of Jewish mystic.”
I should like to mention here that we are in possession of a vast
printed literature of mystical texts which I am inclined to estimate
at 3,000.” In addition, there exists an even greater array of manu-
scripts not yet published.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 19
Within this movement there exists a considerable variety of
religious experience, to use William James’ expression. There have
been many different currents of thought, and various systems and
forms of speculation. There is little resemblance between the ear-
liest mystical texts in our possession, dating from Talmudic and
post-Talmudic days, the writings of the ancient Spanish Kabbalists,
those of the school which later flourished in Safed, the holy city of
Kabbalism in the sixteenth century, and finally the Hasidic litera-
ture of the modern age. Yet the question must be asked whether
there is not something more than a purely historical connection
uniting these disjecta membra, something which also provides us
with a hint as to what renders this mystical movement in Judaism
different from non-Jewish mysticism. Such a common denominator
can, perhaps, be discovered in certain unchanging fundamental
ideas concerning God, creation and the part played by man in the
universe. I'wo such ideas I have mentioned above, namely the attri-
butes of God and the symbolic meaning of the Torah. But may it
not also be that such a denominator is to be found in the attitude
of the Jewish mystic towards those dominant spiritual forces which
have conditioned and shaped the intellectual life of Jewry during
the past two thousand years: the Halakhah, the Aggadah, the pray-
ers and the philosophy of Judaism, to name the most important?
It is this question which I shall now try to answer, though without
going into detail.
As I have said before, the relation of mysticism to the world of
history can serve as a useful starting-point for our investigation.
It is generally believed that the attitude of mysticism toward history
is one of aloofness, or even of contempt. The historical aspects of
religion have a meaning for the mystic chiefly as symbols of acts
which he conceives as being divorced from time, or constantly
repeated in the soul of every man. Thus the exodus from Egypt,
the fundamental event of our history, cannot, according to the
mystic, have come to pass once only and in one place; it must cor-
respond to an event which takes place in ourselves, an exodus from
an inner Egypt in which we all are slaves. Only thus conceived does
the Exodus cease to be an object of learning and acquire the dignity
of immediate religious experience. In the same way, it will be
remembered, the doctrine of “Christ in us” acquired so great an
importance for the mystics of Christianity that the historical Jesus
20 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
of Nazareth was quite often relegated to the background. If, how-
ever, the Absolute which the mystic seeks is not to be found in the
varying occurrences of history, the conclusion suggests itself that it
must either precede the course of mundane history or reveal itself
at the end of time. In other words, knowledge both of the primary
facts of creation and of its end, of eschatological salvation and bliss,
can acquire a mystical significance.
“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay,” “‘as
it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own
life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of
mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writ-
ings of many Jewish mystics, from the anonymous authors of the
early Hekhaloth tracts to Rabbi Nahman of Brazlav. And the im-
portance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exempli-
fied by the case of Jewish mysticism4 The consensus of Kabbalistic
opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the pro-
cession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages
of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return
to the root of all existence} In this sense, the interpretation of
Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always
formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here
that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it
has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together
constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which 1s the life
of the universe.’” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.
But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic
speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways
of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical under-
standing; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic
meaning of history.
There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between
the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical
world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under
which it has become best known, is derived from an historical con-
cept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent
example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have re-
ferred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate
personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal
and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 21
The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the
start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very
nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a
knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.
Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense,
a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mys-
ticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply
hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also
because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the
knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly
corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who
alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at
least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves
have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and
even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this
development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period
of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature
were diffused among an ever-growing number of people.
It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is under-
stood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private
affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his per-
sonal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly per-
fect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common
to mankind. To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge
of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind,
possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason,
the Kabbalah advanced what was at once a claim and an hypo-
thesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own dis-
ciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this
claim is grounded in fact—and I am even inclined to believe that
many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously—the fact that such a
claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mys-
ticism. Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted
in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from
tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly
to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and truc
tradition. This theory has made possible such a paradox as the
Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the most influential system of later Kab-
balism, though the most difficult. Nearly all the important points
22 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
and major theses in Luria’s system are novel, one might even say
excitingly novel—and yet they were accepted throughout as true
Kabbalah, i.e. traditional wisdom. There was nobody to see a con-
tradiction in this.
7
Considerations of a different kind will take us even deeper into
the understanding of the problem. I have already said that the
mystical sphere is the meeting-place of two worlds or stages in the
development of the human consciousness: one primitive and one
developed, the world of mythology and that of revelation. This fact
cannot be left out of account in dealing with the Kabbalah. Who-
ever tries to gain a better understanding of its ideas, without at-
tempting anything in the nature of an apology, cannot fail to notice
that it contains, side by side with a deep and sensitive understand-
ing of the essence of religious feeling, a certain mode of thought
characteristic of primitive mythological thinking. The peculiar afh-
nity of Kabbalist thought to the world of myth cannot well be
doubted, and should certainly not be obscured or lightly passed
over by those of us to whom the notion of a mythical domain within
Judaism seems strange and paradoxical and who are accustomed to
think of Jewish Monotheism as the classical example of a religion
which has severed all links with the mythical. It is, indeed, surpris-
ing that in the very heart of Judaism ideas and notions sprang up
which purported to interpret its meaning better than any others,
and which yet represent a relapse into, or if you like a revival of,
the mythical consciousness. This is particularly true of the Zohar
and the Lurianic Kabbalah, that is to say, of those forms of Jewish
mysticism which have exerted by far the greatest influence in Jew-
ish history and which for centuries stocd out in the popular mind —
as bearers of the final and deepest truth in Jewish thought.
It is no use getting indignant over these facts, as the great
historian Graetz did; they should rather set us thinking. ‘Their im-
portance for the history of the Jewish people, particularly during
the past four centuries, has been far too great to permit them to be
ridiculed and treated as mere deviations. Perhaps, after all, there
is something wrong with the popular conception of Monotheism as
being opposed to the mythical; perhaps Monotheism contains room
after all, on a deeper plane, for the development of mythical lore.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 23
I do not believe that all those devoted and pious spirits, practically
the vast majority of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry, ceased, after
the exodus from Spain, to be Jews also in the religious sense, only
because their forms of belief appear to be in manifest contradiction
with certain modern theories of Judaism. I, therefore, ask myself:
What is the secret of this tremendous success of the Kabbalah among
our people? Why did it succeed in becoming a decisive factor in our
history, shaping the life of a large proportion of Jewry over a period
of centuries, while its contemporary, rational Jewish philosophy, was
incapable of achieving the spiritual hegemony after which it strove?
This is a pressing question; I cannot accept the explanation that
the facts I have described are solely due to external historical cir-
cumstances, that persecution and decline weakened the spirit of the
people and made them seek refuge in the darkness of Mysticism
because they could not bear the light of Reason. The matter appears
to me to be more complicated, and I should like briefly to set out
my answer to the question.
The secret of the success of the Kabbalah lies in the nature of
its relation to the spiritual heritage of rabbinical Judaism. This
relation differs from that of rationalist philosophy, in that it is
more deeply and in a more vital sense connected with the main
forces active in Judaism.
Undoubtedly both the mystics and the philosophers completely
transform the structure of ancient Judaism; both have lost the
simple relation to Judaism, that naiveté which speaks to us from
the classical documents of Rabbinical literature. Classical Judaism
expressed itself: it did not reflect upon itself. By contrast, to the
Mystics and the philosophers of a later stage of religious develop-
ment Judaism itself has become problematical. Instead of simply
speaking their minds, they tend to produce an ideology of Judaism,
an ideology moreover which comes to the rescue of tradition by
giving it a new interpretation. It is not as though the rise of Jewish
philosophy and of Jewish mysticism took place in widely separated
ages, or as though the Kabbalah, as Graetz saw it, was a reaction
against a wave of rationalism. Rather the two movements are inter-
|related and interdependent. Neither were they from the start mani-
festly opposed to each other, a fact which is often overlooked. On
the contrary, the rationalism of some of the philosophical enlighten-
ers frequently betrays a mystical tendency; and conversely, the mystic
24 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
who has not yet learnt to speak in his own language often uses
and misuses the vocabulary of philosophy. Only very gradually did
the Kabbalists, rather than the philosophers, begin to perceive the
implications of their own ideas, the conflict between a purely philo-
sophical interpretation of the world, and an attitude which pro-
gresses from rational thought to irrational meditation, and from
there to the mystical interpretation of the universe.
What many mystics felt towards philosophy was succinctly ex-
pressed by Rabbi Moses of Burgos (end of the 13th century). When
he heard the philosophers praised, he used to say angrily: “You
ought to know that these philosophers whose wisdom you are prais-
ing, end where we begin.”” Actually this means two things: on the
one hand, it means that the Kabbalists are largely concerned with
the investigation of a sphere of religious reality which lies quite
outside the orbit of mediaeval Jewish philosophy; their purpose is
to discover a new stratum of the religious consciousness. On the
other hand, though R. Moses may not have intended to say this,
they stand on the shoulders of the philosophers and it is easier for
them to see a little farther than their rivals.
To repeat, the Kabbalah certainly did not arise as a reaction
against philosophical ‘enlightenment, but once it was there it is
true that its function was that of an opposition to it. At the same
time, an intellectual dispute went on between the Kabbalah and the
forces of the philosophical movement which left deep marks upon
the former’s structure. In my opinion, there is a direct connection
between Jehudah Halevi, the most Jewish of Jewish philosophers,
and the Kabbalists. For the legitimate trustees of his spiritual heri-
tage have been the mystics, and not the succeeding generations of
Jewish philosophers.
The Kabbalists employed the ideas and conceptions of orthodox
theology, but the magic hand of mysticism opened up hidden
sources of new life in the heart of many scholastic ideas and abstrac-
tions. Philosophers may shake their heads at what must appear to
them a misunderstanding of the meaning of philosophical ideas.
But what from the philosopher’s point of view represents a flaw
in the conception can constitute its greatness and dignity in the
religious sense. After all, a misunderstanding is often nothing but
the paradoxical abbreviation of an original line of thought. And
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 25
it is precisely such misunderstanding which has frequently become
productive of new ideas in the mystical sphere.
Let us take, as an example of what I have said, the idea of
“creation out of nothing.” In the dogmatic disputations of Jewish
philosophy, the question whether Judaism implies belief in this
concept, and if so, in what precise sense, has played an important
part. I shall not go into the difficulties with which the orthodox
theologians found themselves faced whenever they tried to preserve
the full meaning of this idea of creation out of nothing. Viewed in
its simplest sense, it affirms the creation of the world by God out of
something which is neither God Himself nor any kind of existence,
but simply the non-existent. The mystics, too, speak of creation out
of nothing; in fact, it is one of their favorite formulae. But in
their case the orthodoxy of the term conceals a meaning which
differs considerably from the original one. This Nothing from which
everything has sprung is by no means a mere negation; only to us
does it present no attributes because it is beyond the reach of intel-
lectual knowledge. In truth, however, this Nothing—to quote one
of the Kabbalists—is infinitely more real than all other reality.”
Only when the soul has stripped itself of all limitation and, in
mystical language, has descended into the depths of Nothing does
it encounter the Divine. For this Nothing comprises a wealth of
mystical reality although it cannot be defined. “Un Dieu défini
serait un Dieu fini.” In a word, it signifies the Divine itself, in its
most impenetrable guise. And, in fact, creation out of nothing means
to many mystics just creation out of God. Creation out of nothing
thus becomes the symbol of emanation, that is to say, of an idea
which, in the history of philosophy and theology, stands farthest
removed from it.
lone
8
Let us return to our original problem. As we have seen, the
renaissance of Judaism on a new plane is the common concern of
both the mystics and the philosophers. For all that, there remains
a very considerable difference, a good example of which is afforded
by the conception of Sithre Torah, or ‘Secrets of the Law’. The
philosophers no less than the mystics talk of discovering these secrets,
using this esoteric phraseology with a profusion hardly distingu-
ishable from the style of the real esoterics and Kabbalists. But what
26 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
are these secrets according to the philosopher? They are the truths
of philosophy, the truths of the metaphysics or ethics of Aristotle,
or Alfarabi or Avicenna; truths, in other words, which were capable
of being discovered outside the sphere of religion and which were
projected into the old books by way of allegorical or typological
interpretation. The documents of religion are therefore not con-
ceived as expressing a separate and distinct world of religious truth
and reality, but rather as giving a simplified description of the rela-
tions which exist between the ideas of philosophy. The story of
Abraham and Sarah, of Lot and his wife, of the Twelve Tribes, etc.,
are simply descriptions of the relation between matter and form,
spirit and matter, or the faculties of the mind. Even where allegori-
zation was not pushed to such absurd extremes, the tendency was to
regard the Torah as a mere vehicle of philosophic truth, though
indeed one particularly exalted and perfect.
In other words, the philosopher can only proceed with his proper
task after having successfully converted the concrete realities of
Judaism into a bundle of abstractions. The individual phenomenon
is to him no object of his philosophical speculation. By contrast, the
mystic refrains from destroying the living texture of religious nar-
rative by allegorizing it, although allegory plays an important part
in the writings of a great many Kabbalists. His essential mode of
thinking is what I should like to call symbolical in the strictest sense.
This point requires a little further explanation. Allegory con-
sists of an infinite network of meanings and correlations in which
everything can become a representation of everything else, but all
within the limits of language and expression. To that extent it is
possible to speak of allegorical immanence. That which is expressed
by and in the allegorical sign is in the first instance something which
has its own meaningful context, but by becoming allegorical this
something loses its own meaning and becomes the vehicle of some-
thing else. Indeed the allegory arises, as it were, from the gap which
at this point opens between the form and its meaning. The two are
no longer indissolubly welded together; the meaning is no longer
restricted to that particular form, nor the form any longer to that
particular meaningful content. What appears in the allegory, in
short, is the infinity of meaning which attaches to every representa-
tion. The ‘‘Mysteries of the Torah” which I just mentioned were
for the philosophers the natural subject of an allegorical interpre-
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 27
tation which gave expression to a new form of the mediaeval mind
as much as it implied a veiled criticism of the old.
Allegorization was also, as I have said, a constant preoccupation
of the Kabbalists, and it was not on this ground that they differed
from the philosophers; nor was it the main constituent of their faith
and their method{We must look for this in the attention they gave
to the symbol—a form of expression which radically transcends the
sphere of allegory. In the mystical symbol a reality which in itself
has, for us, no form or shape becomes transparent and, as it were,
visible, through the medium of another reality which clothes its
content with visible and expressible meaning, as for example the
cross for the Christian} The thing which becomes a symbol retains
its original form and its original content. It does not become, so to
speak, an empty shell into which another content is poured; in it-
self, through its own existence, it makes another reality transparent
which cannot appear in any other formdIf allegory can be defined
as the representation of an expressible something by another ex-
pressible something, the mystical symbol is an expressible repre-
sentation of something which lies beyond the sphere of expression
and communication, something which comes from a sphere whose
face is, as it were, turned inward and away from us. A hidden and
inexpressible reality finds its expression in the symbol. If the sym-
bol is thus also a sign or representation it is nevertheless more
than that,J
For the Kabbalist, too, every existing thing is endlessly correlated
with the whole of creation; for him, too, everything mirrors every-
thing else. But beyond that he discovers something else which
is not covered by the allegorical network: a reflection of the true
transcendence. The symbol “signifies” nothing and communicates
nothing, but makes something transparent which is beyond all ex-
pression. Where deeper insight into the structure of the allegory
uncovers fresh layers of meaning, the symbol is intuitively under-
stood all at once—or not at all. The symbol in which the life of the
Creator and that of creation become one, is—to use Creuzer’s words”
—“‘a beam of light which, from the dark and abysmal depths of
existence and cognition, falls into our eye and penetrates our whole
being.” It is a “momentary totality” which is perceived intuitively
in a mystical now—the dimension of time proper to the symbol.
Of such symbols the world of Kabbalism is full, nay the whole
28 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
world is to the Kabbalist such a corpus symbolicum. Out of the
reality of creation, without the latter’s existence being denied or
annihilated, the inexpressible mystery of the Godhead becomes visi-
ble. In particular the religious acts commanded by the Torah, the
mitswoth, are to the Kabbalist symbols in which a deeper and hid-
den sphere of reality becomes transparent. The infinite shines
through the finite and makes it more and not less real. This brief
summary gives us some idea of the profound difference between the
philosophers’ allegorical interpretation of religion and its symbolical
understanding by the mystics. It may be of interest to note that in
the comprehensive commentary on the Torah written by a great
mystic of the thirteenth century, Moses Nahmanides, there are many
symbolical interpretations as defined here, but not a single instance
of allegory.
8
he difference becomes clear if we consider the attitude of
philosophy and Kabbalah respectively to the two outstanding crea-
tive manifestations of Rabbinical Jewry: Halakhah and Aggadah,
Law and Legend)It is a remarkable fact that the philosophers failed
to establish a satisfactory and intimate relation to either. They
showed. themselves unable to make the spirit of Halakhah and
Aggadah, both elements which expressed a fundamental urge of the
Jewish soul, productive by transforming them into something new.
Let us begin with the Halakhah, the world of sacred law and,
therefore, the most important factor in the actual life of ancient
Jewry. Alexander Altmann, in raising the question: What is Jewish
Theology? is quite justified in regarding as one of the decisive weak-
nesses of classical Jewish philosophy the fact that it ignored the
problem presented by the Halakhah.” The whole world of religious
law remained outside the orbit of philosophical inquiry, which
means of course, too, that it was not subjected to philosophical
criticism. It is not as if the philosopher denied or defied this world.
He, too, lived in it and bowed to it, but it never became part and
parcel of his work as a philosopher. It furnished no material for his
thoughts. This fact, which is indeed undeniable, is particularly
glaring in the case of thinkers like Maimonides and Saadia, in
whom the converging streams meet. They fail entirely to establish
a true synthesis of the two elements, Halakhah and philosophy, a
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 29
fact which has already been pointed out by Samuel David Luzzatto.
Maimonides, for instance, begins the Mishneh Torah, his great
codification of the Halakhah, with a philosophical chapter which
has no relation whatever to the Halakhah itself. The synthesis of
the spheres remains sterile, and the genius of the man whose spirit
moulded them into a semblence of union cannot obscure their in-
trinsic disparity.
For a purely historical understanding of religion, Maimonides’
analysis of the origin of the mitswoth, the religious c
is of great importance,” but he would be a bold man who would
maintain that his theory of the mitswoth was likely to increase the
enthusiasm of the faithful for their actual practice, likely to aug-
ment their immediate appeal to religious feeling. If the prohibition
against seething a kid in its mother’s milk and many similar irra-
tional commandments are explicable as polemics against long-for-
gotten pagan rites, if the offering of sacrifice is a concession to the
primitive mind, if other mitswoth carry with them antiquated moral
and philosophical ideas—how can one expect the community to re-
main faithful to practices of which the antecedents have long since
disappeared or of which Fo aims can be attained directly through
philosophical reasoning? JTo the philosopher, the Halakhah either
had no significance at all, or one that was calculated to diminish
rather than to enhance its prestige in his eyes.)
Entirely different was the attitude of the Kabbalists. For them
the Halakhah never became a province of thought in which they
felt themselves strangers. Right from the beginning and with grow-
ing determination, they sought to master the world of the Halakhah
as a whole and in every detail..From the outset, an ideology of the
Halakhah is one of their ibe in their interpretation of the re-
ligiohs commandments these are not represented as allegories of
more or less profound ideas, or as pedagogical measures, but rather
as the performance of a secret rite_(or mystery in the sense in which
the term was used by the Ancients).”
Whether one is appalled or not by this transformation of the
Halakhah into a sacrament, a mystery rite, by this revival of myth
in the very heart of Judaism, the fact remains that it was this trans-
formation which raised the Halakhah to a position of incomparable
importance for the mystic, and strengthened its hold over the
people. Every mitswah became an event of cosmic importance, an
ye
30 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
act which had a bearing upon the dynamics of the universe. The
religious Jew became a protagonist in the drama of the world; he
manipulated the strings behind the scene. Or, to use a less extra-
vagant simile, if the whole universe is an enormous complicated
machine, then man is the machinist who keeps the wheels going by
applying a few drops of oil here and there, and at the right time.
The moral substance of man’s action supplies this “oil,” and his
existence therefore becomes of extreme significance, since it unfolds
on a background of cosmic infinitude.
The danger of theosophical schematism or, as S. R. Hirsch put
it,” of “magical mechanism” is, of course, inherent in such an inter-
pretation of the Torah, and it has more than once raised its head in
the development of Kabbalism. There is danger of imagining a
magical mechanism to be operative in every sacramental action, and
this imagination is attended by a decline in the essential spontaneity
of religious action. But then this conflict is inseparable from any
and every fulfilment of a religious command, since every prescribed
duty is also conceived as assumed willingly and spontaneously. The
antinomy is, in fact, inescapable, and can only be overcome by
religious feeling so long as it is strong and unbroken. When it begins
to flag, the contradiction between command and free-will increases
in proportion and eventually gathers sufficient force to become
estructive.
By interpreting every religious act as a mystery, even where its
meaning was clear for all to see or was expressly mentioned in the
written or oral Law, a strong link was forged between Kabbalah and
Halakkah, which appears to me to have been, in large part, respon-
sible for the influence of Kabbalistic thought over the minds and
hearts of successive generations.
A good deal of similarity to what I have said about the Hala-
khah is apparent in the attitude of philosophers and mystics, respec-
tively, to the Aggadah. Here too, their ways part right from the
beginning. The Aggadah is a wonderful mirror of spontaneous
religious life and feeling during the rabbinical period of Judaism.
In particular, it represents a method of giving original and concrete
expression to the deepest motive-powers of the religious Jew, a
quality which helps to make it an excellent and genuine approach
to the essentials of our religion. However, it was just this quality
which never ceased to baffle the philosophers of Judaism. Their
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 31
treatment of the Aggadah, except where it pointed an ethical moral,
is embarrassed and fumbling. They almost certainly regarded it as
a stumbling-block rather than as a precious heritage, let alone a key
to a mystery. And thus it is not surprising that their allegorical
interpretation of its meaning reflects an attitude which is not that
of the Aggadah. Only too frequently their allegorizations are simply,
as I have said, veiled criticism.
Here again the Kabbalists conceive their task differently, although
it also involves a transformation of the subject’s meaning. It would
be too much to say that they leave the meaning of the Aggadah
intact. What makes them differ from the philosophers is the fact
that for them the Aggadah is not just a dead letter. They live in
a world historically continuous with it, and they are able, there-
fore, to enhance it, though in the spirit of mysticism./Aggadic pro-
ductivity has been a constant element of Kabbalistic literature, and
only when the former disappears will the latter, too, be doomed to
extinction. The whole of Aggadah can in a way be regarded as a
popular mythology of the Jewish universe. Now, this mythical
element which is deeply rooted in the creative forms of Aggadic
production, operates on different planes in the old Aggadah and
in Kabbalism. The difference between the Aggadic production
of the Kabbalah and that of the early Midrash can be easily
gauged: in the Aggadah of the Kabbalists the events take place on
a considerably wider stage, a stage with a cosmic horizon. Earth and
heaven meet already in the ancient Aggadah, but now an even
greater stress is laid on the heavenly element which comes more
and more to the fore. All events assume gigantic dimensions and a
wider significance; the steps of the heroes of the Kabbalistic Agga-
dah are directed by hidden forces from mysterious regions, while
their “doings react, at the same time, upon the upper world) Seen
that way, there is nothing more instructive than a comparison be-
tween the two great and truly comprehensive collections, or Yal-
kutim, each one representing, respectively, one of the two types of
Aggadic creation. (The compiler of the Yalkut Shim‘oni collected
in the thirteenth century the old Aggadahs which, as preserved by
the Midrashic literature, accompanied the biblical text. In the
Yalkut Reubeni, on the other hand, we have a collection of the
Aggadic output of the Kabbalists during five centuries. The latter
highly interesting work which was compiled during the second half
32 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
of the seventeenth century bears full witness to the growing strength
and preponderance of the mythical element and to the great differ-
ence between Aggadah and Kabbalah in their interpretation of the
stories of Biblical heroesJAt the same time it is obvious that in
comparison with the older Aggadah the realistic element in the later
Aggadah has decreased because the realistic foundations, in which
Jewish life was rooted, have grown more and more narrow. In fact,
this explanation falls in well with the historical experience of the
different generations. The old Aggadah is fed by deep and compre-
hensive experience; the life which it reflects has not yet become
colourless, nor did it lose its impetus. The Kabbalistic Aggadah,
in contrast, reflects a narrow and circumscribed life which sought,
nay, was compelled to seek, inspiration from hidden worlds, as the
real world turned for them into the world of the Ghetto. The
Aggadic myth of the Yalkut Reubeni expresses the historical experi-
ence of the Jewish people after the Crusades, and we may say that
it is expressed with rather greater force because it is not directly
mentioned at all. The depth of the penetration into the hidden
worlds which can be encountered here at every step stands in direct
proportion to the shrinking perimeter of their historical experi-
ence. There is thus a mighty difference of function between the
two types of Aggadic creation but no difference of essence.
here is another point worth mentioning. No Kabbalist was
ever embarrassed by or ashamed of an old Aggadah; in particular
those Aggadahs, which were anathema to ‘enlightened’ Jews, were
enthusiastically hailed by the Kabbalists as symbols of their own
interpretation of the Universe} The anthropomorphical and para-
doxical Aggadahs belong to this class, as well as certain epigrams,
such as R. Abbahu’s saying, that before making this world God
made many others and destroyed them because he did not like
them.” The philosophers, who had passed through the school of
Aristotle, never felt at home in the world of Midrash. But the more
extravagant and paradoxical these Aggadahs appeared to them, the
more were the Kabbalists convinced that they were one of the keys
to the mystical realm. Their vocabulary and favorite similes show
traces of Aggadic influence in proportions equal to those of phil-
osophy and Gnosticism; Scripture being, of course, the strongest
element of all.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 33
10
What has been said of the Halakhah and the Aggadah is also
true of the liturgy, the world of prayer; the last of the three do-
mains in which the religious spirit of post-Biblical Judaism has
found its classical expression} Here too the conclusion is inescapable
that the philosophers had little of value to contribute. Of entire
prayers written by philosophers only a few have been preserved, and
these are often somewhat anaemic and half-hearted in their approach,
especially where the authors were not, like Solomon ibn Gabirol and
Jehudah Halevi, motivated in the last resort by mystical leanings.
There is in many of them a curious lack of true religious feeling.
‘The case is entirely different when we turn to the Kabbalistic atti-
tude towards prayer; there is perhaps no clearer sign that Kabba-
: lism is essentially a religious and not a speculative phenomenon,1
The novelty of its attitude to prayer can be viewed under two
aspects: the vast number of prayers whose authors were mystics
themselves, and the mystical interpretation of the old traditional
community prayers—the backbone of Jewish liturgy.
To begin with the former, it is hardly surprising that the new
religious revelation, peculiar to the visionaries of the Kabbalah,
for which there existed no liturgical equivalent in the older prayers,
strove after some form of expression and had already inspired the
earliest mystics to write their own prayers. Ihe first prayers of a
mystical character, which can be traced back to the Kabbalists of
Provence and Catalonia,” are carried forward by a long and varied
tradition to the prayers in which, about 1820, Nathan of Nemirov,
the disciple of Rabbi Nahman of Brazlav, gave valid expression to
the world of Hasidic Zaddikism.” This mystical prayer, which bears
little*outward resemblance to the older liturgy, and in particular of
course to the classical forms of communal prayer, flows from the
new religious experience to which the Kabbalists were entitled to
lay claim. Often these prayers bear the mark of directness and sim-
plicity, and give plain expression to the common concern of every
form of mysticism. But not infrequently their language is that of
the symbol and their style reveals the secret pathos of magical con-
juration. This has found a profound expression in the mystical
interpretation of the phrase of Psalm cxxx, 1 "Out of the depths
I have called unto Thee’; which, according to the Zohar, means not
34 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
“I have called unto Thee from the depths [where I am]” but “from
the depths [in which Thou art] I call Thee up.””
But side by side with these original productions of the Kabba-
listic spirit we find from the earliest beginnings down to our time
another tendency, that of mystical reinterpretation of the traditional
community liturgy which transforms it into a symbol of the mystical
way and the way of the world itself. This transformation, which
has meant a great deal for the true life of the Kabbalist, has become
crystallized in the conception of Kawwanah, i.e. mystical intention
or concentration, which is its instrument.“ In the words of the
liturgy as in the old Aggadahs, the Kabbalists found a way to
hidden worlds and the first causes of all existence. They developed
a technique of meditation which enabled them to extract, as it
were, the mystical prayer from the exoteric prayer of the commun-
ity the text of which followed a fixed pattern. The fact that this
form of prayer was conceived not as a free effusion of the soul but
as a mystical act in the strict sense of the term, as an act, that is
to say, which is directly linked with the inner cosmic process,
invests this conception of Kawwanah with a solemnity which not
only approaches but also passes the border of the magical. It is sig-
nificant that of all the various forms of Kabbalistic thought and
practice this meditative mysticism of prayer has alone survived and
has taken the place of all the others.<At the end of a long process
of development in which Kabbalism, paradoxical though it may
sound, has influenced the course of Jewish history, it has become
again what it was in the beginning: the esoteric wisdom of small
groups of men out of touch with life and without any influence
on it)
ste
As I have already said, mysticism represents, to a certain extent,
a revival of mythical lore. ‘This brings us to another and very serious
point which I should like at least to mention. The Jewish mystic
lives and acts in perpetual rebellion against a world with which he
strives with all his zeal to be at peace. Conversely, this fact is respon-
sible for the profound ambiguity of his outlook, and it also explains
the apparent self-contradiction inherent in a great many Kabbalist
symbols and images. The great symbols of the Kabbalah certainly
spring from the depths of a creative and genuinely Jewish religious
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 35
feeling, but at the same time they are invariably tinged by the world
of mythology. In the lectures on the Zohar and on Lurianic Kabba-
lism I shall give a number of particularly outstanding instances of
this fact. Failing this mythical element, the ancient Jewish mystics
would have been unable to compress into language the substance
of their inner experience. It was Gnosticism, one of the last great
manifestations of mythology in religious thought, and definitely
conceived in the struggle against Judaism as the conqueror of
mythology, which lent figures of speech to the Jewish mystic.
The importance of this paradox can hardly be exaggerated; it
must be kept in mind that the whole meaning and purpose of those
ancient myths and metaphors whose remainders the editors of the
book Bahir, and therefore the whole Kabbalah, inherited from the
Gnostics”, was simply the subversion of a law which had, at one
time, disturbed and broken the order of the mythical world. Thus
through wide and scattered provinces of Kabbalism, the revenge
of myth upon its conqueror is clear for all to see, and together with
it we find an abundant display of contradictory symbols. It is
characteristic of Kabbalistic theology in its systematical forms that
it attempts to construct and to describe a world in which some-
thing of the mythical has again come to life, in terms of thought
which exclude the mythical element. However, it is this contradic-
tion which more than anything else explains the extraordinary
success of Kabbalism in Jewish history.
Mystics and philosophers are, as it were, both aristocrats of
thought; yet Kabbalism succeeded in establishing a connection be-
tween its own world and certain elemental impulses operative in
every human mind. It did not turn its back upon the primitive side
of life, that all-important region where mortals are afraid of life
and in fear of death, and derive scant wisdom from rational phil-
osophy. Philosophy ignored these fears, out of whose substance man
wove myths, and in turning its back upon the primitive side of
man’s existence, it paid a high price in losing touch with him alto-
gether. For it is cold comfort to those who are plagued by genuine
fear and sorrow to be told that their troubles are but the workings
of their own imagination.
<The fact of the existence of evil in the world is the main touch-
stone of this difference between the philosophic and the Kabbalistic
outlook. On the whole, the philosophers of Judaism treat the exis-
36 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
tence of evil as something meaningless in itself. Some of them have
shown themselves only too proud of this negation of evil as one of
the fundamentals of what they call rational Judaism. Hermann
Cohen has said with great clarity and much conviction: “Evil is
non-existent. It is nothing but a concept derived from the concept
of freedom. A power of evil exists only in myth.” One may doubt
the philosophical truth of this statement, but assuming its truth it
is obvious that something can be said for ‘myth’ in its struggle with
‘philosophy’. To most Kabbalists, as true seal-bearers of the world
of myth, the existence of evil is, at any rate, one of the most pressing
problems, and one which keeps them continuously occupied with
attempts to solve it. They have a strong sense of the reality of evil
and the dark horror that is about everything living. They do not,
like the philosophers, seek to evade its existence with the aid of a
convenient formula; rather do they try to penetrate into its deptt
And by doing so, they unwittingly establish a connection between
their own strivings and the vital interests of popular belief—you may
call it superstition—and all of those concrete manifestations of Jew-
ish life in which these fears found their expression. It is a paradoxi-
cal fact that none other than the Kabbalists, through their interpre-
tation of various religious acts and customs, have made it clear what
they signified to the average believer, if not what they really meant
from the beginning. Jewish folklore stands as a living proof of this
contention, as has been shown by modern research in respect of
some particularly well-known examples.”
It would be idle to deny that Kabbalistic thought lost much of
its magnificence where it was forced to descend from the pinnacles
of theoretical speculation to the plane of ordinary thinking and
acting. The dangers which myth and magic present to the religious
consciousness, including that of the mystic, are clearly shown in the
development of Kabbalism. If one turns to the writings of great
Kabbalists one seldom fails to be torn between alternate admiration
and disgust. There is need for being quite clear about this in a
time like ours, when the fashion of uncritical and superficial con-
demnation of even the most valuable elements of mysticism threat-
ens to be replaced by an equally uncritical and obscurantist glorifi-
cation of the Kabbalah. I have said before that Jewish philosophy
had to pay a high price for its escape from the pressing questions
of real life. But Kabbalism, too, has had to pay for its success.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 37
Philosophy came dangerously near to losing the living God; Kabba-_ ,
lism, which set out to preserve Him, to blaze a new and glorious
trail to Him, encountered mythology on its way and was tempted
to lose itself in its labyrinth.
12
One final observation should be made on the general character
of Kabbalism as distinct from other, non-Jewish, forms of mysticism.
Both historically and metaphysically it is a masculine doctrine,
made for men and by men. The long history of Jewish mysticism
shows no trace of feminine influence. There have been no women
Kabbalists; Rabia of early Islamic mysticism, Mechthild of Magde- :
burg, Juliana of Norwich, Theresa de Jesus, and the many other
feminine representatives of Christian mysticism have no counter-
parts in the history of Kabbalism." The latter, therefore, lacks the
element of feminine emotion which has played so large a part in
the development of non-Jewish mysticism, but it also remained
comparatively free from the dangers entailed by the tendency to-
wards hysterical extravagance which followed in the wake of this
influence.
This exclusively masculine character of Kabbalism was by no
means the result of the social position of Jewish women or their
exclusion from Talmudic learning. Scholasticism was as much ex-
clusively a domain of men as Talmudism, and yet the social position
of women in Islam and in Mediaeval Christianity did not prevent
their playing a highly important part among the representatives—
though not the theoreticians—of Islamic and Christian mysticism.
It is hardly possible to conceive Catholic mysticism without them.
This exclusive masculinity for which Kabbalism has paid a high
price? appears rather to be connected with an inherent tendency to
lay stress on the demonic nature of woman and the feminine ele-
ment of the cosmos.
It is of the essence of Kabbalistic symbolism that woman rep-
resents not, as one might be tempted to expect, the quality of ten-
derness but that of stern judgment. This symbolism was unknown
to the old mystics of the Merkabah period, and even to the Hasidim
in Germany, but it dominates Kabbalistic literature from the very
beginning and undoubtedly represents a constituent element of
Kabbalistic theology. The demonic, according to the Kabbalists, is
t
38 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
an off-spring of the feminine sphere. This view does not entail a
negation or repudiation of womanhood—after all the Kabbalistic
conception of the Shekhinah has room for the, to orthodox Jewish
thought, highly paradoxical idea of a feminine element in God
Himself—but it does constitute a problem for the psychologist and
the historian of religion alike. Mention has already been made of
the dislike shown by the Kabbalists for any form of literary pub-
licity in connection with mystical experience, and of their ten-
dency towards the objectivization of mystical vision. These traits,
too, would appear to be connected with the masculine character of
the movement, for the history of mystical literature shows that
women were among the outstanding representatives of the tendency
towards mystical autobiography and subjectivism in expressing
religious experience.
If, finally, you were to ask me what kind of value I attach to
Jewish mysticism, I would say this: Authoritative Jewish theology,
both mediaeval and modern, in representatives like Saadia, Maimon-
ides and Hermann Cohen, has taken upon itself the task of formu-
lating an antithesis to pantheism and mythical theology, i. e.: to
prove them wrong. In this endeavour it has shown itself tireless.
What is really required, however, is an understanding of these
phenomena which yet does not lead away from monotheism; and
once their significance is grasped, that elusive something in them
which may be of value must be clearly defined. ‘To have posed this
problem is the historic achievement of Kabbalism. The varying
answers it supplied to the question may be as inadequate as you
like; I shall certainly be the last to deny that its representatives
often lost their way and went over the edge of the precipice. But
the fact remains that they faced a problem which others were more
concerned to ignore and which is of the greatest importance for
Jewish theology.
The particular forms of symbolical thought in which the fun-
damental attitude of the Kabbalah found its expression, may mean
little or nothing to us (though even today we cannot escape, at
times, from their powerful appeal). But the attempt to discover the
hidden life beneath the external shapes of reality and to make visi-
ble that abyss in which the symbolic nature of all that exists reveals
itself: this attempt is as important for us today as it was for those
ancient mystics. For as long as nature and man are conceived as His
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF JEWISH MYSTICISM 39
creations, and that is the indispensable condition of highly devel-
oped religious life, the quest for the hidden life of the transcendent
element in such creation will always form one of the most impor-
tant preoccupations of the human mind.
SECOND LECTURE
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM
1
The first phase in the development of Jewish mysticism before
its crystallization in the mediaeval Kabbalah is also the longest. Its
literary remains are traceable over a ‘period of almost a thousand
years, from the first century B.c. to the tenth A.p., and some of
its important records have survived. In spite of its length, and not-
withstanding the fluctuations of the historical process, there is every
justification for treating it as a single distinct phase. Between the
physiognomy of early Jewish mysticism and that of mediaeval Kab-
balism there is a difference which time has not effaced. It is not my
intention here to follow the movement through its various stages,
from its early beginnings in the period of the Second Temple to its
gradual decline and disappearance. To do so would involve a
lengthy excursion into historical and philological detail, much
of which has not yet been sufficiently clarified. What I propose
to do is to analyze the peculiar realm of religious experience which
is reflected in the more important documents of the period. I do
not, therefore, intend to give much space to hypotheses concerning
the origins of Jewish mysticism and its relation to Graeco-Oriental
syncretism, fascinating though the subject be. Nor am I going to
deal with the many pseudepigraphic and apocalyptic works such
as the Ethiopic Book of Enoch and the Fourth Book of Ezra, which
undoubtedly contain elements of Jewish mystical religion. Their
influence on the subsequent development of Jewish mysticism can-
not be overlooked, but in the main I shall confine myself to the
analysis of writings to which little attention has hitherto been given
in the literature on Jewish religious history.
In turning our attention to this subject, we are at once made
aware of the unfortunate fact that practically nothing is known
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 41
about those who espoused the oldest organized movement of Jewish
mysticism in late Talmudic and post-Talmudic times, i.e. the period
from which the most illuminating documents have come down to
us. Like the authors of the Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,
they have generally followed the practice of concealing their identity
behind the great names of the past. There is little hope that we
shall ever learn the true identity of the men who were the first to
make an attempt, still recognizable and describable, to invest Juda-
ism with the glory of mystical splendor.
It is only by accident that certain names from among the mystics
of the later period have been preserved. Thus we hear of Joseph
ben Abba who was head of the rabbinical academy of Pumbeditha
around 814, and who is said to have been versed in mystical lore.*
Another name which occurs with some frequency is that of Aaron
ben Samuel, of Baghdad, the “father of mysteries.” Although his
individuality disappears behind an iridescent haze of legends there
is no doubt that he was instrumental in bringing a knowledge of
the mystical tradition, such as it had by that time become in Meso-
potamia, to Southern Italy, and thence to the Jews of Europe.’ But
these are men of the ninth century, that is to say of a time when
this particular form of mysticism was already fully developed and,
in certain respects, even on the decline: For its classical period, ap-
proximately from the fourth to the sixth,century, we are left com-
pletely in the dark as to the leading figures. It is true that we know
the names of some of the Talmudic authorities of the fourth cen-
tury who made a study of the secret doctrine—men like Rava and
his contemporary, Aha ben Jacob—but we have no means of know-
ing whether they were in any way connected with the groups of
Jewish gnostics whose writings are in our hands.
Palestine was the cradle of the movement, that much is certain.
We also know the names of the most important representatives of
mystical and theosophical thought among the teachers of the Mish-
nah. They belonged to a group of the pupils of Johanan ben Zakkai,
around the turn of the first century a.p. There is good reason to
believe that important elements of this spiritual tradition were
kept alive in small esoteric circles; the writers who, at the end of
the Talmudic epoch, attempted a synthesis of their new religious
faith and thereby laid the foundations of an entirely new literature,
appear to have received important suggestions from this quarter.
42 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
As we have seen, these writers no longer appear under their own
names, but under those of Johanan ben Zakkai, Eliezer ben Hyr-
kanus, Akiba ben Joseph, and Ishmael the “High Priest.’* These
authentic personages are at the same time introduced as the chief
characters of their writings, the “heroes” of mystical action, the
keepers and trustees of secret wisdom. Not all of this is mere
romancing, but it is impossible to treat the bulk of it as
authentic. A good deal undoubtedly pertains to later stages of
development in which older motifs have acquired a new signifi-
cance or revealed new aspects. If the roots in many cases go far
back, they do not necessarily go back to these orthodox rabbinic
teachers of the Mishnaic period. Subterranean but effective, and
occasionally still traceable, connections exist between these later
mystics and the groups which produced a large proportion of the
pseudepigrapha and apocalypses of the first century before and after
Christ. Subsequently a good deal of this unrecognized tradition
made its way to later generations independent of, and often in
isolation from, the schools and academies of the Talmudic teachers.
We know that in the period of the Second Temple an esoteric
doctrine was already taught in Pharisaic circles. The first chapter
of Genesis, the story of Creation (Maaseh Bereshith), and the first
chapter of Ezekiel, the vision of God’s throne-chariot (the ‘“Merka-
bah”), were the favorite subjects of discussion and interpretation
which it was apparently considered inadvisable to make public.
Originally these discussions were restricted to the elucidation and
exposition of the respective Biblical passages.‘ Thus St. Jerome in
one of his letters mentions a Jewish tradition which forbids the
study of the beginning and the end of the Book of Ezekiel before
the completion of the thirtieth year.‘ It seems probable, however,
that speculation did not remain restricted to commentaries on the
Biblical text. ‘The hayoth, the “living creatures’, and other objects
of Ezekiel’s vision were conceived as angels who form an angelo-
logic hierarchy at the Celestial Court. As long as our knowledge is°
confined to the meagre fragmentary material scattered across dif-
ferent parts of the Talmud and the Midrashim we shall probably
be unable to say how much of this was mystical and theosophical
speculation in the strict sense. It is a well-known fact that the editor
of the Mishnah, the patriarch Jehudah “the Saint,” a pronounced
rationalist, did all he could to exclude references to the Merkabah,
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 43
the angelology, etc. A good deal of this material has been preserved
in a second Mishnah collection, the so-called Tosefta, and it is from
this and from other fragments that we are able to draw some in-
ferences concerning the character of these speculations.
Our task in this respect would undoubtedly be considerably fa-
cilitated if we could be sure that certain apocryphal works written
around similar themes, such as the Book of Enoch or the Apocalypse
of Abraham*’—to mention only some of the most outstanding— re-
produce the essentials of the esoteric doctrine taught by the teachers
of the Mishnah; but it is precisely here that we are left in the dark.
Although an immense literature has grown up on the subject of
these apocrypha, the truth is that no one knows for certain to what
extent they reflect views shared by Mishnaic authorities. Be that as
it may—and even granted that it may be possible to trace the influ-
ence of the Essenes in some of these writings—one fact remains cer-
tain: the main subjects of the later Merkabah mysticism already
occupy a central position in this oldest esoteric literature, best rep-
resented by the Book of Enoch. The combination of apocalyptic
with theosophy and cosmogony is emphasized almost to excess: ‘‘Not
only have the seers perceived the celestial hosts, heaven with its
angels, but the whole of this apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic liter-
ature is shot through with a chain of new revelations concerning
the hidden glory of the great Majesty, its throne, its palace .. . the
celestial spheres towering up one over the other, paradise, hell, and
the containers of the souls.’"—This is entirely correct and by itself
sufficient to prove the essential continuity of thought concerning
the Merkabah in all its three stages: the anonymous conventicles
“of the old apocalyptics; the Merkabah speculation of the Mishnaic
teachers who are known to us by name; and the Merkabah mysti-
cisnt of late and post-Talmudic times, as reflected in the literature
which has come down to us. We are dealing here with a religious
movement of distinctive character whose existence conclusively
disproves the old prejudice according to which all the productive
religious energies of early apocalyptic were absorbed by and into
Christianity after the latter's rise.)
2
What was the central theme of these oldest of mystical doctrines
within the framework of Judaism? No doubts are possible on this
44 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
point: the earliest Jewish mysticism is throne-mysticism. Its essence
is not absorbed contemplation of God’s true nature, but perception
of His appearance on the throne, as described by Ezekiel, and cog-
nition of the mysteries of the celestial throne-world. The throne-
world is to the Jewish mystic what the pleroma, the “fullness”, the
bright sphere of divinity with its potencies, aeons, archons and
dominions is to the Hellenistic and early Christian mystics of the
period who appear in the history of religion under the names of
Gnostics and Hermetics. The Jewish mystic, though guided by
motives similar to theirs, nevertheless expresses his vision in terms
of his own religious background. God’s pre-existing throne, which
embodies and exemplifies all forms of creation,’ is at once the goal
and the theme of his mystical vision. From the fourteenth chapter
of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, which contains the oldest descrip-
tion of the throne in the whole of this literature, a long succession
of mystical documents of the most varied character’ leads to the
ecstatic descriptions of the throne-world in the tracts of the Merka-
bah visionaries to which we must now turn our attention. From
the interpretation of the throne-world as the true centre of all mysti-
cal contemplation it is possible to deduce most of the concepts and
doctrines of these ancient mystics. The following is therefore an
excursion through the manifold variations on the one theme which
forms their common point of departure.
The outstanding documents of the movement appear to have been
edited in the fifth and sixth centuries when its spirit was still alive
and vigorous. It is difficult to establish exact dates for the various
writings, but everything points to the period before the expansion of
Islam.” The world reflected in this literature has evoked in the
mind of more than one scholar comparisons with the pattern of
Byzantine society. But there is no reason for assuming that the
descriptions of the celestial throne and the heavenly court simply
reflect the mundane reality of the Byzantine or Sassanid court, if
only because the roots of their central theme go much too far back
for such an hypothesis. At the same time there can be no reasonable
doubt that the atmosphere of these writings is in harmony with
contemporary political and social conditions.
All our material is in the form of brief tracts, or scattered frag-
ments of varying length from what may have been voluminous
works; in addition there is a good deal of almost shapeless literary
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 45
raw material. Much of this literature has not yet been published,”
and the history of many texts still await clarification. Most of the
tracts are called ‘‘Hekhaloth Books,” i. e., descriptions of the hekha-
loth, the heavenly halls or palaces through which the visionary
passes and in the seventh and last of which there rises the throne
of divine glory. One of them, whose title, “Book of Enoch”, appears
to belong to a very late period, was edited in 1928 by the
Swedish scholar Hugo Odeberg.” Of still greater importance
than this book are the so-called “Greater Hekhaloth” and ‘Lesser
Hekhaloth”. The Hebrew text of both tracts is available unfor-
tunately only in very corrupt editions” which still await a critical
edition as much as a translation. If this task were undertaken, a
good deal of light would be thrown on a startling and remarkable
chapter in the history of ancient Gnosticism. In the present context,
with our chief interest restricted to the ideas of the mystics who
were the authors of these writings, there is no room for a discussion
of the rather intricate questions connected with the probable origin
and composition of these texts. My own views on this subject are
rather different from the very scholarly interpretation put forward
by Odeberg.
The so-called “Third Book of Enoch,” which Odeberg attributes
to the third century, appears to me to belong to a later period than
the “Greater Hekhaloth.’”™* The latter in their turn come after the
“Lesser Hekhaloth,” the oldest text available to us,” in which Rabbi
Akiba appears as the principal speaker. The texts of the “Greater
Hekhaloth”, with Rabbi Ishmael as the speaker, are made up of
several different strata. They even include a compilation of materials
—particularly in chapters 17 to 23—which go back in part to the
second century; but in their present form, including certain apo-
calyptic revelations, they can hardly have been edited before the
sixth. Generally speaking, these documents reflect different stages of
development, although some of them may have coexisted with
others. A good deal of precious old material is whirled along in
this stream; not a few allusions to ideas apparently common in these
circles have no meaning for us. But what interests us chiefly, the
spiritual physiognomy and the religious mentality of these groups,
is clear and understandable enough.
In this connection one important point is to be noted: the most
important of these old tracts and compilations, such as the “Greater”
46 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
and ‘‘Lesser’’ Hekhaloth, are precisely those which are almost en-
tirely free from the exegetical element. These texts are not Midra-
shim, i.e. expositions of Biblical passages, but a literature sui generis
with a purpose of its own. ‘They are essentially descriptions of a
genuine religious experience for which no sanction is sought in the
Bible. In short, they belong in one class with the apocrypha and
the apocalyptic writings rather than with the traditional Midrash»
It is true that the vision of the celestial realm which forms their
main theme originally proceeded from an attempt to transform
what is casually alluded to in the Bible into direct personal experi-
ence; similarly, the basic categories of thought which appear in the
description of the Merkabah are derived from the same Biblical
source. But for all that, one meets here with an entirely new and
independent spiritual and religious mood; only in the later stages
of the movement, probably corresponding with its gradual decline,
do the writings show a return to exegesis for its own sake.
The descriptions given to the contemplation of God’s “Glory”
and the celestial throne employ a terminology which has varied in
the course of the centuries. In the period of the Mishnah, reference
is usually made to a theosophic “Study of the Glory” or an “Under-
standing of the Glory’; we even find the curious term ‘‘Employ-
ment of the Glory,” in connection with Rabbi Akiba, who was
found worthy of it.” Later, the Hekhaloth tracts usually speak of
the Wision of the Merkabah.’”” The sphere of the throne, the
“Merkabah,” has its “chambers,’” and, later on, its “palaces” —a
conception foreign to Ezekiel and the earlier writers generally.
According to an Aggadic tradition from the fourth century, Isaac
had a vision on Moriah, at the moment when Abraham was about
to perform the sacrifice, in which his soul perceived the “Chambers
of the Merkabah.’”™ At different times the visionary experience was
also interpreted differently,] In the early literature, the writers al-
ways speak of an “ascent to the Merkabah,” a pictorial analogy
which has come to seem natural to us. The “Lesser Hekhaloth’®
emphasize this “ascent”, and the same term recurs in a few out-of-
the-way passages of the “Greater Hekhaloth,’” and in the introduc-
tion to the “Book of Enoch”. But for reasons which have become
obscure, the whole terminology had in the meantime undergone a
change—it is difficult to say exactly when, probably around 500.
In the “Greater Hekhaloth,” which are of such importance for our
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 47
analysis, and from then on in almost all the later writings, the
visionary journey of the soul to heaven is always referred to as the
“descent to the Merkabah.” The paradoxical character of this term
is all the more remarkable because the detailed description of the
mystical process nonetheless consistently employs the metaphor of
ascent and not of descent. The mystics of this group call them-
selves Yorde Merkabah, i. e. “descenders to the Merkabah’” (and
not “Riders in the Chariot,” as some translators would have it),”
and this name is also given to them by others throughout the whole
literature down to a late period. The authors of the “Greater
Hekhaloth” refer to the existence of these Yorde Merkabah as a
group with some sort of organization and identify them in the usual
legendary fashion with the circle of Johanan ben Zakkai and his
disciples. Since the ‘‘Greater Hekhaloth” contain Palestinian as well
as Babylonian elements—the earliest chapters in particular bear
unmistakable traces, in their subject-matter as well as their style,
of Palestinian influence—it is not inconceivable that the organiza-
tion of these groups did indeed take place in late Talmudic times
(fourth or fifth century) on Palestinian soil. As a matter of ascer-
tained fact, however, we only know of their existence in Babylonia,
from where practically all mystical tracts of this particular variety
made their way to Italy and Germany; it is these tracts that have
come down to us in the form of manuscripts written in the late
Mjddle Ages.
<To repeat, we are dealing with organized groups which foster
and hand down a certain tradition: with a school of mystics who are
not peepared to reveal their secret knowledge, their ‘Gnosis,’ to the
public, Too great was the danger, in this period of ubiquitous
Jewisle and Christian heresies, that mystical speculation based on
private religious experience would come into conflict with that “rab-
binical” Judaism which was rapidly crystallizing during the same
epoch.” The “Greater Hekhaloth” show in many and often highly
interesting details” that their anonymous authors were anxious to
develop their ‘Gnosis’ within the frame-work of Halakhic Judaism,
notwithstanding its partial incompatibility with the new religious
spirit; the original religious impulses active in these circles came,
after all, from sources quite different from those of orthodox
Judaism.
One result of this peculiar situation was the establishment of
48 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
~
‘certain conditions of admission into the circle of the Merkabah
mystics. The Talmudic sources already mention certain stipulations,
albeit of a very general character, in accordance with which admis-
sion to the knowledge of theosophical doctrines and principles is
made conditional on the possession of certain moral qualities. Only
a “court president” or one belonging to the categories of men named
in Isaiah 11, 3 is found worthy of obtaining insight into the tradi-
tion of Merkabah mysticism. Chapter 13 of the “Greater Hekha-
loth” lists eight moral requisites of initiation. In addition, however,
we find physical criteria which have nothing to do with the moral
or social status of the acolyte; in particular the novice is judged in
accordance with physiognomic and chiromantic criteria—a novel
procedure which appears to have been stimulated by the renaissance
of Hellenistic physiognomics in the second century A.D.
Apart from being a criterion for the admission of novices,
physiognomy and chiromancy also figure in Hekhaloth mysticism as
a subject of esoteric knowledge among the adepts. It is therefore
not surprising that several manuscripts have retained a sort of intro-
duction in the form of a chiromantic fragment”—incidentally the
oldest chiromantic document known to us, since no Assyrian or
Graeco-Roman texts of this kind have been preserved.” This pre-
amble to the other Hekhaloth books interprets the significance of
the favorable or unfavorable lines of the human hand, without
reference to astrology but on the basis of a fixed terminology which
to us is frequently obscure. One is perhaps justified in regarding the
appearance of these new criteria as a parallel to the growth of neo-
Platonic mysticism in the Orient during the fourth century. (It is
characteristic of this period that Jamblichus, in his biography of
Pythagoras—a book which throws a good deal more light on the
period of its writing than on its subject-matter—asserts that entry
into the Pythagorean school was conditional upon the possession of
certain physiognomic characteristics.*) ‘The above mentioned frag-
ment, in which the angel Suriyah reveals to Ishmael—one of the
two principal figures of our Hekhaloth tracts—the secrets of chir-
omancy and physiognomy, has a title taken from Isaiah 11, 9:
Hakkarath Panim, i. e. “perception of the face,” and in fact this
passage from Isaiah first received a physiognomic interpretation in
the fourth century, as a Talmudic reference to the subject shows.”
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 49
> 3
~Those who passed the test were considered worthy to make the
“descent’”’ to the Merkabah which led them, after many trials and
dangers, through the seven heavenly palaces, and before that
through the heavens, their preparation, their technique, and the
description of what is perceived on the voyage, arg the subject-
matter of the writings with which we are concerned...
Originally, we have here a Jewish variation on one of the chief
preoccupations of the second and third century gnostics and herme-
tics: the ascent of the soul from the earth, through the spheres of the
hostile planet-angels and rulers of the cosmos, and its return to its
divine home in the “fullness” of God’s light, a return which, to the
gnostic’s mind, signified Redemption. Some scholars consider this
to be the central idea of Gnosticism.” Certainly the description of
this journey, of which a particularly impressive account is found
in the second part of the “Greater Hekhaloth,’™ is in all its details
of a character which must be called gnostic.
oe
This mystical ascent is always preceded by ascetic practices
whose duration in some cases is twelve days, in others forty. An ac-
count of these practices was given about 1000 a.p. by Hai ben
Sherira, the head of a Babylonian academy. According to him,
“many scholars were of the belief that one who is distinguished by
many qualities described in the books and who is desirous of be-
holding the Merkabah and the palaces of the angels on high, must
follow a certain procedure. He must fast a number of days and lay
his head between his knees and whisper many hymns and songs
whose texts are known from tradition. Then he perceives the in-
terior and the chambers, as if he saw the seven palaces with his own
eyes, and it is as though he entered one palace after the other and
saw what is there.”” The typical bodily posture of these ascetics is
also that of Elijah in his prayer on Mount Carmel. It is an attitude
of deep self-oblivion which, to judge from certain ethnological
parallels, is favorable to the induction of pre-hypnotic autosug-
gestion. Dennys™ gives a very similar description of a Chinese som-
nambulist in the act of conjuring the spirits of the departed: ‘‘She
sits down on a low chair and bends forward so that her head rests
on her knees. Then, in a deep measured voice, she repeats three
times an exorcism, whereupon a certain change appears to come
50 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
over her.” In the Talmud, too, we find this posture described as
typical of the self-oblivion of a Hanina ben Dosa sunk in prayer,
or of a penitent who gives himself over to God.”
Finally, after such preparations, and in a state of ecstasy, the
adept begins his journey. The “Greater Hekhaloth” do not describe
the details of his ascent through the seven heavens, but they do des-
cribe his voyage through the seven palaces situated in the highest
heaven. The place of the gnostical rulers (archons) of the seven
planetary spheres, who are opposed to the liberation of the soul
from its earthly bondage and whose resistance the soul must over-
come, is taken in this Judaized and monotheistic Gnosticism by the
hosts of “‘gate-keepers” posted to the right and left of the entrance
to the heavenly hall through which the soul must pass in its ascent.
In both cases, the soul requires a pass in order to be able to continue
its journey without danger: a magic seal made of a secret name.
which puts the demons and hostile angels to flight. Every new stage
of the ascension requires a new seal with which the traveller “seals
himself” in order that, to quote a fragment, “‘he shall not be dragged
_ into the fire and the flame, the vortex and the storm which are
around Thee, oh Thou terrible and sublime.” The ‘Greater He-
khaloth” have preserved a quite pedantic description of this passport
procedure;” all the seals and the secret names are derived from the
Merkabah itself where they “‘stand like pillars of flame around the
fiery throne” of the Creator.”
It is the soul’s need for protection on its journey which has
produced these seals with their twin function as a protective armour
and as a magical weapon. At first the magical protection of a single
seal may be sufficient, but as time goes on the difficulties experi-
enced by the adept tend to become greater. A brief and simple
formula is no longer enough. Sunk in his ecstatic trance, the mystic
at the same time experiences a sense of frustration which he tries
to overcome by using longer and more complicated magical for-
mulae, symbols of a longer and harder struggle to pass the closed
entrance gates which block his progress. As his psychical energy
wanes the magical strain grows and the conjuring gesture becomes
progressively more strained, until in the end whole pages are filled
with an apparently meaningless recital of magical key-words with
which he tries to unlock the closed door.
It is this fact which explains the abundance of magical elements
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 5l
in many of the Hekhaloth texts. Such voces mysticae are particu-
larly prominent in the unedited texts. Already the oldest documents
of all, the “Lesser Hekhaloth’’, are full of them; nor is this surpris-
ing, for shadowy elements of this kind, so far from being later addi-
tions or signs of spiritual decadence—a prejudice dear to the modern
mind—belong to the very core of their particular religious system.
This fact has been placed beyond doubt by modern research into
the history of Hellenistic syncretism, where we find, in the Greek
and Coptic magical papyri written in Egypt under the Roman Em-
pire, the closest and most indissoluble union of religious fervor
and mystical ecstasy with magical beliefs and practices. These magi-
cal interpolations have their proper and natural place in the texts
only to the extent that magical rites were actually practised. Every
secret name seemed to provide a further piece of protective armour
against the demons—up to the point where the magical energy was
no longer sufficient to overcome the obstacles which blocked the way
to the Merkabah. This point is really the end of the movement as
a living force; from then on it degenerates into mere literature. It
is therefore not surprising that the tracts in our possession clearly
reflect two different stages: an older one, in which the movement
is still a living reality and in which, therefore, the seals and secret
names occupy an important place; and a second phase, in which
the process of degeneration has set in and for this very reason the
study of the texts presents few difficulties. In this second stage the
magical contents cease to represent a psychical reality and are
gradually eliminated; in this way the old texts are gradually re-
placed by a new devotional literature, at once stilted and lyrical,
which employs the elements of the original Merkabah mysticism. In
our case, the first stage is represented by the “Greater” and ‘Lesser’
Hekhaloth. ‘The second includes the numerous texts of the ‘‘Midrash
of the Ten Martyrs” and the “Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba,’ both of
them writings which were particularly popular among the Jews of
the Middle Ages.
The dangers of the ascent through the palaces of the Merkabah
sphere are great, particularly for those who undertake the journey
without the necessary preparation, let alone those who are unworthy
of its object. As the journey progresses, the dangers become pro-
gressively greater. Angels and archons storm against the traveller ‘in
order to drive him out’;“ a fire which proceeds from his own body
52 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
threatens to devour him.“ In the Hebrew Book of Enoch there is
an account of the description given by the Patriarch to Rabbi
Ishmael of his own metamorphosis into the angel Metatron, when
his flesh was transformed into “fiery torches.” According to the
“Greater Hekhaloth,” every mystic must undergo this transforma-
tion, but with the difference that, being less worthy than Enoch, he
is in danger of being devoured by the “fiery torches.” This transi-
tion through the opening stage of the process of mystical transfigu-
ration is an ineluctable necessity. According to another fragment,
the mystic must be able to stand upright “without hands and feet,”
both having been burned.“ This standing without feet in bottom-
less space is mentioned elsewhere as a characteristic experience of
many ecstatics; a mystical stage closely approximating to it is re-
ferred to in the Apocalypse of Abraham.*
But the most remarkable passage of all is the interpretation given
already in the “Lesser Hekhaloth” of a famous fragment which Is
found in the Talmud and the Tosefta. This little story is included
in the few pages of the Treatise Hagigah which the Talmud devotes
to the subject of contemporary mysticism:“ “Four entered ‘Paradise’:
Ben Azai, Ben Zoma, Aher and Rabbi Akiba. Rabbi Akiba spoke
to them: ‘When you come to the place of the shining marble plates,
then do not say: Water, water! For it is written: He that telleth lies
shall not tarry in my sight’.
Modern interpretations of this famous passage, which clearly
enough refers to a real danger in the process of ascending to ‘Para-
dise,"* are extremely far-fetched and not a little irrational in their
determination at all costs to preserve the characteristic essentials of
rationalism. We are told“ that the passages refers to cosmological
speculations about the materia prima, an explanation which lacks
all plausibility and finds no support in the context or in the subject-
matter itself. The fact is that the later Merkabah mystics showed a
perfectly correct understanding of the meaning of this passage, and
their interpretation offers striking proof that the tradition of Tan-
naitic mysticism and theosophy was really alive among them, al-
though certain details may have originated in a later period. The
following quotation is taken from the Munich manuscript of the
Hekhaloth texts: ‘‘But if one was unworthy to see the King in his
beauty, the angels at the gates disturbed his senses and confused
him. And when they said to him: ‘Come in,’ he entered, and in-
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 53
stantly they pressed him and threw him into the fiery lava stream.
And at the gate of the sixth palace it seemed as though hundreds of
thousands and millions of waves of water stormed against him, and
yet there was not a drop of water, only the ethereal glitter of the
marble plates with which the palace was tessellated. But he was
standing in front of the angels and when he asked: ‘What is the
meaning of these waters,’ they began to stone him and said: ‘Wretch,
do you not see it with your own eyes? Are you perhaps a descendant
of those who kissed the Golden Calf, and are you unworthy to see
the King in his beauty?’ . . . And he does not go until they strike
his head with iron bars and wound him. And this shall be a sign for
all times that no one shall err at the gate of the sixth palace and
see the ethereal glitter of the plates and ask about them and take
them for water, that he may not endanger himself.”
Thus the text. The authenticity of the story’s core, the ecstatic’s
vision of water, hardly requires proof. Nothing could be more far-
fetched than to treat it as a post festum interpretation of the Tal-
mudic passage; there is no reason whatsoever to doubt that the
mystical experience of the dangers of the ascent is really the subject
of the anecdote.“ Similar dangers are described in the so-called
“Liturgy of Mithras” contained in the great magical papyrus of
Paris,” where the description of the mystical ascent shows many
parallels of detail and atmosphere with the account given in the
“Greater Hekhaloth.”
Particularly vivid descriptions are given in the “Greater Hekh-
aloth” of the last stages of the ascent, the passage through the sixth
and seventh gates. These descriptions, however, are not uniform but
appear rather to be a compilation of various documents and tra-
ditions concerning the relevant experiences of the Merkabah mystic.
The discussions between the traveller and the gate-keepers of the
sixth palace, the archons Domiel and Katspiel, which take up a
good deal of space, clearly date back to very early times. One of
their more unexpected features is the recurrence of rudiments of
certain Greek formulae and standing expressions, which the editors
in Babylonia were not longer capable of understanding and ap-
parently regarded as magical names of the divinity.” The fact that
the original Merkabah mystics in Palestine prescribed the use of
specific Greek formulae for certain occasions deserves special atten-
tion. It is difficult to say whether it indicates a concrete influence
54 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
of Hellenistic religion, or whether the employment of Greek words
by the Aramaic-speaking Jewish mystics is merely analogous to the
predilection for Hebraic or pseudo-Hebraic formulae characteristic
of the Greek-speaking circles for whom the Egyptian magical papyri
were written.
[The idea of the seven heavens through which the soul ascends
to its original home, either after death or in a state of ecstasy while
the body is still alive, is certainly very old. In an obscure and some-
what distorted form it is already to be found in old apocrypha such
as the Fourth Book of Ezra or the Ascension of Isaiah, which is
based on a Jewish text.” In the same way, the ancient ‘Talmudic
account of the seven heavens, their names and their contents, al-
though apparently purely cosmological, surely presupposes an ascent
of the soul to the throne in the seventh heaven.” Such descriptions
of the seven heavens, plus a list of the names of their archons, have
also come down to us from the school of the Merkabah mystics in
the post-Mishnaic period. It is precisely here that we still find an
entirely esoteric doctrine. ‘Thus for example in the “Visions of
Ezekiel”, which have recently become known,” Ezekiel sees the seven
heavens with their seven Merkabahs reflected in the waters of the
Chebar river. This form of speculation about seven Merkabahs cor-
responding to the seven heavens is still innocent of any mention
of Hekhaloth, or chambers, of the Merkabah. Possibly both concep-
tions were known to different groups or schools of the same period.
In any event, the second variant gradually became the dominant —
one
ah 4
This idea of the seven Hekhaloth transforms the old cosmo-
logical conception of the world structure revealed during the ascent
into a description of the divine hierachy: the traveller in search of
God, like the visitor at Court, must pass through endless magnificent
halls and chambers. ‘This change of emphasis, like other important
aspects of the mystical system to which it belongs, appears to me to
be connected with the fundamental religious experience of these
mystics, namely, the decisive importance which they assigned to the
interpretation of God as King. We are dealing here with a Judaized
form of cosmocratorial mysticism concerning the divine King (or
Emperor). This form of adoration takes first place, and cosmological
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 55
mysticism is relegated to the writings concerned with the creation of
the world, the commentaries to Maaseh Bereshith. Not without good
reason has Graetz called the religious belief of the Merkabah mystic
“Basileomorphism.”
This point needs to be stressed, for it makes clear the enormous
gulf between the gnosticism of the Hekhaloth and that of the
Hellenistic mystics. There are many parallels between the two, but
there is a radical difference in the conception of God. In the Hekha-
loth, God is above all King, to be precise, Holy King. This concep-
tion reflects a change in the religious consciousness of the Jews—
not only the mystics—for which documentary evidence exists in the
liturgy of the period. The aspects of God which are really relevant
to the religious feeling of the epoch are His majesty and the aura of
sublimity and solemnity which surrounds Him.
On the other han i lete absence of any sentiment
of divine i J. Abelson has made a valuable contribution
to the understanding of the subject in his ‘“Immanence of God in
Rabbinical Literature,” where he has devoted a particularly search-
ing analysis to the theory offthe Shekhinah, God’s “immanence” or
“indwelling” in the world in the literature of the Aggadah. Quite
rightly he has stressed the connection between these ideas and cer-
tain mystical conceptions which have played a part in the later
development of Jewish mysticism.” But in the Merkabah mysticism
_ with which we are dealing here, the idea of the Shekhinah and of
God’s immanence plays practically no part at all. The one passage
in the “Greater Hekhaloth’” which has been adduced as proof of
the existence of such conceptions is based on an obviously corrupt
text.” The fact is that the true and spontaneous feeling of the
Merkabah mystic knows nothing of divine immanence; the infinite
gulf between the soul and God the King on His throne is not even
pettecd at the climax of mystical ecstasy.
2Not only is there for the mystic no divine immanence, there is
————
also almost no love of God. What there is of love in the relationship
between the Jewish mystic and his God belongs to a much later
period and has nothing to do with our present subject., Ecstasy
there was, and this fundamental experience must have beeh | a source
of religious inspiration, but we find no trace of a mystical union
| between the soul and God. Throughout there remained an almost
exaggerated consciousness of God’s otherness, nor does the identity
56 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
and individuality of the mystic become blurred even at the height
of ecstatic passion. The Creator and His creature remain apart, and
nowhere is an attempt made to bridge the gulf between them or to
blur the distinction. The mystic who in his ecstasy has passed
through all the gates, braved all the dangers, now stands before the
throne; he sees and hears—but that is all. All the emphasis is laid
on the kingly aspect of God, not his creative one, although the two
belong together and the second, as we shall see, even becomes, in
a certain perspective of this mysticism, the dominant one. True, the
mysteries of creation and the hidden connection between all things
existing in the universe are among the riddles whose solution is of
deep interest to the authors of the Hekhaloth tracts. There are some
references to them in the description of the Merkabah vision; thus
the “Greater Hekhaloth” give promise of the revelation of ‘‘the
mysteries and wonderful secrets of the tissue on which the perfection
of the world and its course depends, and the chain of heaven and
earth along which all the wings of the universe and the wings of
the heavenly heights are connected, sewn together, made fast and
hung up.’”™ But the promise is not carried out, the secret not re-
vealed. The magnificence and majesty of God, on the other hand,
this experience of the Yorde Merkabah which overwhelms and over-
shadows all the others, is not only heralded but also described with
an abundance of detail and almost to excess.
Strange and sometimes obscure are the names given to God, the
King who thrones in His glory. We find names such as Zoharariel,
Adiriron, Akhtariel,“” and Totrossiyah (or Tetrassiyah, i. e. the
Tetras or fourfoldness of the letters of God’s name YHWHp?"),
names which to the mystics may have signified various aspects of
God’s glory. In this context it is well to remember that the chief
peculiarity of this form of mysticism, its emphasis on God’s might
and magnificence, opens the door to the transformation of mysti-
cism into theurgy; there the master of the secret “names” himself
takes on the exercise of power in the way described in the various
magical and theurgical procedures of which this literature is full.
The language of the theurgist conforms to that of the Merkabah
mystic. Both are dominated by the attributes of power and sub-
limity, not love or tenderness. It is entirely characteristic of the out-
look of these believers that the theurgist, in adjuring the ‘Prince
of Divine Presence,” summons the archons as “Princes of Majesty,
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 57
Fear and Trembling.’” Majesty, Fear and Trembling are indeed
the key-words to this Open Sesame of religion.
5
The most important sources for our understanding of this at-
mosphere are undoubtedly the numerous prayers and hymns which
have been preserved in the Hekhaloth tracts.” Tradition ascribes
them to inspiration, for, according to the mystics, they are nothing
but the hymns sung by the angels, even by the throne itself, in
praise of God. In chapter 1v of the “Greater Hekhaloth,” in which
these hymns occupy an important place, we find an account of how
Rabbi Akiba, the prototype of the Merkabah visionary, was in-
spired to hear them sung at the very throne of glory before which
his soul was standing. Conversely, their recitation serves to induce
a state of ecstasy and accompanies the traveller on his journey
through the gates. Some of these hymns are simply adjurations of
God; others take the form of dialogues between God and the heav-
enly dwellers, and descriptions of the Merkabah sphere. It would
be vain to look for definite religious doctrines, to say nothing of
mystical symbols, in these hymns which belong to the oldest prod-
ucts of synagogal poetry, the so-called piyut. Often they are curiously
bare of meaning, and yet the impression they create is a profound
one.
Rudolf Otto in his celebrated book “The Idea of the Holy” has
stressed the difference between a purely rational glorification of
God, in which everything is clear, definite, familiar and compre-
hensible, and one which touches the springs of the irrational, or
the “numinous”, as he calls it, one which tries to reproduce in words
the mg#sterium tremendum, the awful mystery that surrounds God's
majesty. Otto” has called compositions of this latter sort “numinous
hymns.” The Jewish liturgy, and not only that of the mystics, con-
tains a great number of these; and from the Jewish liturgy Otto
himself has drawn some of the most important of his examples.
In the Hekhaloth books we have as it were a full treasure-house of
such numinous hymns.
The immense solemnity of their style, the bombast of their mag-
nificent phrases, reflects the fundamental paradoxy of these hymns:
the climax of sublimity and solemnity to which the mystic can at-
58 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the non plus ultra of vacuousness/Philipp Bloch, who was the first
to be deeply impressed by the ‘problem presented by these hymns,
speaks of their “plethora of purely pleonastic and unisonous words
which do not in the least assist the process of thought but merely
reflect the emotional struggle.”” But at the same time he shows
himself aware of the almost magical effect of this vacuous and yet
sublime pathos on those who are praying when, for example, hymns
composed in this spirit are recited on the Day of Atonement.” Per-
haps the most famous example of this kind is the litany haadereth
vehaemunah lehay olamim which is to be found—with a wealth of
variations—in the “Greater Hekhaloth” and has been included in
the liturgy of the High Holidays. Tl.e mediaeval commentators still
referred to it as the ‘Song of the Angels,’ and it is probable that it
called for the deepest devotion and solemnity on the part of those
who prayed. But a formal demand of this kind can hardly have
been necessary, for the mighty effect of these incomparably solemn
and at the same time infinitely vacuous hymns, i. e. their numinous
character, can be witnessed to this day in every synagogue. No
wonder that to this day this hymn is recited by many Hasidic Jews
every Sabbath among the morning prayers. The following is an
approximate translation of the text, which is entirely a medley of
praises of God and citations of the attributes that ‘“‘appertain to
Him who lives eternally’:®
tain in his attempt to express eS Philipp Blo of his vision is also
Excellence and faithfulness—are His who lives forever
Understanding and blessing—are His who lives forever
Grandeur and greatness—are His who lives forever
Cognition and expression—are His who lives forever
Magnificence and majesty—are His who lives forever
Counsel and strength—are His who lives forever
Lustre and brilliance—are His who lives forever
Grace and benevolence—are His who lives forever
Purity and goodness—are His who lives forever
Unity and honor—are His who lives forever
Crown and glory—are His who lives forever
Precept and practice—are His who lives forever
Sovereignty and rule—are His who lives forever
Adornment and permanence—are His who lives forever
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 59
Mystery and wisdom—are His who lives forever
Might and meekness—are His who lives forever
Splendor and wonder—are His who lives forever
Righteousness and honor—are His who lives forever
Invocation and holiness—are His who lives forever
Exultation and nobility—are His who lives forever
Song and hymn—are His who lives forever
Praise and glory—are His who lives forever
This—in its original language—is a classic example of an alphabet-
ical litany which fills the imagination of the devotee with splendid
concepts clothed in magnificent expression; the particular words do
not matter. To quote Bloch again: ‘The glorification of God is not
that of the psalm, which either describes the marvels of creation as
proof of the grandeur and the glory of the Creator, or stresses the
element of divine grace and guidance in the history of Israel as
throwing light on the wisdom and benevolence of Providence; it is
simply praise of God, and this praise is heaped and multiplied as if
there were a danger that some honorific might be forgotten.’
Another passage from a hymn to “Zoharariel, Adonai, God of
Israel,” in the “Greater Hekhaloth,” runs as follows:
His throne radiates before Him and His palace is full of
splendor.
His Majesty is becoming and His Glory is an adornment for
Him.
His servants sing before Him and proclaim the might of His
wonders,
as King of all kings and Master of all masters,
* encircled by rows of crowns, surrounded by the ranks of the
princes of splendor.
With a gleam of His ray he encompasses the sky
and His splendor radiates from the heights.
Abysses flame from His mouth and firmaments sparkle from
His body.
Almost all the hymns from the Hekhaloth tracts, particularly
those whose text has been preserved intact, reveal a mechanism com-
parable to the motion of an enormous fly-wheel. In cyclical rhythm
60 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the hymns succeed each other, and within them the adjurations of
God follow in a crescendo of glittering and majestic attributes,
each stressing and reinforcing the sonorous power of the world. The
monotony of their rhythm—almost all consist of verses of four words
—and the progressively sonorous incantations induce in those who
are praying a state of mind bordering on ecstasy. An important part
of this technique is the recurrence of the key-word of the numinous,
the kedushah, the trishagion from Isaiah vi, 3, in which the ecstasy
of the mystic culminates: holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. One
can hardly conceive of a more grandiose proof of the irresistible
influence which the conception of God’s kingdom exercised on the
consciousness of these mystics. The “holiness” of God, which they
are trying to paraphrase, is utterly transcendent of any moral mean-
ing and represents nothing but glory of His Kingdom. Through
various forms of the prayer known as the kedushah, this conception
has also found its way into the general Jewish liturgy and left its
imprint on it.”
In spite of the last mentioned fact, it cannot be denied that this
“polylogy”’, or verbiage, of the mystics, these magniloquent attempts
to catch a glimpse of God’s majesty and to preserve it in hymnical
form, stands in sharp contrast to the tendencies which already dur-
ing the Talmudical period dominated the outlook of the great
teachers of the Law. They could not but feel repelled by it, and in
the Talmud one early encounters a strong dislike for extravagant
enthusiasm in prayer, much as the Sermon on the Mount had at-
tacked the polylogy of the pagans, their effusive and wordy style.
Passages like the following read like an attack on the tendencies
reflected in the Hekhaloth tracts: “He who multiplies the praise of
God to excess shall be torn from the world.” Or: “In the presence
of Rabbi Hanina, one went to the praying-desk to say the prayer.
He said, ‘God, Thou great, strong, terrible, mighty, feared, power-
ful, real and adorable!’ He waited until the other had finished,
then he said to him: ‘Have you ended with the praise of your God?
What is the meaning of all this? It is as if one were to praise a king
of the world, who has millions of pieces of gold, for the possession
of a piece of silver.’ ”’®
But this resistance to an enthusiasm and a verbiage so different
from the classical simplicity and rationality of the fundamental
prayers of Jewish liturgy was of no avail. That much is clear not
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 61
only from the prayers and hymns of the Merkabah mystics, but also
from certain important parts of the liturgy proper whose spirit re-
flects the influence of the Yorde Merkabah. Bloch was the first to
point out that the community prayer in its final form, which it re-
ceived in late Talmudic and post-Talmudic times, represents a com-
promise between these two opposing tendencies. Some of these pray-
ers are indeed much older than was thought by Bloch, who has
overlooked certain passages of the Palestinian Talmud and at-
tributed every prayer which mentions the angels of the Merkabah
to the post-Talmudic period.” But since the mystical school of the
Yorde Merkabah is in general of much earlier origin than Zunz,
Graetz and Bloch assumed and may have been in existence in Pale-
stine during the fourth century, this fact presents no difficulty for
our contention.
hile the Merkabah hymns with which we are dealing hardly
go back beyond the fifth century, they continue a tradition already
visible in the throne mysticism and the apocalyptic of the Mishnaic
period\In the Apocalypse of Abraham, whose connection with the
Merkabah mysticism has also struck its English editor, G. H. Box,
the patriarch who ascends to the throne hears a voice speaking from
the celestial fire “like a voice of many waters, like the sound of the
sea in its uproar.” The same terms are used in the “Greater He-
khaloth” in describing the sound of the hymn of praise sung by the
“throne of Glory” to its King—“like the voice of the waters in the
rushing streams, like the waves of the ocean when the south wind
sets them in uproar.” The same apocalypse contains the song which
Abraham is taught by the angel who guides him on his way to hea-
ven—and this song is nothing but the hymn sung by the angels who
mount guard before the Throne.” Although the attributes of God
are iff some cases identical with those used in Greek and early
Christian prayers,” this hymn already has the numinous character
described above. God is praised as the Holy Being and also as the
supreme master; this is quite in harmony with the characteristic
outlook of these hymns, whether sung by the angels or by Israel,
in which the veneration of God the King blends imperceptibly
with the conjuring magic of the adept. The presentation of the
crown to God is almost the only act through which the devotee can
still bear witness to the religious destiny of man.
It is characteristic of these hymns that the traditional vocabu-
/
62 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
lary of the Hebrew language, although by no means restricted in
this field, no longer sufficed for the spiritual needs of the ecstatic
eager to express his vision of God’s majesty in words. ‘This is evident
from the large number of original and frequently bizarre phrases
and word combinations, sometimes entirely novel creations,” all
bearing a decidedly numinous character, and which perhaps mark
the beginning of the flood of new verbal creations to be found in
the oldest classics of Palestinian synagogal poetry since the seventh
century A.p. Thus, for example, the influence of the Merkabah
literature on Eleazar Kalir, the outstanding master of this school,
is obvious enough.
The extent to which in these circles the hymn was regarded as
the original language of the creature addressing itself to its Creator,
the extent, therefore, to which they had adopted the prophetic vision
of a redeemed world, in which all beings speak in hymns, is clear
from a brief tract called Perek Shirah, i. e. the chapter of the song
of creation.“ Here all beings are gifted with language for the sole
purpose that they may sing—in Biblical words—the praise of their
Creator. Originally known only among mystics, this poem gradually
made its way—against violent opposition, whose motives are not
clear"—into the liturgy of the daily prayers.
To sum up, it would appear that the Merkabah mystics were led
by logical steps in the direction of mystical prayer, without, how-
ever, having developed anything like a mystical theory of prayer.
One is perhaps justified in seeing a first step towards such a theory
in the characteristic exaggeration of the significance of Israel’s
prayer in the celestial realm. Only when Israel has sung may the
angels join in. One of them, Shemuiel, the “great archon,” stands
at the window of heaven as a mediator between the prayers of Israel,
which rise from below, and the denizens of the seventh heaven to
whom he transfers them." The angel who bears the name of Israel
stands in the centre of heaven and leads the heavenly choir with the
call, “God is King, God was King, God will ever be King.’”” But
great though the importance of prayer undoubtedly is for him, the
Merkabah mystic who pours out his heart in ecstatic and spontan-
eous hymns seeks no mysteries behind the words of prayer. The
ascent of the words has not yet substituted itself for the ascent of
the soul and of the devotee himself. The pure word, the as yet
unbroken summons stands for itself; it signifies nothing but what
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 63
it expresses. But it is not surprising that when the fire out of which
these prayers had streamed to heaven had burned low, a host of
nostalgic souls stirred the ashes, looking in vain for the spirit which
had departed.
6
We have seen that the God of the Merkabah mystics is the Holy
King who emerges from unknown worlds and descends “through 955
heavens’ to the throne of Glory. The mystery of this God in His
aspect of Creator of the universe is one of those exalted subjects of
esoteric knowledge which are revealed to the soul of the mystic in
its ecstatic ascent; it is of equal importance with the vision of the
celestial realm, the songs of the angels, and the structure of the
Merkabah. According to an account given in the “Greater Hekha-
loth”, which one is tempted to correlate with a similar passage at
the end of the Fourth Book of Ezra, it was even the custom to place
scribes or stenographers to the right and left of the visionary who
wrote down his ecstatic description of the throne and its occupants.”
That the mystic in his rapture even succeeded in penetrating beyond
the sphere of the angels is suggested in a passage which speaks of
“God who is beyond the sight of His creatures and hidden to the
angels who serve Him, but who has revealed Himself to Rabbi Akiba
in the vision of the Merkabah.’”
It is this new revelation, at once strange and forbidding, which
we encounter in the most paradoxical of all these tracts, the one
which is known under the name of Shiur Komah, literally trans-
lated, “Measure of the Body” (i. e. the body of God.)." From the
very beginning, the frank and almost provocative anthropomor-
phism of the Shiur Komah aroused the bitterest antagonism among
all Jéwish circles which held aloof from mysticism.” Conversely, all
the later mystics and Kabbalists came to regard its dark and obscure
language as a symbol of profound and penetrating spiritual vision.
The antagonism was mutual, for it is in this attitude towards
anthropomorphism that Jewish rational theology and Jewish mysti-
cism have parted company.
The fragment in question, of which several different texts are
extant,” describes the “body” of the Creator, in close analogy to the
description of the body of the beloved one in the fifth chapter of
the “Song of Solomon,” giving enormous figures for the length of
64 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
each organ. At the same time, it indicates the secret names of the
various organs with the help of letters and configurations which to
us are meaningless. “Whoever knows the measurements of our Cre-
ator and the glory of the Holy One, praise be to Him, which are
hidden from the creatures, is certain of his share of the world to
come.” Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiba, the two heroes of Merka-
bah mysticism, appear as the guarantors of this sweeping promise—
“provided that this Mishnah is daily repeated.’
What is really meant by these monstrous length measurements
is not made clear; the enormous figures have no intelligible mean-
ing or sense-content, and it is impossible really to visualize the
“body of the Shekhinah” which they purport to describe; they are
better calculated, on the contrary, to reduce every attempt at such
a vision to absurdity.” The units of measurement are cosmic; the
height of the Creator is 236,000 parasangs“—according to another
tradition, the height of His soles alone is 30 million parasangs. But
“the measure of a parasang of God is three miles, and a mile has
10,000 yards, and a yard three spans of His span, and a span fills the
whole world, as it is written: Who hath meted out heaven with the
span.” Plainly, therefore, it is not really intended to indicate by
these numbers any concrete length measurements. Whether the
proportion of the various figures, now hopelessly confused in the
texts, once expressed some intrinsic relationships and harmonies is
a question to which we are not likely to find an answer. But a feel-
ing for the transmundane and the numinous still glimmers through
these blasphemous-sounding figures and monstrous groupings of
secret names. God’s holy majesty takes on flesh and blood, as it were,
in these enormous numerical relationships. At any rate the idea that
“God is King” lends itself more easily to such symbolical expression
than the conception of God as Spirit. Again we see that it was the
exaltation of His kingship and His theophany which appealed to
these mystics, not His spirituality. It is true that occasionally we
find a paradoxical change into the spiritual. All of a sudden, in the
midst of the Shiur Komah, we read a passage like the following:
“The appearance of the face is like that of the cheek-bones, and
both are like the figure of the spirit and the form of the soul, and
no creature may recognize it. His body is like chrysolite. His light
breaks tremendously from the darkness, clouds and fog are around
Him, and all the princes of the angels and the seraphim are before
a
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 65
Him like an empty jar. Therefore no measure is given to us, but
only secret names are revealed to us.” In the writings of the second
and third century gnostics, and in certain Greek and Coptic texts,
which frequently reflect a mystical spiritualism, we find a similar
species of mystical anthropomorphism, with references to the “body
of the father,’” or the ‘‘body of truth.’”” Gaster has pointed out the
significance of such instances of anthropomorphism in the writings
of the second century gnostic Markos (described by some scholars
as “‘kabbalistic’’) which are hardly less bizarre and obscure than the
analogous examples in the Shiur Komah.”
The fact probably is that this form of speculation originated
among heretical mystics who had all but broken with rabbinical
Judaism. At some date this school or group must have blended with
the “rabbinical” Gnosticism developed by the Merkabah visionaries,
i. e. that form of Jewish Gnosticism which tried to remain true to
the Halakhic tradition. Here we come inevitably to the question
whose bodily dimensions are the subject of these fantastic descrip-
tions? The prophet Ezekiel saw on the throne of the Merkabah “a
figure similar to that of a man” (Ez. 1, 26). Does it not seem possible
that among the mystics who wrote the Shiur Komah, this figure was
identified with the ‘‘primordial man” of contemporary Iranian spec-
ulation, which thus made its entry into the world of Jewish mysti-
cism?"/Going a step further we may ask whether there did not exist
—at any rate among the Merkabah mystics to whom we owe the
preservation of the Shiur Komah—a belief in a fundamental distinc-
tion between the appearance of God the Creator, the Demiurge, i. @.
one of His aspects, and His indefinable essence? There i is no denying
the fact that it is precisely the “primordial man” on the throne of
the Merkabah whom the Shiur Komah calls Yotser Bereshith, 1. e.
Creatér of the world—a significant and, doubtless, a deliberate desig-
nation. As is well known, the anti-Jewish gnostics of the second
and third centuries drew a sharp distinction between the unknown,
“strange,” good God, and the Creator, whom they identified with
the God of Israel.] It may be that the Shiur Komah reflects an
attempt to give a new turn to this trend of thought, which had be-
come widespread throughout the Near East, by postulating some-
thing like a harmony between the Creator and the “true” God.
A dualism of the Gnostic kind would of course have been_unthink-
ee eee
able for Jews; instead, the Demiurge becomes, by an exercise of
66 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
mystical anthropomorphism, the appearance of God on the “throne
of Glory,” at once visible and yet, by virtue of His transcendent
nature, incapable of being really visualized.
If this interpretation is correct, we should be justified in saying
that the Shiur Komah referred not to the “dimensions” of the divi-
nity, but to those of its corporeal appearance. This is clearly the
interpretation of the original texts. Already the “Lesser Hekhaloth”
interpret the anthropomorphosis of the Shiur Komah as a represen-
tation of the “hidden glory”. Thus, for example, Rabbi Akiba says:
“He is like us, as it were, but greater than everything; and that is
His glory which is hidden from us.’” This conception of God’s
hidden glory, which forms the subject of much theosophical specu-
lation, is almost identical, as we have seen, with the term employed
for the object of their deepest veneration by the actual representa-
tives of the Mishnaic Merkabah mysticism, among them the histori-
cal Rabbi Akiba. One has only to compare it with the relevant pas-
sage of the Shiur Komah (already quoted above) where it says,
“whoever knows the measurements of our Creator, and the glory
of the Holy One, praise be to him,” etc. The term employed: shivho
shel hakadosh barukh hu, signifies not only praise of God=i
context that would be without any meaning—but glory 56£a, shevah» ;
being the equivalent of the Aramaic word for glory, shuoha“Fhe
reference, in short, is not to God’s praise but to the vision of His
glory. Later when the “Glory of God’ had become identified with
the Shekhinah, the ‘‘Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba” expressly referred
to the “body of the Shekhinah’™ as the subject of the Shiur Komah.
The employment of this term is proof that its authors had in mind
not the substance of divinity but merely the measurements of its
appearance.
Shiur Komah speculation is already to be found in the earliest
Hekhaloth texts and must be counted among the older possessions
of Jewish gnosticism. Graetz’ theory that it came into being at a
late date under the influence of Moslem anthropomorphic tenden-
cies is entirely fallacious and has confused matters down to our own
day.” If there can be any question of external influence, it was
certainly the other way round. This is also borne out by the asser-
tion of the Arab doxograph Shahrastani—not, it is true, an al-
together reliable witness—that these ideas made their way from
Jewish into Moslem circles.” Still less is it possible to agree with
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 67
Bloch’s hypothesis that the Shiur Komah with “its exaggerations
and its dull dryness” (!) was “intended for school children.”” The
curious tendency of some nineteenth century Jewish scholars to treat
profoundly mythical and mystical references to God and the world
as pedagogical obiter dicta for the benefit of small children is cer-
tainly one of the most remarkable examples of misplaced criticism
and insensitiveness to the character of religious phenomena which
this period has produced.
7
The Shiur Komah is not the only subject of mystical vision in
this group. There are several others, some of which undoubtedly
originated from entirely different sources but were more or less
closely mixed up with the Shiur Komah during the period when all
these various tendencies crystallized in the classical Hekhaloth lite-
rature. To the later mystics they presented what appeared to be on
the whole a uniform picture. The most important of these deviations
from the main current is the Metatron mysticism which revolves
round the person of Enoch who, after a lifetime of piety, was raised,
according to the legend, to the rank of first of the angels and sar
ha-panim, (literally: prince of the divine face, or divine presence).
“God took me from the midst of the race of the flood and carried
me on the stormy wings of the Shekhinah to the highest heaven and
brought me into the great palaces on the heights of the seventh
heaven Araboth, where there are the throne of the Shekhinah and
the Merkabah, the legions of anger and hosts of wrath, the shinantm
of the fire, the cherubim of the flaming torches, the ofannim of the
fiery coals, the servants of the flames, and the seraphim of the
lightning, and He stood me there daily to serve the throne of
glory?” This Enoch, whose flesh was turned to flame, his veins to
fire, his eye-lashes to flashes of lightning, his eye-balls to flaming
torches,” and whom God placed on a throne next to the throne
of glory, received after this heavenly transformation the name
Metatron.
The visions of the heavenly traveller Enoch, as set out in the
Ethiopic and Slavonic Books of Enoch, have become, in the Enoch
book of the Merkabah mystics, accounts given to Rabbi Ishmael by
Metatron of his metamorphosis and of the hierarchy of the throne
and the angels. It is impossible to overlook the steady line of de-
68 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
velopment in this Enoch mysticism; moreover, the Hebrew “Book
of Enoch” is not the only link between the earlier Enoch legend
and the later Jewish mysticism. Some of the oldest mythical motifs
are to be found not in that book but in an extremely interesting—
from the mythographical point of view—magical text, the ““Havdalah
of Rabbi Akiba,” of which several as yet unpublished manuscripts
are in existence.” In the “Greater Hekhaloth,” on the other hand,
we find Metatron mentioned only once in a chapter belonging to
the later stratum; the earlier chapters do not mention him at all.™
It was after the beginning of the second century A. D., probably
not earlier, that the patriarch Enoch was identified following his
etamorphosis with the angel Yahoel, or Yoel, who occupies an
important and sometimes dominant position in the earliest docu-
ments of throne mysticism and in the apocalypses.“* The most im-
portant characteristics of this angei are now transferred to Metatron.
We also find Yahoel as the first in the various lists of the “Seventy
Names of Metatron” compiled in the Gaonic period (7th to 11th
centuries). The Babylonian Talmud contains only three references
to Metatron, and the most important of these passages is meaning-
less if thought to refer to the name Metatron.™ It refers to a tradi-
tion from the beginning of the fourth century, according to which
Metatron is the angel of whom it is said in Exod. xxi, 20 ff.:
“Beware of him for my name is in him.” The explanation is to be
found in the tenth chapter of the Apocalypse of Abraham, already
mentioned several times, where the angel Yahoel says to Abraham:
“I am called Yahoel . . . a power in virtue of the ineffable name
that is dwelling in me.’ That the name Yahoel contains the name
of God is obvious, Yaho being an abbreviation of the Tetragram-
maton YHWH, which was used especially often in texts bearing on
Jewish-Hellenistic syncretism. ‘The same Yahoel 1s referred to in
Jewish gnostical literature as the “lesser Yaho,” a term which at the
end of the second century had already made its way into non-
Jewish gnostical literature,” but which was also retained by the
Merkabah mystics as the most exalted cognomen of Metatron, one
which to outsiders seemed to border on blasphemy.” Also in the
Talmudic passage cited above the assumption that the verse in
Exodus xxiv, 1 “Ascend to YHWH”’ refers to Metatron seems to
contain an implicit recognition of the latter as the “lesser Yaho,”
which he becomes explicitly in later texts.
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 69
Mention may be made, moreover, of a further and very striking
example of the extreme stubbornness with which ancient traditions
are preserved in Jewish mystical literature, often in out-of-the-way
places. In the Apocalypse of Abraham, Yahoel appears as the spiri-
tual teacher of the patriarch to whom he explains the mysteries of
the throne world and the last judgment, exactly as Metatron does
in the Hekhaloth tracts. Abraham is here the prototype of the
novice who is initiated into the mystery, just as he appears at the
end of the Sefer Yetsirah, the “Book of Creation’, a document the
precise age of which is not known but the character of which I
propose to discuss at the end of this lecture. In the Apocalypse we
find him being initiated into the mysteries of the Merkabah, just as
in the Sefer Yetsirah he is allowed to penetrate into the mysteries
of its cosmogonical speculation. It is somewhat surprising to read in
a manuscript originating among the twelfth century Jewish mystics
in Germany that Yahoel was Abraham's teacher and taught him
the whole of the Torah. The same document also expressly mentions
Yahoel as the angel who—in the above-mentioned Talmudic passage
—invites Moses to ascend to heaven.” Thus the tradition attached
to his name must still have been preserved in mediaeval literature.
If the meaning of the name Yahoel is fairly clear, that of Metatron
is completely obscure. There have been very many attempts to throw
light on the etymology of the word,” the most widely accepted
interpretation being that according to which Metatron is short for
Metathronios, 1. e. “he who stands besides the (God’s) throne,” or
“who occupies the throne next to the divine throne.” Mention of
this throne is indeed made in the later (Hebrew) “Book of Enoch,”
but there is not the slightest suggestion that the author saw any
connection between the name of the archon and his throne. The
fact ig that all these etymologies are so much guess-work and their
studied rationality leads nowhere. There is no such word as
Metathronios in Greek and it is extremely unlikely that Jews
should have produced or invented such Greek phrase. In Talmudic
literature the word 6pévoc is never used in the place of its Hebrew
equivalent. On the other hand, the reduplication of the ¢ and the
ending ron follow a pattern which runs through all these texts.
Both the ending and the repetition of the consonant are observable,
for instance, in names like Zoharariel and Adiriron. It must also be
borne in mind that on and ron may have been fixed and typical
70 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
constituents of secret names rather than meaningful syllables. It is
quite possible that the word Metatron was chosen on strictly symbol-
ical grounds and represents one of the innumerable secret names
which abound in the Hekhaloth texts no less than in the gnostical
writings or in the magical papyri. Originally formed apparently in
order to replace the name Yahoel as a vox mystica, it gradually
usurped its place. It is interesting, by the way, that the spelling in
the oldest quotations and manuscripts is 7/wwY3—a fact which is
usually overlooked; this would seem to suggest that the word was
pronounced Meetatron rather than Metatron. As a transcription of
the Greek epsilon in the word Meta, the yod in the name would
appear to be quite superfluous.
In the often highly imaginative description of the angelic sphere
which one finds in the Hebrew Enoch book of the Merkabah period,
Metatron’s rank is always placed very high. Nevertheless the class-
ical writings of the Merkabah school contain no suggestion that he
is to be regarded as being one with the glory that appears on the
throne. Throughout this literature Metatron, or whatever name is
given to him, remains in the position of the highest of all created
beings, while the occupant of the throne revealed in the Shiur Ko-
mah is, after all, the Creator Himself. No attempt is made to bridge
the gulf; what has been said of the relationship of the mystic in his
ecstasy towards his God is true also of the supreme exaltation of the
prince of angels himself. The latter, incidentally, is also called
Anafiel, according to an independent tradition which has found its
reflection in the “Greater Hekhaloth,” and the characteristics given
of this angel make it clear that Anafiel is not simply one more name
for Metatron, but is the name of another figure which for some
mystics retained that supreme rank.”
8
Several texts have preserved codifications of the throne mysticism
abounding among the Merkabah travellers, and elaborate lists of
the problems and questions relevant in this context. These do not
all belong to one particular period; subjects which appear to be of
great importance in one text are not even mentioned in the other.
One such codification of pure throne mysticism, for example, is to
be found in the brief ‘““Treatise of the Hekhaloth” which probably
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 71
dates back to the eighth century.” Here the imaginative description
of objects which were originally really visualized, but are now
treated at great length purely for the purpose of edification, has
already reached baroque proportions.
A more concise and restrained account of the principal subjects
of Merkabah mysticism—apparently based on a Hekhaloth tract—
is to be found in the Midrash to Solomon’s proverbs.” Here, too,
Rabbi Ishmael appears as the representative of the esoteric tradition.
In this case he enumerates the questions which the doctors of the
Torah will be asked by God on the Day of Judgment; the crowning
part of this examination are the questions referring to esoteric
doctrine:
“If there comes before Him one who is learned in the Talmud,
the Holy One, praise be to Him, says to him: ‘My son, since you
have studied the Talmud, why have you not also studied the Mer-
kabah and perceived my splendor? For none of the pleasures I have
in My creation is equal to that which is given to me in the hour
when the scholars sit and study the Torah and, looking beyond it,
see and behold and meditate these questions: How the throne of
My glory stands; what the first of its feet serves as; what the second
foot serves as; what the third and what the fourth serve as; how
the hashmal (seen by Ezekiel in his vision) stands; how many ex-
pressions he takes on in an hour, and which side he serves; how the
heavenly lightning stands; how many radiant faces are visible be-
tween his shoulders, and which side he serves; and even greater than
all this: the fiery stream under the throne of My glory, which is
round like a stone made of brick; how many bridges are spanned
across it, how great is the distance between one bridge and the next,
and, if I cross it, over which bridge do I cross; which bridge do the
ofanntm (a class of angels) cross, and which do the galgalim (an-
other class) cross; even greater than all this: how I stand from the
nails of My feet to the parting of My hair; how great is the measure
of My palm, and what is the measure of My toes. Even greater than
all this: how the throne of My glory does stand, and which side it
does serve on every day of the week. And is this not My greatness,
is not this My glory and My beauty that My children know My
splendor through these measurements?’ And of this David hath
said: O Lord, how manifold are Thy works!”
It is apparent from this passage that all these questions were
72 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
systematically discussed, although some of them are not mentioned
in the texts which have been preserved. Of the bridges in the Mer-
kabah world, for instance, which find almost no mention in the
“Greater Hekhaloth” and the Book of Enoch, we have several vivid
descriptions.
7 Among the most important objects which Metatron describes to
\ Rabbi Ishmael is the cosmic veil or curtain before the throne, which
conceals the glory of God from the host of angels. The idea of such
a veil appears to be very old; references to it are to be found already
in Aggadic passages from the second century. The existence of veils
in the resplendent sphere of the aeons is also mentioned in a Coptic
writing belonging to the gnostic school, the Pistis Sophia.” Now
this cosmic curtain, as it is described in the Book of Enoch, contains
the images of all things which since the day of creation have their
pre-existing reality, as it were, in the heavenly sphere.™ All genera-
tions and all their lives and actions are woven into this curtain; he
who sees it penetrates at the same time into the secret of Messianic
redemption, for like the course of history, the final struggle and the
deeds of the Messiah are already pre-existently real and visible. As
we have seen, this combination of knowledge relating to the Merka-
bah and the Hekhaloth with a vision of the Messianic end—the
inclusion, that is to say, of apocalyptic and eschatologic knowledge—
is very old. It dominates the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Book
of Enoch no less than the various Hekhaloth tracts four or eight
centuries later. All of them contain varying descriptions of the end
of the world, and calculations of the date set for the redemption.”
Indeed, there is a passage in the “Greater Hekhaloth” where the
meaning of the Merkabah vision is summed up in the question:
‘When will he see the heavenly majesty? When will he hear of the
final time of redemption? When will he perceive what no eye has
yet perceived?’*—Incidentally, according to these mystics, that
which now belongs to the domain of secret lore shall become unt-
versal knowledge in the Messianic age. The throne and the glory
which rests on it “shall be revealed anon to all inhabitants of the
world.’*" At the same time the reasons, now obscure, of the com-
_{ mandments of the Torah will also be revealed and made plain.™
It is safe to say that what might be termed apocalyptic nostalgia
was among the most powerful motive-forces of the whole Merkabah
mysticism. The attitude of these mystics towards the reality of his-
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 73
tory is even more pointedly negative than that of the contemporary
Jewish theologians, the Aggadists."" The depressing conditions of
the period, the beginning of the era of persecution by the Church
since the fourth century, directed the religious interests of the
mystics towards the higher world of the Merkabah; from the world
of history the mystic turns to the prehistoric period of creation,
from whose vision he seeks consolation, or towards the post-history
of redemption. Unfortunately the sources at our disposal shed no
light on the social environment of the founders and leaders of the
movement. As | said at the beginning of this lecture, they have been
only too successful in preserving their anonymity.
9
In contrast to the connection between throne mysticism and
apocalyptic which, as we have seen, is very close, that between es-
chatology and cosmogony—the end of things and the beginning of
things—is rather loose, at any rate in the writings which have come
down to us. In this respect, Merkabah mysticism differs not only
from the non-Jewish forms of Gnosticism but also from the Kab-
balism of the later period, where the connection between the two is
exceedingly close. Moreover, the comparatively sparse account de-
voted to this subject under the heading of reflections on the Maaseh
Bereshith is cosmology rather than cosmogony, that is to say, the em-
phasis is laid—so far as we are in a position to judge—on the order
of the cosmos rather than on the drama of its creation, which plays
so large a part in the mythology of the Gnostics. One has only to
read the ‘‘Baraitha on the Work of Creation,” which includes some
fragments belonging to this period, albeit in a comparatively recent
edition, and whose connection with Merkabah mysticism is evident,
to become aware of this difference between Merkabah speculation
and Gnosticism proper.™ Its cause is obvious: the realm of divine
“fullness,” the pleroma of the Gnostics, which unfolds dramatically
the succession of aeons, is directly related to the problem of creation
and cosmogony, while for the Merkabah mystics, who substituted
the throne world for the pleroma and the aeons, this problem has
no significance at allf The constituents of the_throne world: the
hashmal, the ofannim and hayoth, the seraphim, etc., can no longer
be interpreted in terms of a cosmogonic drama; the only link be-
74 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
tween this realm and the problem of creation was, as we have seen,
the idea of the cosmic curtain. Here we have one of the most im-
portant points of difference between Merkabah mysticism and Kab-
balism; the latter is distinguished by renewed interest in purely
cosmogonic speculation, whose spirit often enough is entirely Gnos-
tigf'in the earlier literature—certainly during the phase represented
by the Hekhaloth—theoretical questions have no place; its spirit is
descriptive, not speculative, and this is particularly true of the best
examples of this genre| Nevertheless it is possible that there was a
speculative phase in the very beginning and that the famous passage
in the Mishnah which forbids the questions: “What is above and
what is below? What was before and what will be after?” refers to
theoretical speculation in the manner of the Gnostics who strove
after “the knowledge of who we were, and what we have become,
where we were or where we are placed, whither we hasten, from
what we are redeemed.”™”
As a matter of fact there exists indubitable proof that among
certain groups of Jewish Gnostics who tried to stay within the relig-
ious community of rabbinical Judaism, Gnostical speculation and
related semi-mythological thought was kept alive.[ Traces of such
ideas in Aggadic literature are few but they exist. Thus for instance
there is the well-known saying of the Babylonian teacher Rav in the
third century a.p.: “Ten are the qualities with which the world
has been created: wisdom, insight, knowledge, force, appeal, power,
justice, right, Tove and compassion.” Or the following reference
‘to seven hypostases of similar general ideas of the kind so often
found in the names of Gnostical aeons: “Seven middoth serve before
the throne of glory: wisdom, right and justice, love and mercy, truth
and peace.’”"” What the aeons and the archons are to the Gnostics,
the middoth are to this form of speculation, i. e. the hypostatized
attributes of God.
Much more important are the relics of speculation concerning
aeons preserved in the oldest Kabbalistic text, the highly obscure
and awkward book Bahir, which was edited in Provence during the
twelfth century.“ This brief document of Kabbalistic theology con-
sists, at least in part, of compilations and editions of much older
texts which, together with other writings of the Merkabah school,
had made their way to Europe from the East. It was my good for-
tune to make a discovery a few years ago which renders it possible
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 75
to identify one of these Eastern sources, namely, the book Raza
Rabba, “The Great Mystery,” which some Eastern authors of the
tenth century named among the most important of esoteric writings
and which was hitherto thought to have been lost.™ Fortunately,
several lengthy quotations from it have been preserved in the writ-
ings of thirteenth century Jewish mystics in Southern Germany,
which leave no doubt that the Book Bahir was to a large extent
directly based on it.™ It thus becomes understandable how gnostical
termini technict, symbols, and mythologems came to be used by the
earliest Kabbalists who wrote their works in Provence during the
twelfth century. The point obviously has an important bearing on
the question of the origins of mediaeval Kabbalism in general. It
can be taken as certain that in addition to the Raza Rabba, which
appears to have been a cross between a mystical Midrash and a
Hekhaloth text, with a strong magical element thrown in, other
similar fragments of ancient writings, with Gnostic excerpts written
in Hebrew, made their way from the East to Provence. It was thus
that remainders of Gnostic ideas transmitted in this fashion entered
the main stream of mystical thought via the Book Bahir, to become
one of the chief influences which shaped the theosophy of the thir-
teenth century Kabbalists.
10
The existence of speculative Gnostic tendencies in the immediate
neighborhood of Merkabah mysticism has its parallel in the writ-
ings grouped together under the name of Maaseh Bereshith. These
include a document—the Sefer Yetstrah or Book of Creation—which
represents a theoretical approach to the problems of cosmology and
cosmogony.” The text probably includes interpolations made at a
lates period, but its connection with the Merkabah literature is
fairly evident, at least as regards terminology and style. Written
probably between the third and the sixth century, it is distinguished
by its brevity; even the most comprehensive of the various editions
does not exceed sixteen hundred words. Historically, it represents
the earliest extant speculative text written in the Hebrew language.
Mystical meditation appears to have been among the sources from
which the author drew inspiration, so far as the vagueness and ob-
scurity of the text permits any judgment on this point. The style is
at once pompous and laconic, ambiguous and oracular—no wonder,
76 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
therefore, that the book was quoted in evidence alike by mediaeval
philosophers and by Kabbalists. Its chief subject-matters are the
elements of the world, which are sought in the ten elementary and
primordial numbers—Sefiroth, as the book calls them—and the 22
letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These together represent the mys-
terious forces whose convergence has produced the various combina-
tions observable throughout the whole of creation; they are the
“thirty-two secret paths of wisdom,” through which God has created
all that exists. These Sefiroth are not just ten stages, or representa-
tive of ten stages, in their unfolding; the matter is not as simple as
that. But “their end is in their beginning and their beginning in
their end, as the flame is bound to the coal—close your mouth lest
it speak and your heart lest it think.” After the author has analysed
the function of the Sefiroth in his cosmogony, or rather hinted at
the solution in some more or less oracular statements, he goes on to
explain the function of the letters in creation: ‘“[God] drew them,
hewed them, combined them, weighed them, interchanged them,
and through them produced the whole creation and everything that
is destined to be created.’’ He then proceeds to discuss, or rather
to unveil, the secret meaning of each letter in the three realms of
creation known to him: man, the world of the stars and planets, and
the rhythmic flow of time through the course of the year. The
combination of late Hellenistic, perhaps even late Neoplatonic
numerological mysticism with exquisitely Jewish ways of thought
concerning the mystery of letters and language is fairly evident
throughout.” Nor is the element of Merkabah mysticism lacking;
the author appears to have searched the Merkabah for a cosmo-
logical idea, and not without success, for it seems that the hayoth
in the Merkabah described by Ezekiel, i. e. the “living beings”
which carry the Merkabah, are for him connected with the Sefiroth
as “living numerical beings.” For, indeed, these are very peculiar
“numbers” of which it is said that “their appearance is like a flash
of lightning and their goal is without end; His word is in them
when they come forth [from Him] and when they return; at His
bidding do they speed swiftly as a whirlwind, and before His throne
they prostrate themselves.”
Various peculiarities of the terminology employed in the book,
including some curious neologisms which find no natural explana-
tion in Hebrew phraseology, suggest a paraphrase of Greek terms,
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 77
but most of the details still await a full clarification.” The precise
meaning of the phrase Sefiroth belimah which the author constantly
uses and which may be the key to the understanding of what he
actually had in mind when speaking of the Sefiroth, is a matter of ©
speculation. The second word -belimah which may be taken to
denote or to qualify the specific nature of these ‘numbers’ has
been explained or translated in accordance with the theories of the
several writers or translators: infinite Sefiroth, or closed, abstract,
ineffable, absolute Sefiroth, or even Sefiroth out-of-nothing. If the
author of the book wanted to be obscure, he certainly succeeded
beyond his wishes. Even the substance of its cosmogony, as set forth
in the chapter dealing with the Sefiroth, is still a subject of discus-
sion. On the question whether the author believes in the emanation
of his Sefiroth out of each other and of God it is possible to hear
directly conflicting views. According to some writers, he identifies
the Sefiroth directly with the elements of creation (the spirit of
God; ether; water; fire; and the six dimensions of space). Others,
with whom I am inclined to agree, see in his description a tendency
towards parallelism or correlation between the Sefiroth and the ele-
ments. In any event, the Sefiroth which, like the host of angels in
the Merkabah literature, are visualized in an attitude of adoration
before God's throne, represent an entirely new element which is
foreign to the conception of the classical Merkabah visionaries.
On the other hand, one cannot overlook the connection between
the “Book of Creation” and the theory of magic and theurgy which,
as we have seen, plays its part in Merkabah mysticism.” The ec-
static ascent to the throne is not the only element of that mysticism;
it also embraces various other techniques which are much more
closely connected with magical practices. One of these, for example,
is the ‘“‘putting on, or clothing, of the name,” a highly ceremonious
rite in which the magician impregnates himself, as it were, with the
great name of God™—1. e. performs a symbolic act by clothing him-
self in a garment into whose texture the name has been woven.”
The adjuration of the prince or archon of the Torah, Sar Torah,
belongs to the same category.’ The revelation sought through the
performance of such rites is identical with that of the Merkabah
vision. The ‘Prince of the Torah” reveals the same mysteries as
the voice which speaks from the throne of fire: the secret of heaven
and earth, the dimensions of the demiurge, and the secret names
"8 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the knowledge of which gives power over all things. It is true that
in addition these magical practices also hold out a promise of other
things, e. g. a more comprehensive knowledge of the Torah, chiefly
reflected in the fact that the adept can no longer forget anything he
has learned, and similar accomplishments: Matters which to the He-
khaloth mystics were important but not vital, much as they tried to
remain in conformity with rabbinical Judaism—a tendency which
finds its expression in the emphasis laid in the “Greater Hekhaloth”
on the link with Halakhic tradition. These theurgical doctrines
form a kind of meeting-place for magic and ecstaticism. The theur-
gical element is brought to the fore in various writings which dis-
play manifold points of contact with the Hekhaloth tracts, as, to
take some instances, Harba de-Moshe, ‘“The Sword of Moses,” the
“Havdalah of Rabbi Akiba” and the recipes that are preserved in
the book Shimmushe Tehillim, the title of which means “The
magical use of the psalms.” The latter have had a long, if not quite
distinguished career in Jewish life and folklore.™
lf Merkabah mysticism thus degenerates in some instances into
magic pure and simple, it becomes subject to a moral reinterpreta-
tion in others. Originally, the ascent of the soul was by no means
conceived as an act of penitence, but in later days the ancient Tal-
mudic saying “great is repentance . . . for it leads to the throne of
Glory” came to be regarded—e. g. by the Babylonian Gaon Jehudai
(eighth century)—as a reference to it. In this conception, the act of
penitence becomes one with the ecstatic progress through the seven
heavens.” Already in one of the Hekhaloth tracts the first five of
the seven palaces through which the soul must pass are placed
parallel to certain degrees or stages of moral perfection. Thus Rabbi
Akiba says to Rabbi Ishmael: “When I ascended to the first palace
I was devout (hasid), in the second palace I was pure (tahor),
in the third sincere (yashar), in the fourth I was wholly with God
(tamim), in the fifth 1 displayed holiness before God; in the sixth
I spoke the kedushah (the trishagion) before Him who spoke and
created, in order that the guardian angels might not harm me; in
the seventh palace I held myself erect with all my might, trembling
in all limbs, and spoke the following prayer: . . . ‘Praise be to Thee
MERKABAH MYSTICISM AND JEWISH GNOSTICISM 79
who art exalted, praise be to the Sublime in the chambers of
grandeur’.””
This tendency to set the stages of ascent in parallel with the
degrees of perfection obviously raises the question whether we are
not faced here with a mystical reinterpretation of the Merkabah it-
self. Was there not a temptation to regard man himself as the rep-
resentative of divinity, his soul as the throne of glory, etc.? A step
in this direction had been taken by Macarius the Egyptian, one of
the earliest representatives of fourth century Christian monastic
mysticism. “The opening of his first homily reads like a programme
of his mystical faith. It offers a new explanation of the obscure
vision of Ezekiel (i. e. of the Merkabah) . . . according to him, the
prophet beholds ‘the secret of the soul which is on the point of
admitting its master and becoming a throne of his Glory’.’”"" We
find an analogous reinterpretation of the Merkabah among the Jew-
ish mystics in the thrice repeated saying of the third century Pal-
estinian Talmudist Simeon ben Lakish: ‘“The Patriarchs (i. e. Ab-
raham, Isaac and Jacob)—they are the Merkabah.”™ The author
tries to justify this bold assertion by an ingenious exegetical reason-
ing based on certain Scriptural phrases, but it is plain that the exe-
gesis provided only the occasion for making it, not the motive; the
latter is genuinely and unmistakably mystical.
It must be emphasized that these tendencies are alien to the
spirit of Hekhaloth literature; we find in it none of that symbolic
interpretation of the Merkabah which was later revived and per-
fected by the Kabbalists. Its subject is never man, be he even a
saint. The form of mysticism which it represents takes no particular
interest in man as such; its gaze is fixed on God and his aura, the
radiant sphere of the Merkabah, to the exclusion of everything else.
For the same reason it made no contribution to the development of
a new moral ideal of the truly pious Jew. All its originality is on
the ecstatical side, while the moral aspect is starved, so to speak, of
life. The moral doctrines found in Hekhaloth literature are pale
and bloodless; the ideal to which the Hekhaloth mystic is devoted is
that of the visionary who holds the keys to the secrets of the divine
realm and who reveals these visions in Israel. Vision and knowledge,
in a word, Gnosis of this kind, represents for him the essence of
the Torah and of all possible human and cosmic wisdom.
LaliD LECT OIE
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY
pi
Mediaeval German Jewry held aloof from the discussions of
theological and philosophical problems which exercised so deep an
influence on contemporary Jewish thought in the East, in Spain and
in Italy, and which gave an impetus to new and important develop-
ments in the cultural life of these communities. The introduction
of new values and ideas into the fields of metaphysics, ethics and
anthropology by the Jewish theologians and philosophers of the
period, the whole movement which can be described as the struggle
between Plato and Aristotle for the Biblical and Talmudic heritage
of Judaism, was all but ignored by the Jewish communities of Ger-
many and Northern France. True, the study of the Talmud was
pursued with an enthusiasm which was nowhere surpassed; nowhere
else was so much importance assigned to learning, so much zeal
developed in the pursuit of study. But this interest in the casuistry
of the Holy Law was not paralleled by a similar genius for, or de-
votion to, speculative thought.
That, however, is not to say that German Jewry made no signi-
ficant contribution to the history of Jewish religion in the Diaspora.
Its spiritual leaders were indeed strangely devoid of originality in
the domain of metaphysics. They showed themselves unable to turn
to productive account even the few elements of philosophic specula-
tion which were gradually absorbed. But a significant and lasting
imprint was made on the spirit of this great Jewish community by
the upheaval of the Crusades, by the savage persecutions of the peri-
od and the Jews’ own constant readiness for martyrdom. Hence-
forth there was to be a novel element in the character of German
Judaism, an element which owed its growth to purely religious mo-
tives but which never found adequate philosophic expression. Its
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 81
mark is to be found in the movement to which the name of German
Hasidism has been given, i. e. in the activities of certain groups of
men whom their contemporaries already called with special empha-
sis Haside Ashkenaz, i. e. “the devout of Germany.”
The rise of Hasidism was the decisive event in the religious devel-
opment of German Jewry. Of all the factors determining the deeper
religion of that community it was the greatest until the change
which took place in the seventeenth century under the influence of
the later Kabbalism, which originated at Safed in Palestine. Strictly
speaking, it was the only considerable religious event in the history
of German Judaism. Its importance lies in the fact that it succeeded
already during the Middle Ages in bringing about the triumph of
new religious ideals and values which were acknowledged by the
mass of the people; in Germany and for the German Jewish com-
munity at any rate the victory was complete. Where the thirteenth
century Kabbalism of Spain failed—for it became a real historical
factor only much later, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain
and after Safed had become the new centre—German Hasidism
succeeded. So far from being isolated, the Hasidim were intimately
connected with the whole of Jewish life and the religious interests
of the common folk; they were recognized as representatives of an
ideally Jewish way of life even where their principles were never
completely translated into practice. Side by side with the great docu-
ments of the Halakhah, and (in spite of their deep reverence for
the divine commandment) by no means always in perfect conformity
with them, the classical literature of Hasidism retained a truly
canonical prestige—not indeed among the representatives of Tal-
mudic learning, who can hardly have read documents like the
“Book of the Devout” without experiencing some qualms, but with
the average pious Jewish burgher or “householder,” the baal bayith.
Thus the Hasidim escaped the fate of the early Kabbalists who
always remained a small aristocratic sect and whose ideas and value
never entered into the general consciousness of their amin
[Although the creative period of the movement was relatively short—
about one century, from 1150 to 1250—its influence on the Jews of
Germany was lasting; \the religious ideas to which it gave rise and
which it filled with life retained their vitality for centuries. It is
to them that German Jewry largely owes the inner strength and
devotion which it displayed when new storms of persecution arose.
82 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Like the Talmudic aristocracy before it, Hasidism found its
leading representatives among that remarkable family which for
centuries provided the Jewish communities in the Rhineland with
their spiritual leaders: the Kalonymides, who had come to the Rhine
from Italy and who, in Speyér, Worms and Mainz, formed a natural
aristocracy among the communities. (he three men who moulded
German Hasidism all belonged to this family. Samuel the Hasid, the
son of Kalonymus of Speyer, who lived in the middle of the twelfth
century’; his son Jehudah the Hasid, of Worms, who died in Re-
gensburg in 1217’; and the latter’s disciple and relative, Eleazar ben
Jehudah, of Worms, who died between 1223 and 1232f All three
exercized a deep and lasting influence on their contemporaries;
Jehudah the Hasid in particular held an unrivalled position as a
Eiipious Tender so long as Hasidism itself remained a living force.
A contemporary said of him, “he would have been a prophet if he
had lived in the times of the prophets.’* Like Isaac Luria of Safed
in a later age, he, too, soon became a legendary figure of mythical
proportions, and in much the same way the personalities of the
other two leaders of German Hasidism tend to disappear behind the
tropical jungle of legends that has grown up around them. These
legends have been preserved not only in Hebrew but also in a Yid-
dish version, the Maase Buch, which Gaster has translated into Eng-
———
lish.” They do not always give a true picture of what Hasidism
actually was, but rather tell us what popular imagination would
have liked it to be. And this distortion, too, is not without signifi-
cance for an understanding of the motive-powers which were active
in this movement.
Of Samuel the Hasid’s writings little has been preserved, while
the more numerous writings of his son Jehudah have come down for
the most part only in the form given to them by his disciples. On
the other hand, Eleazar of Worms, the most zealous of all the
apostles of his master, has left a whole literature which is a veritable
store-house of early Hasidic thought, including in particular the
entire body of earlier mystical doctrine in so far as it was known
to the members of this group. Indeed, his life work seems to have
been devoted to the task of codification, whether of the Halakhah
(in his great work Rokeah of which several editions have appeared
in print), or of other materials and traditions. His voluminous writ-
ings, many of them extant only in manuscripts of which a distin-
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 83
guished Jewish scholar once remarked that he hoped they would
never emerge from their ‘well-deserved oblivion”, are of consider-
able interest for the study of Jewish mysticism. But the most im
portant literary monument of the movement which gives the fullest
insight into its origins and its originality, is the Sefer Hasidim or
“Book of the Devout”, an edition of the literary Testaments of the
three founders, and in particular of the writings of Jehudah the
Hasid.* Undistinguished and even awkward in style, often resem
bling a mass of casual jottings rather than a coherent literary com-
position, it is yet undoubtedly one of the most important and re-
markable products of Jewish literature. No other work of the period
provides us with so deep an insight into the real life of a Jewish
community in all its aspects. For once we are able to study religion
and theology not detached from reality and as it were suspended in
the vacuum of Revelation, but in the closest and most intimate con-
nection with everyday life. Where other authors or editors have
drawn a dogmatic, Halakhic or idyllic veil before the living reality
of religious experience, the book records in plain words the actual
conflicting motives which determined the religious life of a Jew in
mediaeval Germany. Life, as it is presented here, although lived in
the shadow of a great idea, is painted with a realism which has an
almost dramatic quality. Thus the “Book of the Devout’ inaugu-
rates the all too brief series of Jewish writings—not a few of them
and not the least valuable written at a later stage in the develop-
ment of Jewish mysticism—which are also genuine historical docu-
ments revealing the whole truth about the circumstances of their
time.
In his brilliant analysis of the “Religious Social Tendency
of the Sefer Hasidim,” F. I. Baer has shown that the “teachings
of the Sefer Hasidim form a definite and consistent whole’’ and
that they reflect the spirit of a kentral dominating figure—Rabbi
Jehudah the Hasid, whose histori¢al position, according to Baer, 4
akin to that of his Christian contemporary, St. Francis of Assish>
Baer has also raised anew the problem of the relationship between
the social philosophy of Hasidism and its Monkish-Christian en-
vironment.’ It is in fact undeniable that certain popular religious
and social ideas common to the Roman Catholic West after the
Cluniacensian reform also filtered into the religious philosophy of
some Jewish groups. According to Baer, this was possible only in
ae, a
84 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Germany, while in Italy and Spain the spread of philosophical
enlightenment among the Jews either prevented this infiltration or
at least limited its scope by conducting an incessant fight against it.
Although Baer describes these tendencies as “stimulants which
merely served to hasten a spontaneous development” he goes further
than Guedemann who also believed in a connection between the
popular Christian mysticism of the period and the Hasidic move-
ment, but makes a reservation in respect of their interdependence
by arguing that “there is no need to speak of derivations; similar
causes produce similar effects. Mysticism was in the air and its seeds
fell on fertile soil both among Jews and Christians.’”
It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the impact upon
the Jewish religious consciousness of the terrible sufferings during
the Crusades was the source of an entirely novel mystical disposition.
The truth is that long before this period, and long before the great
body of lay Christianity had come under the influence of mystical
thoughts which in turn could have penetrated into Jewish circles,
the Jewish communities of the Rhineland, the cultural centre of
German Jewry, had begun to absorb elements of the early Merkabah
mysticism. It seems probable that this infiltration of an older tradi-
tion, in whose wake an entire literature was transplanted, coincided
with the immigration during the ninth century of the already men-
tioned Kalonymide family from Italy, where through the tireless
activity of Aaron of Baghdad an understanding of this literature
had spread among wider circles.” The extent to which this renais-
sance of Merkabah mysticism on Italian soil had gone can be gauged
from the legends in the ‘Chronicle of Ahimaaz of Oria’”—a precious
document of eleventh-century Jewish life which has been preserved
as though by a miracle in the library of the Cathedral of Toledo.”
And one has only to read the religious poetry of the Jews of South-
ern Italy in the tenth century—especially the hymns of Amitai ben
Shefatiah—to become aware of the enormous influence of Merkabah
mysticism both on its style and its contents. That the Sefer Yetsirah
was already known in Italy in the tenth century is proved by the
commentary of Sabbatai Donnolo.” JTogether with it there came a
sreat deal of related literature, semi-mystical or entirely mystical
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 85
Midrashim and various documents of whose existence we only know
through quotations scattered in the writings of the Hasidim.
The influence of this literature on the Jews of Germany was
profound. One finds its reflection in the writings of the old synago-
gal poets of the German and Northern Fgench school which carried
on the tradition of Palestine and Italy This poetry is frequently in-
comprehensible unless one is familiar with the Merkabah literature. |
The voluminous commentary on a large number of these poems
compiled by Abraham ben Azriel of Bohemia, publication of which
has lately been started”, deals largely with mystical ideas. It is
equally obvious, though less generally realized, that the writings of
many Talmudists and Tosafists—the name generally given to the
school of ‘Talmudic casuists in Germany and Northern France in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—in so far as they deal at all
with religious subjects, are steeped in the same kind of mystical
thought. The tradition which ascribes to some of the most famous
Tosafists a preference for the study of old mystical tracts, if not the
actual practice of mystical rites, is by no means simply a legend.
The various testimonies to this effect are quite independent of each
other, and for the rest a careful study of their occasional ventures
into theology leaves no doubt that they draw their inspiration from
mystical ideas on the subject of creation, the Merkabah, and even
the Shiur Komah. One of the greatest masters of this school of
casuists, Isaac of Dampierre, whom one would be the last to suspect
of mystical leanings, was said to be a visionary“; we have a com-
mentary to the “Book of Creation,” written by Elhanan ben Yakar
of London, which was based on his lectures”, and one of his most
famous pupils, Ezra of Montcontour, whose cognomen “The Pro-
phet’’*was by no means intended to be merely an honorific appella-
tion, is known to have practised Merkabah mysticism. His “ascents
to heaven” are attested by several witnesses, and his possession of
prophetic gifts was regarded as proved.” “He showed signs and
miracles. One heard a voice speak to him from a cloud, as God spoke
to Moses. Great scholars, among them Eleazar of Worms, after days
of fasting and prayer, were granted thé rfevelation that ail his words
were truth and not deception. He also produced Talmudic explana-
tions the like of which had never been heard before, and he re-
vealed the mysteries of the Torah and the Prophets.” When he an-
nounced that the Messianic age would begin in 1226 and culminate
86 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
in 1240, the year 5000 of Creation, the rumor of this prediction
spread far and wide.
These traditions concerning the way of life and the vision of
the old ecstatics, by which the imagination continued to be power-
fully affected although only a few followed in their footsteps, com-
bined—probably in the main during the period of the Crusades—
with various other and often quite heterogenous elements of
thought. Thus the ideas of Saadia, the soberest of philosophic ra-
tionalists, who flourished in the first half of the tenth century, grad-
ually became known and, paradoxically enough, they gained influ-
ence owing to the poetical, enthusiastic and quasi-mystical style of
the old Hebrew translation, or rather paraphrase, of his magnum
opus, the “Book of Philosophic Doctrines and Religious Beliefs,”
the original of which was written in Arabic. Apart from partly mis-
understood elements of Saadia, there was the growing influence of
Abraham ibn Ezra and Abraham bar Hiya, through which Neo-
platonic thought, including some of purely mystical character, came
to Northern France and to the Hasidim of Germany. The stream
also carried along with it an indefinable mixture of traditions con-
cerning occultism of which the sources are difficult to trace; the most
extraordinary combinations of Hellenistic occultism, early Jewish
magic, and ancient German belief in demons and witches are fre-
quently encountered in the Hasidic literature of the period.” It
is characteristic that Eleazar of Worms uses the term “philosopher”’
in the same sense in which it is used in the medieval Latin writings
on alchemy and occultism, i. e. as the designation of a scholar versed
in these occult sciences. Wherever in his book on psychology a
“philosopher” makes his appearance, he introduces hermetical ideas
of this kind.”
All these elements are intermingled in the richly varied literature
of Hasidism, but rather in the form of an amorphous whole than
as elements of a system. Its authors, as we have already had occasion
to remark, showed themselves unable to develop these elements of
thought or to produce anything like a synthesis; possibly they were
not even conscious of the manifold inconsistencies among the vari-
ous traditions, all of which were treated by them with the same
reverence. As regards the form of their writings it is worth noting
that they displayed nothing of that passion for anonymity, let alone
pseudepigraphy, which is so characteristic of the Merkabah mystics.
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 87
Only a very small number of pseudepigraphic texts are grouped
round the figure of one Joseph ben Uziel* who first makes his
appearance in the “Alphabet of ben Sira” (tenth century), where
he is introduced as the grandson of ben Sira and the greatgrandson
of the Prophet Jeremiah. And even there it is not certain whether
some of these texts, and possibly the “Alphabet” as well, did not
originate in Italy. Whatever else there is to be found of pseudepi-
graphic elements in this literature apparently owes its origin less to
deliberate intention than to misunderstanding and confusion, such
as for example the awkward commentary on the “Book of Creation”
written by a disciple of Eleazar of Worms but published under the
name of Saadia.” For Saadia was actually considered by the Hasidim
as “learned in the mysteries.”
$
Notwithstanding the failure to establish doctrinal unity or rather
the lack of any serious attempt to bring it about, these writings,
with all their manifold contradictions and inconsistencies, display
a certain community of outlook. The new impulse which deeply
affected the precarious life led by the German Jews in the twelfth
century left a powerful imprint on the character of their literature;
its spirit somehow permates even the semi-philosophic arguments,
the ancient mythologems scattered among the fragments, and the
rest of this stream of traditions and reminiscences, replete with
obvious misunderstandings and not infrequently showing a rever-
sion to mythology.
For like the external world, the world of the spirit, too, had un-
dergone a deep transformation. The force of the religious impulse
which“at one time found expression and satisfaction in the visionary
perception of God’s glory and in the apocalyptic vision of the down-
fall of the fiendish powers of evil, had waned and for a time ceased
to shape the outlook of actively religious groups. Nothing, indeed,
disappeared completely; all the old traditions were preserved, often
in abstruse metamorphoses, for in this Hasidic world age is its own
justification.
But in spite of the innate conservatism of German Judaism,
the novel circumstances in the end called forth a new response. It
will always remain a remarkable fact that the great catastrophe of
the Crusades, the incessant waves of persecution which now broke
88 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
over the Jews of Germany, failed to introduce an apocalyptic ele-
ment into the religious tenets of German Jewry. Not a single apo-
calypse was written during that period, unless this name be given
to the no longer extant ‘‘Prophecy” of Rabbi Troestlin the Prophet,
the work of a Merkabah mystic who lived in Erfurt and of whose
book a brief passage has been preserved.” It is true that the chron-
iclers of the persecutions and the writers of the new school of religi-
ous poetry, perhaps the most characteristic representatives of this
period, sought consolation in eschatological hopes, but they laid far
more stress on the blessed state of the martyrs and the transcendent
splendor of the coming Redemption than on the terrors of the end
and the vision of the Last Judgment.
As far as concerns the views of the Hasidic leaders, Jehudah the
Hasid himself was radically opposed to all speculation concerning
the time of the Messiah’s arrival. In chronicling the account of the
journey of Petahyah of Regensburg, who made a voyage to Baghdad
and Persia around 1175, he even went so far as to censor the manu-
script by leaving out the Messianic prophecy of one Samuel, an
astrologer of Niniveh, ‘so that it might not seem as though he be-
lieved in it.” And in the “Book of the Devout” he says: “If you
see one making prophecies about the Messiah, you should know that
he deals in witchcraft and has intercourse with demons; or he is one
of those who seek to conjure with the names of God. Now, since
they conjure the angels or spirits, these tell them about the Messiah,
so as to tempt him to reveal his speculations. And in the end he is
shamed because he has called up the angels and demons, and in-
stead a misfortune occurs at that place. The demons come and teach
him their calculations and apocalyptic secrets in order to shame
him and those who believe in him, for no one knows anything
about the coming of the Messiah.””
But for all the lack of apocalyptic elements in the Messianic con-
ception of Hasidism it would be a mistake to overlook its escha-
tological character. There have been tendencies in this direction.
Thus J. N. Simhoni, one of the few writers on the subject who have
tried to go below the surface, has drawn a picture of Hasidism as a
movement distinguished by a frankly anti-eschatologic form of de-
votion which holds out no expectations of reward in life for meri-
torious deeds, ignores the hope of salvation and remains resolutely
wedded to the present.” “If heavy misfortune befall a man let him
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 89
think of the knights who go to war and do not flee before the sword,
for they are ashamed to flee, and so as not to expose themselves to
shame they let themselves be killed or wounded, and they receive
no reward from their masters for their death in battle. Thus let him
speak with the Scripture: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in
Him’, and I will serve him without hope of reward.’ According to
Simhoni, the legend which ascribes to Jehudah the Hasid an un-
successful attempt, before his death, to unravel the date of the ‘end’
is typical of the belated efforts to represent Hasidism as more
Messianic than it really was.
But is it possible to accept this fundamentally anti-eschatological
interpretation of Hasidism? It is not borne out even by the “Book
of the Devout,” far less by the other documents of this group, such
as, for example, the writings of Eleazar of Worms. If it is true that
their religious interest does not center on the Messianic promise in
the strict sense, it is no less true that the imagination of these writers
is powerfully affected by everything which concerns the eschatology
of the soul. The whole subject was of less direct interest to the
apocalyptically inclined Merkabah mystics than to the older vision-
aries like the author of the Ethiopic book of Enoch, but it was
studied in other circles and inspired several of the shorter Midra-
shim. Eschatological ideas concerning the nature of the state of bliss
in Paradise, the dawn of Redemption, the nature of Resurrection,
the beatific vision of the just, their bodies and garments, the prob-
lem of reward and punishment, etc., were of real importance to a
man like Jehudah the Hasid.* These notions were by no means mere
literary ballast carried along with many traditions of a different
kind; indeed, they belong to the very heart and core of the religious
faith of these men which manifested itself in so many different ways.
Many were no doubt the spontaneous creation of the age, but even
those which came from the East in the wake of the eschatological
Aggadah, such as the description of the terrors of the judgment held
in the grave itself in the first days after burial (Hibbut Ha-Kever),
were eagerly taken up and embellished.”
At all times the vagueness of eschatological hopes the contents
of which have not been dogmatically defined, has evoked more in-
terest among the common people than some great Jewish theolo-
gians have been willing to allow. For Jehudah the Hasid, mysticism
represents something like an anticipation of a knowledge which,
go MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
strictly speaking, belongs to Messianic times. There are secrets which
are revealed in the upper world and which are preserved there for
“the time to come.” Only the mystics and the allegorists of this
world “absorb something of the odor of these secrets and myster-
ies.”’"—Notwithstanding which there can be no doubt that specula-
tions concerning the “end” never ceased to play a part in Hasidic
mysticism.”
The scope and variety of Hasidic speculation is far greater than
that of the old Merkabah mysticism. In addition to the latter’s
favorite subjects of meditation it introduces a species of mystical
thought on a number of new subjects. Thus we find a new theoso-
phy, the “mystery of God’s unity,” which, without entirely abandon-
ing the old mysticism of the Throne, goes far beyond it and forms
a special branch of mystical doctrine; a new mystical psychology,
conceived as an instrument of this theosophy”; and extensive specu-
lation concerning the “reasons of the Torah,” i. e. above all the true
motives of the commandments—a subject which the old Aggadah, no
less than many of the Merkabah mystics, expressly reserved for Mes-
sianic times.” Thus while the ecstatic Merkabah vision, as we have
seen, left little room for exegetical speculation, such speculation,
whatever its forms or methods—and some of them were strange in-
deed—occupies a highly important place in the religious thought of
the Hasidim.”
Nor is this all. The Hasidic doctrine includes—in addition to a
social philosophy based on the conception of natural right and
probably derived from Christian sources—something like a rudi-
mentary theology of history. According to Eleazar of Worms, there
have been since the days of Creation historical forces of opposition,
“weeds” as he calls them, which counteract the divine purpose. The
verse Gen. m1, 18 “thorns and thistles shall the earth bring forth to
thee” is to be understood not only in a natural but also in a histori-
cal sense, the earth signifying in this context the stage on which
man’s history is enacted. “Thorns and thistles” are interpreted, by
a process of reasoning based on numerological mysticism, as repre-
sentations of the profane history which in every generation stands
in opposition to the inner sacred historical process. The origin of
profane history is sought in the Fall which is also defined as the
cause of force and social inequality in the relations of men. But for
Adam’s fall, man would have continuous concourse with the angels
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY gl
and maintain a permanent relationship with God based on direct
revelation. And even after the Fall, men might have avoided the
division into rich and poor, the evil of social inequality, if they ali
had remained tillers of the soil.”
The point to be stressed here is the fact that side by side with
theosophical speculation concerning the mysteries of the Creator and
the Creation, Hasidism gives prominence, far more than does Mer-
kabah mysticism, to ideas which are of direct concern to the religi-
ous existence of man. It sets up a definite human ideal, a type of
man and a way of life to be followed, and includes among the
main articles of its mystical faith, in addition to a peculiar form of
mystical prayer, the ideal of Hasiduth, of which a fuller account
must now be given.
4
Neither learning nor tradition of any kind are among the prime
motive forces of Hasidism. What gave to the movement its distinc-
tive character was, more than any other idea, its novel conception
of the devout, the Hasid, as a religious ideal which transcended all
values derived from the intellectual sphere and the realization of
which was considered more desirable than any intellectual accom-
plishment. To be a Hasid is to conform to purely religious stand-
ards entirely independent of intellectualism and learning. ‘The sur-
prise expressed by Guedemann that the term Hasid was often used
of “devout but otherwise not remarkable men’ reveals a significant
inability—doubly remarkable in the case of so eminent a scholar—
to appreciate a scale of values completely independent of the tradi-
tional Jewish veneration for the learned student of the Torah. For
while, Hasidism continued to place a premium on knowledge, it
was nevertheless possible to be a Hasid without an understanding
of more than, say, the text of the Bible. It is significant that the
psalm reader became a figure of Hasidic legend: it is owing to him
that an entire community is able to resist the great persecutions in
the years of the “Black Death” (1348—52).“ It is more than unlikely
that such legends could have arisen in Spain. They could flourish
only because the ground had been prepared by a new conception of
ideal humanity. The Hasid is “remarkable” not by any intellectual
standard of values but only within the categorical frame-work of
Hasiduth itself.
92 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
The word Hasid has a specific meaning which is sharply distin-
guished from the much more vague and general significance of the
same term in Talmudic usage.” Three things above all others go
to make the true Hasid as he appears before us in the ‘Book of the
Devout’: Ascetic renunciation of the things of this world; complete
serenity of mind; and an altruism grounded in principle and driven
to extremes. Let us consider these points a little closer.”
The ascetic turn of mind is the corollary of a darkly pessimistic
attitude towards life, a characteristic expression of which may be
found in the interpretation given to an old Midrash by Eleazar of
Worms. The “Midrash on the Creation of the Child” relates that
after its guardian angel has given it a fillip upon the nose, the new-
born child forgets all the infinite knowledge acquired before its
birth in the celestial houses of learning. But why, Eleazar asks, does
the child forget? ‘Because, if it did not forget, the course of this
world would drive it to madness if it thought about it in the light
of what it knew.’” Truly a remarkable variant of the Platonic con-
ception of cognition as recollection, anamnesis, which lies also at
the root of this Midrash! For this doctrine, hope is present only in
the eschatological perspective. As Eleazar put it in a somewhat
drastic metaphor, man is a rope whose two ends are pulled by God
and Satan; and in the end God proves stronger.”
In practice, this asceticism enjoins the renunciation of profane
speech, of playing with children and of other innocent pleasures—
“he who keeps birds only for ornament would do better to give the
money to the poor.” In short, it amounts to turning one’s back on
ordinary life as lived by ordinary people, azivath derekh erets, to
quote the pregnant term used in the “Book of the Devout.’” The
Hasid must resolutely reject and overcome every temptation of or-
dinary life. By a natural corollary, this asceticism finds its antithesis
in a magnified eschatological hope and promise; by renouncing the
temptations of this world, by averting his eyes from women, he be-
comes worthy of an afterlife in which he will see the g'ory of the
Shekhinah with his own eyes and rank above the angels.”
Secondly, the Hasid must bear insults and shame without flinch-
ing; indeed the very term Hasid is interpreted, with the aid of an
ingenious play of words, as ‘‘one who bears shame.” For to bear
shame and derision is an essential part of the way of life of the true
devotee; in fact, the Hasid proves himself worthy of his name pre-
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 93
cisely in such situations. Though he be insulted and pale with
shame, yet he remains deaf and dumb. ‘For even though his face
is now pale, Isaiah has already said (xxix, 22): ‘neither shall his
face now wax pale’; for indeed his face shall be radiant hereafter.’’*
‘When the psalmist says: ‘for Thy sake are we killed all the day
long’ he means those who bear shame and dishonor and humilia-
tion in carrying out His commands.” This constantly stressed im-
perviousness to the scorn and the mockery which the Hasid’s way
of life cannot fail to evoke by its extremism, is the true imitation
of God. He, the ideal of the Hasid, is meant by the prophet when
he says (Isaiah xx, 14): “I have long time holden my peace; I
have been still and refrained myself.” Here again the hope of
eternal bliss is the predominant note, although, as we have seen, it
is occasionally emphasized that this hope should not be the motive
of one’s actions. “One abused and insulted a Hasid; the latter did
not mind while the other called down curses on his body and his
possessions. But when he cursed him by saying he wished him many
sins so that he might lose his share of eternal bliss, that grieved him.
When his disciples questioned him about it, he replied: When he
called me names, he could not wound me. I need no honor, for
when a man dies, what becomes of his honor? But when he called
curses down on my blessedness, then I began to fear that he might
bring me to sin.’
No less stress is laid on the third point: “The essence of Hasiduth
is to act in all things not on but within the line of strict justice—
that is to say, not to insist in one’s own interest on the letter of the
Torah; for it is said of God, whom the Hasid strives to follow,
(Psalm cxtv, 17): The Lord is hasid in all his ways.”“ This
altruism is stressed already in the “Sayings of the Fathers,” an ethi-
cal Mishnah treatise: “What is mine is yours, and what is yours is
yours—that is the way of the Hasid.” The famous commentator
Rashi, too, repeatedly lays emphasis on the fact that the Hasid
does not insist on the letter of the law even though it may be to
his advantage to do so.“
There can be little doubt that the formulation of this principle
in the Sefer Hasidim only partially bridges the divergence between
this way of life and the normative canon of rabbinical Judaism,
the Halakhah. On the side of the Hasidim there was the ancient
Talmudic tradition of a special ‘“‘Mishnah of the Hasidim,” whose
94 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
commandments place far heavier demands upon the Hasid than the
ordinary standards of common law. Tendencies of this kind appear
only sporadically in Talmudic literature and have never been sys-
tematized; nevertheless, they could be used as a legitimation of
those ideals of mediaeval Hasidism which were indirectly derived
from contemporary religious movements.“ In the “Book of the De-
vout” we find what amounts almost to a crystallization of this
hitherto amorphous “Mishnah of the Hasidim.” The “heavenly
law,” din shamayim, as conceived by the Hasid, i. e. the call to self-
abnegation and altruism, in many instances goes far beyond the
common law of the Torah as interpreted by the Halakhah. It is not
difficult to perceive the latent antagonism between the two concep-
tions.” There are things chiefly concerning social relations which
are permitted under rabbinical law but for which heaven neverthe-
less inflicts punishment.® As Baer has pointed out, this divergence
between the law of the Torah and the heavenly law—the latter fre-
quently used as a synonym for natural and humane fairness and
equity—is a fundamental principle of the conception of morality
outlined in the Sefer Hasidim; it is even made the criterion of what
shall be considered right and just in everyday life.
True, even this higher law, which is considered binding only for
the Hasid and which is set up in somewhat veiled opposition to
the Halakhah, is capable of exegetical deduction from Scripture, an
undertaking in which the author of the book displays considerable
ingenuity.” But it is plain that anyone who proceeds from such
assumptions can hardly be productive in the domain of strict Hala-
khah, however much veneration he may show for Halakhic tradition
and however little he may feel inclined to adopt a “revolutionary”
attitude towards it. And in fact we possess hardly a single new Hala-
khah from Jehudah the Hasid, in striking contrast to his productive
influence in so many other fields. In the great Halakhic work Or
Zarua written by his disciple, Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, who was
with him in Regensburg during the last years of his life, not one
Halakhah is introduced in the name of his master." What he does
attribute to him are “miracle stories, exegetical commentaries, and
original deductions and opinions”, such as there are by the hundred
—most of them taken no doubt from Jehudah—in the “Book of the
Devout.”
The Hasid, who in his outward behavior submits to the estab-
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 95
lished law in all its rigour, at bottom denies its absolute validity for
himself. It is a little paradoxical when Eleazar of Worms, at the
outset of his Sefer Rokeah, in which he gives an outline of the
religious law, makes an attempt to codify the Hasidic ideal in Hala-
khic terms.” It is a remarkable fact that both Maimonides and his
younger contemporary, Eleazar, preface their codifications of the law
by attempts to extend the Halakhah to matters which, strictly speak-
ing, lie beyond its province: in the case of Maimonides, a philo-
sophic and cosmologic preface in which the ideas of Aristotelian
enlightenment are introduced as elements of the Halakhah; in the
case of Eleazar, a chapter devoted to the entirely unintellectual
principles of Hasiduth. The coincidence is hardly fortuitous and
throws an interesting light on the significance of the various reli-
gious trends in Judaism; nor is it fortuitous that in both cases the
attempts failed: ‘The Halakhah was never organically linked with
the quasi-Halakhah which preceded it.
5
Such Hasiduth leads man to the pinnacles of true fear and love
of God. In its sublimest manifestations, pure fear of God is identical
with love and devotion for Him, not from a need for protection
against the demons, or from fear of temptation, but because in this
mystical state a flood of joy enters the soul and sweeps away every
trace of mundane and egotistical feeling.” “The soul is full of love
of God and bound with ropes of love, in joy and lightness of heart.
He is not like one who serves his master unwillingly, but even when
one tries to hinder him, the love of service burns in his heart, and
he is glad to fulfill the will of his Creator . .. For when the soul
thinks deeply about the fear of God, then the flame of heartfelt love
bursts in it and the exultation of innermost joy fills the heart...
And the lover thinks not of his advantage in the world, he does not
care about the pleasures of his wife or of his sons and daughters, but
all this is as nothing to him, everything except that he may do the
will of his Creator, do good unto others, keep sanctified the name
of God... And all the contemplation of his thoughts burns in the
fire of love for Him.”™
It is characteristic of this stage that the fulfillment of the divine
will becomes purely an act of love. As in the contemporaneous
96 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Christian mystical love-poetry, the relation of the mystic to God is
described in terms of erotic passion, not infrequently in a way which
shocks our modern sensibilities.” The use of such metaphors goes
back to the exhaustive treatment of the subject in Saadia’s theologic
magnum opus.” The earthly love, which he describes in consider-
able detail, was for the early German Hasidim a complete allegory
of the heavenly passion, just as it was in a later age for Israel Baal
Shem, the founder of Polish Hasidism, who is quoted as saying:
“What Saadia says of love makes it possible to draw an inference
from the nature of the sensual to that of the spiritual passion; if
the force of sensual love is so great, how great must be the passion
with which man loves God.’”” The mystical principles of this Hasi-
duth which culminate in pure love of God are necessary for the
understanding of theosophy and of what is here called Merkabah
mysticism, and it is as such prerequisites that they are introduced
by Eleazar of Worms.*
It is clear that this ideal of the Hasidic devotee, an ideal which
bears none of the traces of scholarly gravity that might be expected
in a centre of ‘Talmudic learning like mediaeval Germany, is closely
related to the ascetic ideal of the monk and particularly to its most
archaic traits. Its practical message is indistinguishable from the
ataraxy, the “absence of passion” of the Cynics and Stoics—an ideal
which, although originally not conceived from religious motives,
powerfully affected the nascent asceticism of Christianity and, at a
later period, the way of life of the ancient Mohammedan mystics,
the Sufis. What we have before us in these writings is a Judaized
version of Cynicism, which makes use of cognate tendencies in Tal-
mudic tradition but relegates to the background or eliminates alto-
gether those elements which did not fall into line with these ten-
dencies. The influence of Cynicism is obvious in the ideal of com-
plete indifference to praise or blame, which very often in the history
of mysticism figures as a sine qua non of mystical illumination, not
least in the writings of the Kabbalists. The point is well brought
out in the following anecdote told by the Spanish Kabbalist Isaac
of Acre (around 1300): “He who is vouchsafed the entry into the
mystery of adhesion to God, devekuth, attains to the mystery of
equanimity, and he who possesses equanimity attains to loneliness,
and from there he comes to the holy Spirit and to prophecy. But
about the mystery of equanimity the following was told to me by
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 97
Rabbi Abner: Once upon a time a lover of secret lore came to an
anchorite and asked to be admitted as a pupil. Then he said to
him: My son, your purpose is admirable, but do you possess equani-
mity or not? He replied: Indeed, I feel satisfaction at praise and
pain at insult, but I am not revengeful and I bear no grudge. Then
the master said to him: My son, go back to your home, for as long
as you have no equanimity and can still feel the sting of insult,
you have not attained to the state where you can connect your
thoughts with God.’’*—There is nothing in this Kabbalistic or Sufic
anecdote which is not entirely in harmony with the spirit of Hasi-
dism. Very similar ideas have been expressed at the same time by
the German mystic Meister Eckhart who quotes “the old” i. e. the
Stoics as his authority.
Another element of Cynicism is evident in the way in which the
practice of certain actions is carried to extremes and the whole
moral and religious fervor of the mind concentrated on a single
aspect of religious life or on a single moral quality. Already the old
paraphrasis of Saadia, through which, as we have seen, numerous
religious ideas were transmitted to these circles, defines the Hasid
as one “who all his life devotes himself to one particular religious
commandment to which he stays obedient under any circumstances,
even though he may be inconsistent in fulfilling other command-
ments . . . But one who wavers from one day to another between
the various commandments is not called a Hasid.”” Here the ele-
ment of radicalism and extremism, which later on Maimonides too
regarded as characteristic of the Hasid,“ appears already in the
definition of the term. On the other hand, the element of indiffer-
ence to praise or blame, the ideal of ataraxy which stands in such
srihiong contrast to this religious radicalism, is nowhere referred to
in the theological sources of Hasidism and must have come from
outside, that is to say, probably from the Christian environment.
Both are equally essential, for it is the paradoxical combination
of these two spiritual qualities which makes the Cynic, and it is
the ideal of the monkish Cynic which appears before us in a Jewish
guise under the name of Hasidism. Generally accepted as the moral
ideal by contemporary Christian society, glorified by saints, popular
preachers and tract writers, it struck roots among the German Jews
in the atmosphere created by the Crusades. The innumerable little
stories in which the Hasidic ideal is developed in the “Book of the
98 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Devout” have a close counterpart in the collections of those ‘‘ex-
amples” which Christian preachers were in the habit of introducing
in their homilies.” Alongside a mass of folklore these contain not a
few stories of profound moral interest, thoughts common to the
mystics of every religion and which might have grown out of any
one of them. Such tales travel fast and know no boundaries; a
story such as that of the devout man who bears the odium of
apparent depravity and lives among whores and gamblers in order
to try to save them from at least one sin,” is cosmopolitan in its
appeal.
For the old Merkabah mystics, the devotee, as we have seen,
was at best the keeper of the holy mysteries. This conception differs
radically from that of the Hasidim for whom humility, restraint and
self-abnegation rank higher than the pride of heart which fills the
Merkabah visionary in the mystical presence of God. The place of
the ecstatic seer, whose mystical élan carries him across all barriers
and hindrances to the steps of the heavenly throne, is taken by the
meditative devotee, sunk in humble contemplation of the Omni-
present Infinite. However, this ideal of the purely contemplative
mystic must be understood in its true religious and social context.
The Hasid whose face is, as it were, turned towards God and away
from the community, nevertheless functions as the latter’s true
guide and master. ‘The guiding function appears very clearly in the
manner in which Hasidic literature is at pains to make allowances
for human weakness and to show every consideration for the con-
ditions of life of the community. The moral casuistry of the ‘Book
of the Devout”, which in this respect goes far beyond the older
Halakhic literature in its earth-bound realism, is a precious docu-
ment of true humanity. For all the moral and religious radicalism
of its demands upon the devout, Hasidism does not hesitate to con-
demn the ostentatious display of these qualities and what the Tal-
mud already called “heedless” or ‘‘absurd” devotion. Its monkish
character is also apparent in the quiet assumption that not every-
body is destined to be a Hasid. Both Jehudah the Hasid and his
father are pictured by the legend as saints in whom both aspects of
this form of religious life were harmoniously combined: radical,
anti-social, introspective devotion to the ideal, and loving care for
the maintenance of the community.
To this trait must be added another: The helpless, selfless, in-
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 99
different Hasid figures in the minds of a public influenced by Hasid-
ism as an enormously powerful being who can command the forces
of all the elements. Here the popular conception of the true Hasid
supplements the picture which the Hasidim have drawn of them-
selves, though not without causing some discrepancies. ‘To take one
example, Jehudah the Hasid, though fully convinced of the effective-
ness of magic and other occult disciplines, was sharply opposed to
their practice. He appears to have sensed very clearly the contrast
between the magician who prides himself on his control of the ele-
ments, and the humble Hasid who craves no form of power. But his
perception of the danger did not prevent the magical elements in
his heritage from gaining the upper hand over his moral ideal. In
the legend, he appears as the bearer and dispenser of all those magi-
cal powers and attributes which he was at such pains to renounce,
and this legend is by no means the product of later generations:
it began to form already during his lifetime.“ In this conception,
the Hasid appears as the true master of magical forces who can ob-
tain everything precisely because he wants nothing for himself. No-
where else in Judaism has man the magical creator been surrounded
with such an halo. It is to Hasidism that we owe the development
of the legend of the Golem, or magical homunculus—this quintes-
sential product of the spirit of German Jewry—and the theoretical
foundations of this magical doctrine.” In the writings of Eleazar of
Worms, the most faithful of Jehudah’s disciples, discourses on the
essence of Hasiduth are to be found side by side with tracts on
magic and the effectiveness of God’s secret names, in one case even
in the same book.” There one also finds the oldest extant recipes for
creating the Golem—a mixture of letter magic and practices obvi-
ously aimed at producing ecstatic states of consciousness.” It would
appear as though in the original conception the Golem came to life
only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted. The creation of the
Golem was, as it were, a particularly sublime experience felt by the
mystic who became absorbed in the mysteries of the alphabetic
combinations described in the “Book of Creation.” It was only later
that the popular legend attributed to the Golem an existence out-
side the ecstatic consciousness, and in later centuries a whole group
of legends sprang up around such Golem figures and their creators.”
100 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
6
Obscurity still surrounds the question how far a certain form of
magic was also involved in the prayer mysticism of the Hasidim
which contemporary authors already regarded as particularly char-
acteristic of their faith. Jacob ben Asher, whose father came to
Spain from Germany, says on this subject: ‘““The German Hasidim
were in the habit of counting or calculating every word in the pray-
ers, benedictions and hymns, and they sought a reason in the Torah
for the number of words in the prayers.’’” In other words, this mys-
ticism of prayer originates not from the spontaneous prayer of the
devotee but from a study of the classical liturgy whose text was
largely fixed by tradition. It is essentially not a new form of devo-
tion, but mystical speculation concerning the background of an
already firmly established tradition. Here and elsewhere in the
literature of the Hasidism, prominence is given for the first time to
certain techniques of mystical speculation which are popularly
supposed to represent the heart and core of Kabbalism, such as
Gematria, i. e. the calculation of the numerical value of Hebrew
words and the search for connections with other words or phrases
of equal value; Notarikon, or interpretation of the letters of a word
as abbreviations of whole sentences; and Temurah, or interchange
of letters according to certain systematic rules.” As a matter of
historical fact, none of these techniques of mystical exegesis can be
called Kabbalistic in the strict sense of the word. In the literature
of the classical Kabbalah, during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, they often played a very minor part; the few important
Kabbalists who made more marked use of them, such as Jacob ben
Jacob Hacohen, or Abraham Abulafia, were clearly influenced by
the German Hasidim. What really deserves to be called Kabbalism
has very little to do with these ‘Kabbalistic’ practices.
The Hasidic literature on the subject of prayer is comprehensive
and to a large extent still in our hands.” It shows that the number
of words which constituted a prayer and the numerical values of
words, parts of sentences, and whole sentences, were linked not only
with Biblical passages of equal numerical value, but also with cer-
tain designations of God and the angels, and other formulas. Prayer
is Tikened to Jacob’s ladder extended from the earth to the sky; it
is therefore conceived as a species of mystical ascent and appears in
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 101
many of these ‘‘explanations” as a “highly formalized process full
of hidden aspects and purposes.” But while we know a great deal
about the external technique of these “mysteries of prayer’ as the
Hasidim called them, we are in the dark as regards the real mean-
ing, the functional purpose of these mystical numerologies. Were
certain meditations meant to go with certain prayers, or does the
emphasis lie on the magical influence of prayer? In the former case
we should be dealing with what the Kabbalah since 1200 referred
to as Kawwanah, literally “intention,” i.e. mystical meditation on
the words of prayer while they are being spoken. Kawwanah, in
other words, is something to be realized in the act of prayer itself.
Now among the German Hasidim, this fundamental doctrine of
Kabbalistic mysticism of prayer does not yet ocur. Eleazar of Worms,
in his great commentary on the prayers, makes no mention of it, and
where, in another context, he refers in passing to a conception of
Kawwanah which comes close to the Kabbalistic one—a fact which
I shall discuss later—it is clear that this concerns not particular
words but the whole of the prayer. As to how the Hasidim them-
selves interpreted the use of the above-mentioned “mysteries” 1 have
been unable to come to a final conclusion, but it is plain that this
mysticism of prayer stands in opposition to the old Merkabah mys-
ticism. The emphasis is no longer on the approach of the mystic
himself to God’s throne but on that of his prayer. It is the word,
not the soul, which triumphs over fate and evil. ‘The enormous con-
cern shown for the use of the correct phrase in the traditional texts,
and the excessive pedantry displayed in this regard reveals a totally
new attitude towards the function of words. Where the Merkabah
mystics sought spontaneous expression for their oceanic feeling in
the prodigal use of words, the Hasidim discovered a multitude of
esoteric meanings in a strictly limited number of fixed expressions.
And this painstaking loyalty to the fixed term does indeed seem to
go hand in hand with a renewed consciousness of the magic power
inherent in words.
As to when and how this mysticism of prayer or, as one should
perhaps say, magic of prayer, first originated, the texts tell us no-
thing. Certainly it did not originate solely among the Hasidim, al-
though all our knowledge is derived from these sources. A consen-
sus of traditions handed down by the disciples of Jehudah the Hasid
determines the new mysticism as the final link in a chain which
102 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
reaches back through the Kalonymides to Italy, and from there to
Aaron of Baghdad, whose name has already been mentioned. Cer-
tain intermediate links in the chain may appear dubious, but in its
essence the view that the “mysteries of prayer” were brought to
Germany from Italy, perhaps in a more primitive form, seems in-
controvertible.” Eleazar of Worms tells us that when the father of
Samuel the Hasid, R. Kalonymus, died around 1126, his son was too
young to be told the secret by his father, in accordance with the
traditional family usage. For this reason another scholar, at the time
leader of prayers in the Speyer community, was entrusted by him
with the mission of initiating the boy when he had grown up. This
shows quite clearly that the origins of the secret doctrine go back
beyond the period of the Crusades. Whether they lay in Babylonia
and spread from there to Italy—simultaneously perhaps with the
already declining Merkabah mysticism—must remain a matter for
conjecture. At any rate there can be little doubt that the Kabbal-
istic mysticism of prayer, though its own subsequent development
was entirely different, was taken over from the Hasidim.
The combination of ecstaticism and magic, already noted as char-
acteristics of Merkabah mysticism, reappears on a new plane in this
mysticism of prayer. As to whether it determined the theory of
prayer, it is only possible to guess. In other respects its influence is
plain. Moses Taku (of Tachau?) a follower of Jehudah the Hasid,
who set himself to defend the undiluted doctrine of Talmudic Juda-
ism, if necessary even against the teachings of his own master, has
given an account of such practices of which he strongly disapproved
and which he did not hesitate to condemn as heretical: ““They set
themselves up as prophets by practicing the pronounciation of holy
names, or sometimes they only direct their intention upon them
without actually pronouncing the words. Then a man is seized by
terror and his body sinks to the ground. The barrier in front of his
soul falls, he himself steps into the centre and gazes into the fara-
way, and only after a while, when the power of the name recedes,
does he awaken and return with a confused mind to his former
state. This is exactly what the magicians do who practice the ex-
orcism of the demons. They conjure one from their midst with un-
clean exorcisms, in order that he may tell them what has perhaps
been happening in a far away country. The conjurer falls down on
the ground where he was standing and his veins become cramped
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 103
and stiff, and he is as one dead. But after a while he rises without
consciousness and runs out of the house, and if one does not hold
him at the door he would break his head and his limbs. ‘Then when
he again becomes a little conscious of himself, he tells them what he
has seen.’”™
It is well known how widespread such manifestations of the ab-
normal “‘metapsychic” life were during this period among the Chris-
tians in whose midst the Hasidim passed their life. A book like
Josef Goerres’ voluminous “Christliche Mystik” is a veritable the-
saurus of instances of this genre. But that the Jewish mystics also
attached the very greatest importance to such direct contact with the
psychic world is clearly proved by the example of Jacob Halevi of
Marvége, (around 1200) who seems to have belonged to a Hasidic
circle. He has left us a whole collection of “Responses from Heaven”’
i. e. judgments (on controversial questions of rabbinic law) which
were revealed to him as answers to “dream questions,” sheeloth ha-
lom." The asking of such questions was an extremely widespread
magical practice for which we have hundreds of recipes." While
there were scholars who disparaged the solution of Halakhic prob-
lems on the basis of direct revelation instead of Talmudic casuistry,
there were also many others who admired and imitated the practice.
Indeed, the thing is as characteristic of the attitude of many fol-
lowers of Hasidism towards the Halakhah as it is dubious from
the point of view of strict Talmudism.
7
Thus the new religious spirit which finds expression in the ideal
of the Hasid permeates every domain of traditional Jewish mysti-
cisnf and theosophy and tries, albeit awkwardly and unsystemati-
cally, to transform them. This effort includes attempts to give a
new interpretation to the Merkabah. Jehudah the Hasid relates to
his pupil Eleazar how, when he was once standing in the synagogue
with his father and there was a bowl with water and oil before
them, his father drew his attention to the incomparable radiance
which the light of the sun produced on the surface of the liquid,
and said to him: “Fix your attention on this radiance, for it is the
same as the radiance of the Hashmal’ (one of the personified
objects of Ezekiel’s Merkabah vision).”
104 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
We have seen how the new temper transformed the old spirit of
prayer. But it also opened new spheres of religious experience—
important in spite of all the doubts that they may raise in the
minds of later generations—such as the theory and practice of peni-
tence which here first in the development of Jewish mysticism ac-
quired vehement force. Hitherto penitence had not been of para-
mount importance to the mystics; now it became the central fact
of their existence. In the place of the heavenly journey of the self-
absorbed ecstatic, and parallel to the new emphasis laid on the now
enormously important act of prayer, the technique of penitence was
developed into a vast and elaborate system until it became one of
the cornerstones of true Hasiduth. It is important to realize that
previously an elaborate casuistry of penitential acts corresponding
to every conceivable degree of transgression had been almost un-
known among Jews." The Hasidim were thus not restricted by tra-
ditional obstacles when they undertook the task of formulating a
ritual of penitence that was entirely in accordance with the new
spirit they represented.
Here we are again undoubtedly faced with the after-effects of
Christian influence. The whole system of penitence, particularly in
the codified form given to it by Eleazar of Worms in several of his
writings, closely corresponds to the practices prescribed by the early
mediaeval Church in its literature on the subject, the “penitentiary
books.”” Among the latter, the Celtic and later the Frankish tracts
developed a peculiar system of which the understanding is pertinent
to our subject. Penitence is conceived as reparation for an insult to |
God through a personal act of restitution, the sinner undertaking .
to perform certain well-defined acts of a penitentiary character—a
conception which inevitably led to the establishment of what can
only be described as a tariff of penitence. These “forcible cures and
powerful remedies,” of which the history of ecclesiastical penitence
is full, were doubtless suited to the comprehension of the recently
Christianized Celts and Germans and accorded well with their
primitive notions of justice, especially in the case of the Franks.
But the point to be noted here is that they were also taken over by
the Hasidim and adapted to the Jewish milieu. Although after the
Gregorian reform of the Church in the eleventh century, Rome
opened a fight against the old “penitentiary books,” their authority
remained unshaken among wide circles during the whole period of |
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 105
the Crusades, at a time, that is to say, when the Jewish communities
in Germany were themselves under the influence of a mood favor-
able to their adoption. Authority could easily be ascribed to them
by pointing to some scattered analogies in the older Jewish litera-
ture. In this manner it became possible to justify the adoption of
a whole system of penitence, beginning with all sorts of fastings
and leading through various acts, frequently of a highly bizarre
nature, to the supreme punishment of voluntary exile—an act of
penance already known to the Talmud.”
Generally speaking, the system as developed in the Sefer Hasidim
and conserved in the moral literature of later generations distin-
guishes between four categories of penitence.” In its mildest form,
penitence simply meant that the opportunity for committing the
same sin again was not utilized (teshuvah habaah); but penitence
could also amount to a system of voluntary restraints and the pre-
ventive avoidance of all occasions calculated to tempt one into com-
mitting a certain sin (teshuvath hagader) ; thirdly, the amount of
pleasure derived from committing a sin could be made the criterion
of the self-imposed askesis (teshuvath hamishkal); lastly, in the
case of transgressions forbidden under pain of death by the Torah,
the sinner must undergo “‘tortures as bitter as death’’—often amount-
ing to extravagantly painful and humiliating punishments—in order
to obtain divine forgiveness and avoid the “extermination of the
soul” which the Torah threatens for certain sins (teshuvath haka-
tuv). In regard to these practices we have the evidence not only of
the Hasidic writings, whose exhortations might be dismissed as
belonging purely to the realm of theory, but also of a good many
accounts of actual happenings through which the fame of the Ger-
man Hasidim soon spread far and wide. These stories, of which
theré are many, leave no doubt about the spirit of fanatical earnest-
ness which animated the zealots. To sit in the snow or in the ice
for an hour daily in winter, or to expose one’s body to ants and
bees in summer, was judged a common practice among those who
followed the new call. It is a far cry from the Talmudic conception
of penitence to these novel ideas and practices.
A story like the following is characteristic of the new mood: “A
Hasid was in the habit of sleeping on the floor in summer, among
the fleas, and placing his feet into a bucket with water in winter,
until they froze into one lump with the ice. A pupil asked him:
106 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Why do you do that? Why, since man is responsible for his life, do
you expose yourself to certain danger? The Hasid replied: It is true
that I have not committed any deadly sin, and though I am surely
guilty of lighter transgressions there is no need for me to expose
myself to such tortures. But it is said in the Midrash that the
Messiah is suffering for our sins, as it is said (Isaiah Li, 5): ‘he
is wounded for our transgressions’, and those who are truly just
take sufferings upon themselves for their generation. But I do not
want anyone but myself to suffer for my sins.’”” And in fact the
pupil who, after the death of his teacher, is perturbed by the
thought that his death might have been due to his ascetic sufferings,
and that he may now be punished for it, has a dream revelation
in which he learns that his master has attained to an infinitely
high place in heaven.
In the same manner we are told by the Kabbalist Isaac of Acre,
in the fourteenth century: “1 have heard tell of a Hasid in Germany,
who was not a scholar but a simple and honest man, that he once
washed away the ink from a strip of parchment on which were writ-
ten prayers which included the name of God. When he learned that
he had sinned against the honor of God’s name, he said: I have
despised God’s honor, therefore I shall not think higher of my
own. What did he do? Every day during the hour of prayer, when
the congregation entered and left the synagogue, he lay down on the
doorstep and old and young passed over him; and if one trod on
him, whether deliberately or by accident, he rejoiced and thanked
God. Thus he did for a whole year, taking as his guide the saying
of the Mishnah: ‘the wicked will be judged in hell for twelve
months’.”*"—Long afterwards, the responses of German Rabbis still
bear testimony to the powerful influence of Hasidic morality, as
when Jacob Weil prescribes detailed penances for an adulterous
young woman, or Israel Bruna for a murderer.“ There is, however,
one important respect in which Hasidism differs sharply from its
Christian contemporaries: it does not enjoin sexual asceticism. On
the contrary, the greatest importance is assigned in the Sefer Hast-
dim to the establishment and maintenance of a normal and reason-
able marital life. Nowhere is penitence extended to sexual abstin-
ence in marital relations. The asceticism of the typical Hasid con-
cerns solely his social relations towards women, not the sexual side
of his married life.
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 107
8
Turning to the influence which Hasidism as a whole has exer-
cised upon the Jews of Germany one finds that its prcatical side, 1. e.
the new morality, the system of penitence, and the mysticism of
prayer, have held their own much longer than the theological and
theosophical ideas and the conception of God expounded in the
writings of Jehudah the Hasid and his disciples. With the gradual
infiltration, since the fourteenth century, of a more highly developed
system of thought, the Kabbalism of Spain, early Hasidic theosophy
lost ground, and in time—albeit never completely“—relinquished
its hold on those Jewish circles which were at all concerned with
theological questions.
Nevertheless, an understanding of Hasidism also requires an
analysis of these theosophical ideas of which the literature of the
thirteenth and fourteenth century is full; and here one is immedi-
ately forced to recognize the existence of a new religious mood with
a strong tendency towards pantheism, or at least a mysticism of
divine immanence. In the literature with which we are concerned,
this element is combined with Aggadic traditions, with remnants
from the heritage of Merkabah mysticism”—sometimes in a new
guise—and above all with the consistently influential theology of
Saadia. In the case of some of these representations and transforma-
tions of theosophical ideas, some doubt remains both as regards
their origin and their rabbinical orthodoxy. Now and then, when
they became entangled in mystical brooding, it seems as though
these pious and naive mediaeval Jewish devotees unconsciously
drew upon the religious heritage of heretics and sectarians. One
even finds tendencies towards a kind of Logos doctrine.
Thfe God of the old pre-Hasidic mystics was the Holy King who,
from his throne in the empyraeum, listens to the ecstatic hymns
of his creatures. The living relationship of these mystics to God
rested upon the glorification of certain aspects of the divinity, its
solemnity, the absence of everything profane, even its immensity
and overwhelmingness. In contradistinction to this picture, Ger-
man Hasidism now develops a different conception of God which
poignantly contrasts with the older one.
The Hasidim like to employ Saadia’s terminology in order to
describe the pure spirituality and the immeasurable infiniteness of
108 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
God, two aspects of His being on which they lay the greatest empha-
sis. Io these attributes was added a third which, like the two others,
played no part in the mysticism of the Merkabah period, namely
God’s omnipresence, which in turn imperceptibly acquired the char-
acter of an immanence not easily reconciled with the supramundane
transcendence of the Creator, another Hasidic article of faith. As
the idea is finally developed by the outstanding representatives of
the new school, God is not so much the master of the universe as
its first principle and prime mover. Side by side with this new
conception, the earlier belief seems to linger on as though by force
of tradition. The new conception is formulated by Eleazar of Worms
in a significant passage where he says: “God is omnipresent and
perceives the just and the evil-doers. Therefore when you pray,
collect your mind, for it is said: 1 always place God against myself;
and therefore the beginning of all benedictions runs ‘Praise be to
Thee, oh God’—as though a man speaks to a friend.”™ No Merkabah
mystic would have given this interpretation of the “Thee” with
which God is addressed. More than that, the change between the
second and the third persons in the formulae of the benedictions
(“Praise be to Thee . . . who has blessed us’) is quoted as proof
that God is at once the nearest and the farthest, the most plainly
revealed and the most completely hidden of all.”
God is even closer to the universe and to man than the soul is
to the body. This doctrine, propounded by Eleazar of Worms” and
accepted by the Hasidim, closely parallels Augustine’s thesis—so
often approvingly quoted by the Christian mystics of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries—that God is closer to any of His creatures
than the latter to itself. In its most uncompromising form this doc-
trine of God’s immanence is expressed in the “Song of Unity”, a
hymn composed by a member of the inner circle around Jehudah
the Hasid—who seems to have written a commentary to it—which
gives an impressive version of Saadia’s conception of God.” Thus
we read: “Everything is in Thee, and Thou art in everything; Thou
fillest every thing and dost encompass it; when everything was cre-
ated, Thou wast in everything; before everything was created, Thou
wast everything.” Expressions of this sort recur in every kind of
Hasidic writing. As Bloch has shown, they are nothing but enthusi-
astic embellishments of the idea of divine omnipresence as set out
in the old Hebrew paraphrase of Saadia’s magnum opus.”
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 109
But from where are they taken? Whose spirit do they reflect? One
is tempted to think of John the Scot, called Scotus Erigena, the
“great light’ of Neoplatonic mysticism in the ninth century. His
influence was immense and could very well have extended to Jewish
circles in Provence where, according to some scholars, the above-
mentioned paraphrase of Saadia seems to have originated. It is
well known that writers from these circles drew heavily upon early
sources of Latin scholasticism. And indeed, it is the spirit of John
the Scot, which is reflected in such formulae as those that I have
quoted. Nobody would be surprised if they closed with the words:
“For Thou shalt be everything in everything, when there shall be
nothing but Thee alone’—words which are actually a transposition
into direct speech of a sentence taken from John the Scot’s book
“On the Division of Nature.”
Not infrequently the idea of immanence is given a naturalistic
twist, as when Moses Azriel, a thirteenth-century Hasid, defines it
thus: ‘He is One in the cosmic ether, for He fills the whole ether
and everything in the world, and nowhere is there a barrier before
Him. Everything is in Him, and He sees everything, for He is en-
tirely perception though He has no eyes, for He has the power to
see the universe within His own being.’” Some of these passages
have been taken literally from Saadia’s commentary to the Sefer
Yetsirah, where he refers in very naturalistic terms to God’s life as
a positive attribute of His being.”
Here it should be remarked in passing that this widespread doc-
trine of divine immanence, which clearly corresponded to the deep-
est religious feeling of the Hasidim, had already been criticized
sharply by a disciple of Jehudah the Hasid: Moses Taku expressed
the fear that this pantheistic element in the conception of the
divimity might be used as a justification of paganism, since it made
it possible for the heathen to argue that “they were serving the
Creator with their cult and their idols, seeing that He was omni-
present.”” And in fact there have always been pronounced oppon-
ents of this form of pantheism who refused to permit the “Song of
Unity” to be included in the communal prayer although it was in-
cluded already at an early period in the liturgy. Instances of such
opposition are related of Rabbi Solomon Luria in the 16th century
and the famous Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, the “Gaon of Vilna,” in
the 18th century.”
110 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Among the Hasidim, the doctrine of divine immanence persisted
after they had come in contact with Spanish Kabbalism—hardly
surprising in view of the fact that Kabbalism was by no means free
of similar tendencies, including radically pantheistic notions. One
of these part Hasidic, part Kabbalistic treatises contains a very illu-
minating explanation of the description of God as the “soul of the
soul,” in which it is explained that God inhabits the soul. This, we
are told, is the true meaning of the word (Deut. vu, 21) “for the
Lord thy God is in your midst,” the “in your midst” being a preg-
nant reference not to the people—although this is doubtless the
meaning of the verse—but to the individual.” Thus with the aid
of mystical exegesis the theory of divine immanence and the con-
ception of God as the inmost ground of the soul is traced back to
the Torah itself—an idea wholly foreign to the old Merkabah
mystics.
This doctrine of a God who in a mysterious fashion is immanent
in all things does not always differentiate between the unknown
God, the deus absconditus and His revelation as King, Creator and
sender of prophecy. Frequently the same designation is applied in
both contexts. But side by side with these general theological char-
acteristics of spirituality, infinity and immanence, there also appears
a form of theosophic speculation which attempts to differentiate be-
tween the various aspects under which God is revealed. Owing to
the lack of talent, peculiar to the Hasidim, for precisely-worded
abstract thought, this attempt has been the source of a good deal
of confusion. There is overlapping in the texts, and the various
conflicting religious motives are not harmonized. As religious phil-
osophers the Hasidim were distinguished by the quality which a
modern scholar, referring to Philo, has defined as “that model lack
of clarity which, in conjunction with an extraordinary susceptibility,
makes it possible for a large variety of contradictory ideas to coexist
in one mind, so that one is struck now by one and now by the
other.’”” There are three main thoughts which characterize the
peculiar theosophy of the Hasidim and which plainly originate
from different sources: (1) the conception of Kavod, i. e. divine
glory; (2) the idea of a “holy” or specially distinguished cherub
on the throne; and (3) their conception of God’s holiness and
greatness.
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY Pr
9
Before turning to the analysis of these ideas, it is necessary to
make a prefatory remark. The question how it is possible for the
unknown God to reveal himself as the Creator, this central problem
of Spanish Kabbalism, does not exist for the Hasidim. The con-
ception of God the Creator presents no problem to their minds. It
is to them not a special development, a modification of the unknown
omnipresent God: since both are identical, there can be no question
of a relationship between the two. It is not the riddle of Creation
for which a solution is sought in the ideas of the Kavod and the
cherub. Those formulae of Merkabah mysticism which come closest
to postulating a discrepancy between the deus absconditus and the
appearance of God the King-Creator on his celestial throne are
precisely those to which the Hasidim pay least attention. Their in-
terest belongs not to the mystery of Creation but to that of Revela-
tion. How can God reveal Himself to His creatures? What is the
meaning of the frequent anthropomorphisms in the Bible and in
the Talmud? These are the questions which the theosophy of Ger-
man Hasidism undertakes to answer.”
The glory of God, the Kavod, i.e. that aspect of God which He
reveals to Man, is to the Hasidim not the Creator but the First
Creation. The idea is derived from Saadia whose doctrine of divine
glory was intended to serve as an explanation of the Biblical an-
thropomorphisms and the appearance of God in the vision of the
prophets. According to him, God, who remains infinite and un-
known also in the role of Creator, has produced the glory as “a
created light, the first of all creations.”™ This Kavod is “the great
radiance called Shekhinah” and it is also identical with the ruah
ha-kodesh, the “holy spirit”, out of whom there speaks the voice and
word of God. This primeval light of divine glory is later revealed
to the prophets and mystics in various forms and modifications,
“thus to one, and differently to the other, in accordance with the
demands of the hour.’ It serves as a guarantee of the authentic
character of the words heard by the prophet and excludes any
doubts as to their divine origin.
The importance of this conception for the religious thought of
Hasidism is considerable. Its variations are manifold and the contra-
dictions between them frequently quite obvious. God does not reveal
4 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Himself, nor does He speak. He ‘‘maintains His silence and carries
the universe,” as Eleazar of Worms puts it in a magnificent meta-
phor. The silent divinity immanent in all things as their deepest
reality speaks and reveals itself through the appearance of its glory.
The assertion that the light of glory was created is, of course, a
novelty introduced by Saadia of which the ancient Merkabah con-
ception of Kavod knows nothing. For Saadia there was a special
emphasis on the word “created’’ which became blurred in the
Hasidic conception, since for the Hasidim there is not, as for Saadia,
a sharp distinction between created and emanated glory. The idea
that the Kavod was created has for them little more significance
than the notion of a created logos, which he sometimes uses, had for
Philo. While in Saadia’s theology this as yet amorphous light of
glory was born on the first day of creation, the Hasidim apparently
regarded it as in some way existent prior to the seven days’ work.
Jehudah the Hasid has laid down his own dotrine of Kavod
in a “Kook of the Glory,” of which only some scattered quotations
have survived.” It appears to have included also a variety of specu-
lative thoughts not concerned with the theory of Kavod. Like his
pupil, Eleazar, Jehudah distinguished between two kinds of glory:
One is an “inner glory” (Kavod Penimt) which is conceived as be-
ing identical with the Shekhinah and the holy spirit and as having
no form, but a voice.“ While man cannot directly communicate
with God, he can “connect himself with the glory.’ There is some
overlapping between the definition of God and that of the Kavod
Penimi, as when the qualities of omnipresence and immanence are
in one place attributed to God and in another only to the She-
khinah. Occasionally this inner glory is identified with the divine
will, thereby giving rise to a sort of Logos mysticism.” ‘Thus in the
“Book of Life,” a document written about 1200 a.p., the Kavod
is actually defined as the divine will, the “holy spirit,” the word of
God, and conceived as inherent in all creatures.” The author of this
book goes even further. According to him, the potency of the Kavod,
from which every act of creation originates, is never the same but
undergoes a gradual, insensible change from one moment to an-
other. In this way, the mundane process of constant change corre-
sponds to a secret life of the divine glory active in it—a conception
not far distant from Kabbalism.™ For Eleazar of Worms the ten
Sefiroth of the ‘Book of Creation” have already ceased to represent
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 113
the ten original numbers and have become aspects of Creation, the
first Sefirah being identified with the all-transcending will or glory
of God, and therefore occupying a position midway between the
created and the uncreated.™
This ‘inner’ glory now has its pendant in the ‘visible’ glory.
While the first is formless, the second has various changing forms
of which each change is subject to the will of God. It is this second
glory which appears on the throne of the Merkabah or in the
prophetic vision, and which forms the subject of the enormous
spatial measurements in the Shiur Komah speculations regarding
the “body of the Shekhinah.”” Through perceiving the Kavod,
says Jehudah the Hasid in conscious or unconscious development
of one of Saadia’s thoughts, the prophet knows that his vision comes
from God and that he is not deceived by demons, who are also able
to speak to man, for the demons are powerless to produce the phe-
nomena of the glory.”
The vision of the Kavod is expressly defined as the aim and the
reward of Hasidic askesis."” As to the emanation of the visible from
the invisible Kavod, the notions vary. According to some writers,
they emanate directly from each other, while another view’” ascribes
to the light of the invisible Kavod thousands and myriads of reflec-
tions before it becomes visible even to the angels and holy seraphim.
Side by side with this conception of the two-fold Kavod, one finds
another remarkable element of Hasidic theosophy, the idea of the
holy cherub as the appearance on the throne of the Merkabah. This
cherub, who is never mentioned by Saadia, figures in certain Merka-
bah tracts which were known to the Hasidim.™” Since in the visions
of Ezekiel reference is generally to a host of cherubim, the idea
of a particularly distinguished angel probably goes back to the
one passage in Ezekiel x, 4 where the singular is used: “Then the
glory of the Lord went up from the cherub.” For the Hasidim, this
cherub is identical with Saadia’s “visible glory.”"* He is the ema-
nation of God’s Shekhinah or His invisible glory—according to
others, the product of the “great fire’ of the Shekhinah whose flame
surrounds the Lord, while the throne of glory, on which the cherub
appears, springs from a less exalted fire. According to the mythical
account,” the reflection of the divine light in the cosmic waters pro-
duced a radiance which became a fire and out of which the throne
and the angels arose. From the “great fire’’ of the Shekhinah not
114 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
only the cherub emanates but also the human soul, which therefore
ranks above the angels. The cherub can take every form of angel,
man or beast; his human form was the model in whose likeness God
created man.”
What this idea of the cherub originally signified can only be
guessed, for it is clear that the Hasidim merely adapted to their own
thoughts a conception of much earlier origin. A hint is perhaps
supplied by an idea which one encounters among certain Jewish
sectaries of the period of Saadia. Philo thought that the logos, the
divine ‘word’ acted as an intermediary in the process of Creation.
This Philonic doctrine of creation was developed by these sectarians,
who for a long time moved on the fringe of rabbinic Judaism, in a
somewhat crude form which, incidentally, had been ascribed already
in earlier writings to isolated heretics.“ According to them, God
did not create the world directly, but through the intermediary of
an angel, whether this latter emanated from Him or was himself
a created being. This angel, who thus appears as creator or demi-
urge, is also defined as the subject of all Biblical anthropomor-
phisms and as the being which is perceived in the vision of the
prophets.
This discovery of an echo of Philonic thought need not surprise
us. Although not many traces of it are to be found in Talmudic and
early rabbinic literature, there can be no doubt, since Poznanski’s
researches on the subject, that the ideas of the Alexandrian the-
osophist somehow spread even to the Jewish sectarians in Persia and
Babylonia who as late as the tenth century were in a position to
quote from some of his writings.” It is by no means impossible that
the cherub on the throne was originally nothing but the transformed
logos, especially if one takes into account the fact that for the pre-
Hasidic mystics—as we have seen in the previous lecture—the ap-
pearance on the throne is precisely that of the Creator of the world.
Among the Hasidim, who saw no particular problem in the idea of
the infinite God as the Creator of the finite things, the angel lost
this character; nevertheless, he is given attributes which almost
make a second God out of him.” In reading these descriptions one
is reminded time and again of the logos. Even the names under
which God appears in the Hekhaloth tracts: Akhtariel, Zoharariel,
Adiriron, are occasionally resuscitated and applied to the Kavod
and the cherub through which the Kavod appears.” The transfor-
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 115
mation is similar to the one which we have encountered in the pre-
vious lecture, where the angel Metatron is described as the “lesser
JHWH,” except that the cherub corresponds more closely to the
idea of the logos.
To the question how such ideas could have penetrated to the
pious German Hasidim, several answers are possible. In the first
place, such logos speculations may have become part and parcel of
orthodox Jewish Gnosticism already in some Merkabah texts of
whose existence the Hasidim had knowledge. Secondly, there is the
possibility that the Hasidim came into direct contact with heretical
thoughts. Moses Taku mentions such writings which came from
the East and wandered in the twelfth century through Russia to
Regensburg, at that time one of the chief centres of trade with the
Slav countries.” Moreover, we know from newly discovered frag-
ments of a book whose author was Samuel ben Kalonymus, the
father of Jehudah the Hasid, that “among the heretical scholars
there are a few who know of something like a reflection of the mys-
teries [of the Kavod], though not of their substance.’”” Samuel the
Hasid himself is known on good authority to have travelled outside
Germany for several years and may well have come into contact with
Jewish sectarians or heretics and their writings.
The third theosophic symbol of importance in this connection
seems to have originated among the Hasidim themselves. In their
literature there appears early a sort of continuous reference to the
“holiness” of God, and his “greatness” which they also call his
“kingdom.” The point is that these qualities are not conceived as
attributes of the divinity but—at any rate in those writings of which
we have any knowledge’*—as a created hypostasis of its glory. The
“holiness” is the formless glory, the hidden presence of God in all
things»But in the same way as a passage of the Talmud says of the
Shekhinah that its essential locality is in the ‘““West’,™ the holiness
of God is given a special “western” location. Again, the “holiness’’
is identified by the Hasidim with the “world of light’, the highest
of the five worlds of the spirit—a half gnostic, half Neoplatonic
conception borrowed from Abraham bar Hiya, an early twelfth cen-
tury writer in Northern Spain who belonged to the Neoplatonic
school. While God’s voice and His word issue from His “holiness,”
the latter radiates light from the “West” on His “greatness” which
is localized in the ‘‘East.”” There is also this difference that while
116 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the “holiness” is infinite like God’s essence itself, His “greatness”
or appearance as “King”’ is finite, that is to say, identical with the
visible Kavod or the cherub. In this system, therefore, the infinite
Creator is conceived without any attributes which are a matter of
the Glory in its various modifications.
The doctrine of prayer is again of special importance in this
context. ‘God is infinite and everything; therefore if He did not
take form in the vision of the prophets and appear to them as King
on the throne, they would not know to whom they were praying”,
says Eleazar of Worms.” For this reason the devout in his prayer
calls to God as King—in the visible theophany of the glory. But
the true intention (kawwanah)—according to the same author—
is not directed towards the appearance on the throne, and still less
towards the Creator himself who, as we have seen, is identified in
this system with the hidden God. The real object of mystical con-
templation, its true goal, is the hidden holiness of God, His infinite
and formless glory, wherefrom there emerges the voice and the word
of God.” The finite word of man is aimed at the infinite word
of God. By the same token the Shekhinah is defined, in Eleazar’s
terminology, as the real aim of prayer. In view of the above-men-
tioned conception of the Shekhinah as a created light, this idea is
plainly paradoxical. And in fact we read in one of the fragments
from Samuel ben Kalonymus’ work, to which reference has already
been made, “the creatures praise the Shekhinah, which is itself cre-
ated; but in the world to come they will praise “God Himself.’
In other words, a direct prayer to the Creator, in spite of His in-
finiteness and omnipresence, is possible cnly in the eschatological
perspective. At present, it is directed only towards “the Shekhinah
of our Creator, the spirit of the living God,” i. e. His “holiness”,
which in spite of everything is almost defined as the Logos.
10
Side by side with this theosophy and the mysticism of immanence
ascribed to the authority of Saadia, one finds a third element of
thought which for all its lack of color and true metaphysical
breadth merits the description of Neoplatonism. Certain ideas de-
rived from the writings of Spanish-Jewish Neoplatonists were taken
up by the Hasidim and incorporated in their own system. In a num-
HASIDISM IN MEDIAEVAL GERMANY 117
ber of cases, of course, these ideas underwent a process of retro-
gression from the metaphysical to the theological or Gnostical
sphere, if not to pure mythology.
It has been argued that the mystical theology of the Spanish
Kabbalists and that of the German Hasidim represent two different
schools of thought which have nothing whatsoever in common. ‘The
Spaniards, according to this reading of the facts, followed in the
footsteps of the Neoplatonists, while the typical Hasidic conceptions
go back to oriental mythology.” This appears to me to be an over-
simplification. ‘The fact is that Neoplatonic thought came to be
known among both groups, but with the difference that in Spain
and Provence these ideas became a potent factor in transforming the
character of the early Kabbalism, which was almost entirely a Gnos-
tical system, whereas in Germany the elements of such speculations
as they engendered failed to make a lasting impression on Hasidic
thought. To the Hasidic mind they carried no real life. Instead of
transforming the doctrine of Hasidism they were themselves trans-
formed by being deprived of their original speculative content. In
the final stage of decomposition they are no longer even recogniz-
able for what they were. Thus to take an example, Abraham bar
Hiya’s doctrine of the hierarchy of the five worlds—that of light, of
the divinity, of the intellect, of the soul, and of (spiritual) nature—
was incorporated in a highly peculiar fashion in the Hasidic system
in which cosmological ideas played a not unimportant part.”
Of special interest in this connection is the doctrine of the arche-
types—wholly foreign to Saadia—which dominates Eleazar’s work on
“The Science of the Soul,” but is of importance also for the
“Book of the Devout.” According to this doctrine, every “lower”
form of existence, including lifeless things,—‘‘even the wood block’”’
to say nothing of even lower forms of life, has its archetype, de-
muth.™ In this conception we recognize the traits not only of Plato's
theory of ideas, but also of the astral theory of correspondence be-
tween higher and lower planes, and of the astrological doctrine
that everything has its “‘star.”” The archetypes, as we have already
seen in connection with the Hekhaloth tracts,“ are conceived as
being pictorially represented in the curtain spread before the
Throne of Glory. According to the Hasidim, this curtain consists of
blue flame and surrounds the throne from all sides except from
the west.” The archetypes themselves represent a special sphere
118 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
of non-corporeal, semi-divine existence. In another connection, men-
tion is actually made of an occult “Book of Archetypes.”” The
archetype is the deepest source of the soul’s hidden activity. The
fate of every being is contained in its archetype, and there is even
an archetypal representation of every change and passing made of
its existence. Not only the angels and the demons draw their fore-
knowledge of human fate from these archetypes; the prophet, too,
is able to perceive them and thus to read the future.” Of Moses
it is expressly said that God showed him the archetypes.™ There
is a hint that even guilt and merit have their “signs” in the arche-
types.
These mysteries of the Godhead and its glory, then, the arche-
types of all existence in a mythically conceived realm of ideas, and
the secret of man’s nature and his path to God, are the principal
subjects of Hasidic theosophy. In a curiously pathetic manner those
who studied them became absorbed in a mixture of profound and
abstruse ideas and tried to combine a naive mythical realism with
mystical insight and occult experience.
There is little to connect these old Hasidim of the thirteenth cen-
tury with the Hasidic movement which developed in Poland and
the Ukraine during the eighteenth century with which we shall deal
in the final lecture. The identity of name is no proof of real con-
tinuity. After all, the two are separated by two or three great epochs
in the development of Kabbalistic thought. The later Hasidism was
the inheritor of a rich tradition from which its followers could draw
new inspiration, new modes of thought and, last but not least, new
modes of expression. And yet it cannot be denied that a certain
similarity between the two movements exists. In both cases the
problem was that of the education of large Jewish groups in a spirit
of mystical moralism. The true Hasid and the Zaddik of later Ha-
sidism are related figures; the one and the other are the prototypes
of a mystical way of life which tends towards social activity even
where its representatives are conceived as the guardians of all the
mysteries of divinity.
FOURTH LECTURE
ABRAHAM ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF
PROPHETIC KABBALISM
1
As from the year 1200, the Kabbalists begin to emerge as a distinct
mystical group which, while still not numerically significant, had
nonetheless attained considerable prominence in many parts of
Southern France and Spain. The main tendencies of the new move-
ment are clearly defined and the modern student may without difh-
culty trace its development from the early stages about 1200 to the
Golden Age of Kabbalism in Spain at the close of the thirteenth and
the early fourteenth centuries. An extensive literature has preserved
for us the highlights of thought and personalities dominating the
new mysticism which for five or six generations was to exercise an
ever increasing influence on Jewish life. Some of the outstanding
leaders, it is true, are but lightly sketched and we have not sufficient
data to give us a clear picture of them all, but research of the past
thirty years has brought an unexpected harvest of illuminating
facts. Nor must it be forgotten that each of the leading figures had
his own clearly defined physiognomy and there was no vagueness
of outline to lead to confusion of identity. The same clear lines of
demarcation apply also to tendencies each of which can be distin-
guished, by terminology as well as by the nuance of its mystic
thought.
This demarcation is intelligible enough when we review the
growth of mystic tradition. Teaching by word of mouth and impli-
cation rather than assertion, was the rule. The numerous allusions
found in this field of literature, such as “I cannot say more”, “I have
already explained to you by word of mouth”, “this is only for those
familiar with the ‘secret wisdom’ ” are not mere flights of rhetoric.
This vagueness, indeed, is the reason why many passages have
remained obscure to the present day. In many cases, whispers, and
120 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
that in esoteric hints, were the only medium of transmission. It is
therefore not surprising that such methods should lead to innova-
tions, sometimes startling, and that differentiations arose between
the various schools. Even the devout pupil who leaned heavily on
the tradition of his master, found before him a wide field for inter-
pretation and amplification if he were so inclined. Nor should it
be forgotten that the primary source was not always a mere mortal.
Supernatural illumination also plays its part in the history of
Kabbalism and innovations are made not only on the basis of new
interpretations of ancient lore but as a result of fresh inspiration
or revelation, or even of a dream. A sentence from Isaac Hacohen
of Soria (about 1270) illustrates the twin sources recognized by
the Kabbalists as authoritative. “In our generation there are but a
few, here and there, who have received tradition from the ancients
. .. or have been vouchsafed the grace of divine inspiration.” Tradi-
tion and intuition are bound together and this would explain why
Kabbalism could be deeply conservative and intensely revolutionary.
Even “‘traditionalists” do not shrink from innovations, sometimes
far-reaching, which are confidently set forth as interpretations of the
ancients or as revelation of a mystery which Providence had seen
fit to conceal from previous generations.
This duality colors Kabbalistic literature for the succeding
hundred years. Some scholars are staunch conservatives who will
say nothing that has not been handed down by their masters and
that only in enigmatic brevity. Others frankly delight in innovations
based on fresh interpretation and we have the admission of Jacob
ben Sheshet of Gerona:
Were they not the findings of my heart
I had believed . . . this Moses from Sinai did impart.
A third class propound their views, either laconically or at length,
without citing any authority, while yet a fourth, such as Jacob
Hacohen and Abraham Abulafia, lean frankly on divine revelation.
But it is not surprising that so many Kabbalists, illuminates as well
as commentators, display a reticence which is among the factors
that led directly to the revival of pseudepigraphic forms in Kabba-
listic literature. This pseudepigraphy was, in my opinion, based on
two impulses, psychological and historic. The psychological stimulus
emanates from modesty and the feeling that a Kabbalist who had
been vouchsafed the gift of inspiration should shun ostentation.
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 121
The historic impulse, on the other hand, was bound up with the
desire to influence the writer’s contemporaties. Hence the search
for historic continuity and the sanctification of authority, and the
tendency to lend to Kabbalistic literature the lustre of some great
name from Biblical or Talmudic times. The Zohar, or the ‘Book
of Splendor’, is the most famous, but by no means the sole ex-
ample, of such pseudepigraphy. But not all Kabbalists, fortunately
for us, preferred anonymity and it is thanks to them that we are
able to place the authors of the pseudepigraphic writings in their
proper historic setting. I think it will be appropriate to sum up the
contribution of Spanish Kabbalism to the treasury of Jewish mysti-
cism by characterizing the most outspoken representatives of its
main currents, the outspoken illuminates and ecstatics and, on the
other hand, the masters of pseudepigraphy.
In the opening lecture I referred to the fact that Jewish mystics
are inclined to be reticent about the hidden regions of the religious
life, including the sphere of experiences generally described as ec-
stasy, mystical union with God, and the like. Experiences of this
kind lie at the bottom of many Kabbalistic writings, though not, of
course, of all. Sometimes, however, this fact is not even mentioned
by the author. Of one bulky volume, Rabbi Mordecai Ashkenazi’s
book Eshel Abraham,’ | have been able to prove for instance that
it was written against a background of visionary dreams. But for
the fact that one of the author’s notebooks, a kind of mystical diary,
has come down to us, it would be impossible to guess this, for it is
in vain that one looks for a single allusion to the source of his
ideas.” The treatment of the subject remains throughout strictly
objective. Other Kabbalists deal at length with the question of the
individual’s approach to mystical knowledge, without any reference
to their own experience. But even writings of this kind, if they are
really manuals of the more advanced stages of mystical practice and
technique, have seldom been published. To this class belongs, for
instance, a penetrating analysis of various forms and stages of
mystical rapture and ecstasy written by Rabbi Dov Baer (died
1827), son of the famous Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Ladi, the founder
of Habad-Hasidism, in his Kuntras Ha-Hithpaaluth—roughly trans-
lated “An Enquiry into Ecstasy.’ Or take the case of the famous
Kabbalist, Rabbi Hayim Vital Calabrese (1543-1620), the leading
disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria, himself one of the central figures of
122 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
later Kabbalism. This celebrated mystic is the author of an essay
called Shaare Kedushah, i. e., ““The Gates of Holiness’, which in-
cludes a brief and easily comprehensible introduction into the mys-
tical way of life, beginning with a description of certain indispensa-
ble moral qualities and leading up to a whole compendium of Kab-
balistic ethics. The first three chapters of the little book have been
printed many times, and on the whole they make interesting read-
ing. So far so good. But Vital has added a fourth chapter, in which
he sets out in detail various ways of imbuing the soul with the holy
spirit and prophetic wisdom, and which, by virtue of its copious
quotations from older authors, is really an anthology of the teach-
ings of the older Kabbalists on the technique of ecstasy. You will
not, however, find it in any of the printed editions of the book; in
its place the following words have been inserted: “Thus speaks the
printer: This fourth part will not be printed, for it is all holy names
and secret mysteries which it would be unseemly to publish.” And
in fact, this highly interesting chapter has survived in only a few
handwritten copies.‘ It is the same, or almost the same, with other
writings which describe either ecstatical experiences or the tech-
nique of preparing oneself for them.
Still more remarkable is the fact that even when we turn to the
unpublished writings of Jewish mystics, we find that ecstatic experi-
ence does not play the all-important part one might expect. It is
true that the position is somewhat different in the writings of the
early mystics who lived before the development of Kabbalism and
whose ideas have been outlined in the second lecture. Instead of
the usual theory of mysticism, we are treated in these documents of
Jewish Gnosticism to enthusiastic descriptions of the soul’s ascent to
the Celestial Throne and of the objects it contemplates; in addition,
the technique of producing this ecstatic frame of mind is described
in detail. In later Kabbalistic literature these aspects tend more and
more to be relegated to the background. The soul’s ascension does
not, of course, disappear altogether. The visionary element of mys-
ticism which corresponds to a certain psychological disposition,
breaks through again and again. But, on the whole, Kabbalistic
meditation and contemplation takes on a more spiritualized aspect.
Moreover, the fact remains that, even leaving aside the distinction
between earlier and later documents of Jewish mysticism, it is only
in extremely rare cases that ecstasy signifies actual union with God,
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 123
in which the human individuality abandons itself to the rapture of
complete submersion in the divine stream. Even in this ecstatic
frame of mind, the Jewish mystic almost invariably retains a sense
of the distance between the Creator and His creature. The latter is
joined to the former, and the point where the two meet is of the
greatest interest to the mystic, but he does not regard it as constitut-
ing anything so extravagant as identity of Creator and creature.
Nothing seems to me to express better this sense of the distance
between God and man, than the Hebrew term which in our litera-
ture is generally used for what is otherwise called unio mystica. I
mean the word devekuth, which signifies “adhesion,” or “being
joined,” viz., to God. This is regarded as the ultimate goal of
religious perfection. Devekuth can be ecstasy, but its meaning is far
more comprehensive. It is a perpetual being-with-God, an intimate
union and conformity of the human and the divine will.’ Yet even
the rapturous descriptions of this state of mind which abound in
later Hasidic literature retain a proper sense of distance, or, if you
like, of incommensurateness. Many writers deliberately place de-
vekuth above any form of ecstasy which secks the extinction of the
world and the self in the union with God.* I am not going to deny
that there have also been tendencies of the opposite kind’; an ex-
cellent description of the trend towards pure pantheism, or rather
acosmism, can be found ina well-known Yiddish novel, F. Schneer-
son’s Hayim Grawitzer,’ and at least one of the famous leaders of
Lithuanian Hasidism, Rabbi Aaron Halevi of Starosselje, can be
classed among the acosmists. But I do maintain that such tendencies
are not characteristic of Jewish mysticism. It is a significant fact
that the most famous and influential book of our mystical literature,
the Zohar, has little use for ecstasy; the part it plays both in the
descriptive and in the dogmatical sections of this voluminous work
1S entirely subordinate. Allusions to it there are,’ but it 1s obvious
that other and different aspects of mysticism are much nearer to
the author’s heart. Part of the extraordinary success of the Zohar
can probably be traced to this attitude of restraint which struck a
familiar chord in the Jewish heart.
2
Considering all the aforementioned facts, it is hardly surprising
that the outstanding representative of ecstatic Kabbalism has also
124 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
been the least popular of all the great Kabbalists. I refer to Abra-
ham Abulafia, whose theories and doctrines will form the main
subject of this lecture. By a curious coincidence, which is perhaps
rather more than a coincidence, Abulafia’s principal works and the
Zohar were written almost simultaneously. It is no exaggeration
to say that each marks the culminating point in the development
of two opposing schools of thought in Spanish Kabbalism, schools
which I should like to call the ecstatic and the theosophical. Of the
latter 1 shall have something to say in the following lectures. For
all their differences, the two belong together and, only if both are
understood, do we obtain something like a comprehensive picture
of Spanish Kabbalism.
Unfortunately, not one of Abulafia’s numerous and often volum-
inous treatises has been published by the Kabbalists, while the
Zohar runs into seventy or eighty editions. Not until Jellinek, one
of the small band of nineteenth century Jewish scholars who probed
deeper into the problem of Jewish mysticism, published three of
his minor writings and some extracts from others, did any of them
appear in print.” This is all the more remarkable as Abulafia was
a very prolific writer who, on one occasion, refers to himself as the
author of twenty-six Kabbalistic and twenty-two prophetic works.”
Of the former, many still exist; I know of more than twenty, and
it is a fact that a few among them enjoy a great reputation among
Kabbalists to this day.”
While some of the more orthodox Kabbalists, such as Rabbi
Jehudah Hayat (about 1500 a. pb.) attacked Abaluafia with vehe-
mence and warned their readers against his books”, their criticism
appears to have aroused only a faint echo.“ At any rate, Abulafia’s
influence as a guide to mysticism continued to remain very great.
He owed this to the remarkable combination of logical power, pel-
lucid style, deep insight and highly colored abstruseness which
characterizes his writings. Since, as we shall have occasion to see,
he was convinced of having found the way to prophetic inspira-
tion, and from there to the true knowledge of the Divine, he took
pains to use a simple and direct style which went straight to the
heart of every attentive reader. He went so far as to include among
his works a number of what one might call manuals, which not only
set out his theory but also constitute a guide to action. In fact they
can be practised so easily as to go far beyond his intentions; the
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 125
point is that although Abulafia himself never thought of going be-
yond the pale of rabbinic Jewry, his teachings can be put into effect
by practically everyone who tries. That probably is also one of the
reasons why the Kabbalists refrained from publishing them. Very
likely they feared that once this technique of meditation, which
had a very broad appeal, became publicly known, its use would no
longer be restricted to the elect. Certainly the success of Abulafia’s
writing made the ever-present danger of a clash between the mysti-
cal revelation and that of Mount Sinai seem more real than ever.
Thus, the whole school of practical mysticism, which Abulafia him-
self called Prophetic Kabbalism, continued to lead an underground
life. By witholding his writings from the public, the Kabbalists un-
doubtedly sought to eliminate the danger that people might go in
for ecstatic adventures without due preparation and lay dangerous
claims to visionary powers.
Generally speaking, lay mystics—sclf-taught and untutored by
Rabbinism—have always been a potential source of heretical
thought. Jewish mysticism tried to meet this danger by stipulating
in principle that entry into the domain of mystical thought and
practice should be reserved to rabbinic scholars.” In actual fact,
however, there has been no lack of Kabbalists who either had no
learning whatsoever, or who lacked the proper rabbinic training.
Thus enabled to look at Judaism from a fresh angle, these men
frequently produced highly important and interesting ideas, and
so there grew up, side by side with the scholarly Kabbalah of the
Rabbis, another line of prophetic and visionary mystics. The pristine
enthusiasm of these early ecstatics frequently lifted the heavy lid of
rabbinic scholasticism, and for all their readiness to compromise
occasionally came into conflict with it. It is also worth pointing out
that ‘during the classical period of Kabbalism, i. e. up to 1300 A. D.,
as distinct from later periods, its representatives were, as a rule,
not men whom their contemporaries regarded as outstanding Rab-
bis. Great Kabbalists, who also contributed to strictly rabbinical
literature, men like Moses Nahmanides or Solomon ben Adret, were
rare.” Yet the Kabbalists were, in the great majority, men of rab-
binic education. Abulafia marks an exception, having had little
contact with higher rabbinic learning. All the more extensive, how-
ever, was his knowledge of contemporary philosophy; and his writ-
126 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
ings, especially those of a systematic character, show him to have
been, by the standards of his age, a highly erudite man.
3
About Abulafia’s life and his person we are informed almost ex-
clusively by his own writings.” Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia was
born in Saragossa in 1240, and spent his youth in Tudela, in the
province of Navarre. His father taught him the Bible with its com-
mentaries as well as grammar and some Mishnah and Talmud.
When he was eighteen years old he lost his father. Two years later
he left Spain and went to the Near East in order, as he writes, to
discover the legendary stream Sambation beyond which the lost ten
tribes were supposed to dwell. Warlike disturbances in Syria and
Palestine soon drove him back from Acre to Europe, where he spent
about ten years in Greece and Italy.
During these years of travel, he steeped himself in philosophy
and conceived for Maimonides an admiration that proved lifelong.
For him there was no antithesis between mysticism and the doc-
trines of Maimonides. He rather considered his own mystical theory
as the final step forward from the “Guide of the Perplexed” to which
he wrote a curious mystical commentary. This affinity of the mystic
with the great rationalist has its astounding parallel—as the most
recent research has shown—in the relationship of the great Chris-
tian mystic Meister Eckhart to Maimonides, by whom he seems to
be much more influenced than was any scholastic before him. While
the great scholastics, such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus,
although having learned and, indeed, accepted much from him,
none the less frequently oppose him, the Rabbi is—as Josef Koch
has ascertained*—for the great Christian mystic a literary authority
to whom Augustine at best is superior. In the same way Abulafia
tries to connect his theories with those of Maimonides.” According
to him, only the “Guide” and the “Book of Creation” together rep-
resent the true theory of Kabbalism.”
Coincidentally with these studies he seems to have been deeply
occupied with the Kabbalistic doctrines of his age, without, how-
ever, being overmuch impressed by them. About 1270 he returned
to Spain for three or four years, during which he immersed him-
self completely in mystical research. In Barcelona he began to study
the book Yetsirah and twelve commentaries to it showing both
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 127
philosophic and Kabbalistic inclinations.” Here, too, he seems to
have come into contact with a conventicle the members of which
believed they could gain access to the profoundest secrets of mystical
cosmology and theology “by the three methods of Kabbalah, being
Gematria, Notarikon, and Temurah.” Abulafia especially mentions
one Baruch Togarmi, precentor, as his teacher, who initiated him
into the true meaning of the Sefer Yetstrah. We still possess a treatise
of this Kabbalist—“The Keys to Kabbalah’’—about the mysteries of
the book Yetsirah.” Most of them, he says, he felt not entitled to
publish, nor even to write down. “I want to write it down and I
am not allowed to do it, I do not want to write it down and cannot
entirely desist; so I write and I pause, and 1 allude to it again in
later passages, and this is my procedure.”
Abulafia himself at times wrote in this vein, so typical of mystical
literature. By immersing himself in the mystical technique of his
teacher, Abulafia found his own way. It was at the age of 31, in
Barcelona, that he was overcome by the prophetic spirit. He ob-
tained knowledge of the true name of God, and had visions of which
he himself, however, says, in 1285, that they were partly sent by the
demons to confuse him, so that he ‘“‘groped about like a blind man
at midday for fifteen years with Satan to his right.” Yet on the
other hand he was entirely convinced of the truth of his prophetic
knowledge. He travelled for some time in Spain, expounding his
new doctrine, but in 1274 he left his native country for the second
and last time, and from then on led a vagrant life in Italy and
Greece. It was still in Spain that he exerted a deep influence upon
the young Joseph Gikatila who later became one of the most em-
inent Spanish Kabbalists. In Italy too, he found disciples in various
places and taught them his new way, partly in pursuit of the phil-
osophy of Maimonides. Quick enthusiasm about his disciples turned
quickly into disappointment and he complained bitterly of the un-
worthiness of some of those whom he had taught in Capua.”
He became the author of prophetical writings wherein he prefers
to designate himself by names of the same numerical value as his
original name of Abraham. He prefers to call himself Raziel or
Zechariah. Only in the ninth year after the beginning of his pro-
phetic visions he began, as he says himself,” to compose distinctly
prophetic writings, although he had written before that time other
tracts on different branches of science, among them “writings on the
128 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
mysteries of Kabbalah.’’” In the year 1280, inspired with his mission,
he undertook a most venturesome and unexplained task: He went
to Rome to present himself before the Pope and to confer with him
“in the name of Jewry.” It seems that at that time he nursed Messia-
nic ideas. Well may he have read of such a mission of the Messiah
to the Pope in a then very widely known booklet.” This contained
the disputation of the famous Kabbalist Moses ben Nahman with
the apostate Pablo Christiani in the year 1263. Here Nahmanides
said: ‘““‘When the time of the end will have come, the Messiah will
at God’s command come to the Pope and ask of him the liberation
of his people, and only then will the Messiah be considered really
to have come, but not before that.”
Abulafia himself relates” that the Pope had given orders “when
Raziel would come to Rome to confer with him in the name of
Jewry, to arrest him and not to admit him into his presence at all,
but to lead him out of town and there to burn him.” But Abulafia,
although informed of this, paid no attention, but rather gave him-
self up to his meditations and mystical preparations and on the
strength of his visions wrote a book which he later called: “Book
of Testimony,” in remembrance of his miraculous rescue. For as he
prepared himself to come before the Pope, “two mouths,” as he
obscurely expresses himself, grew on him, and when he entered the
city-gate, he learned that the Pope—it was Nicholas III.—had sud-
denly died during the night. Abulafia was held in the College of
the Franciscans for twenty-eight days, but was then set free.
Abulafia then wandered about Italy for a number of years. Of
these he seems to have spent several in Sicily, where he remained
longer than in any other place. Almost all his extant works were
written during his Italian period, particularly between the years
1279 and 1291. We are altogether ignorant of his fate after the year
1291. Of his prophetic, or inspired, writings only his apocalypse,
Sefer ha-Oth, the “Book of the Sign,” a strange and not altogether
comprehensible book, has survived.” On the other hand, most of his
theoretical and doctrinal treatises are still extant, some of them in a
considerable number of manuscripts.
He seems to have made many enemies by claiming prophetical
inspiration and antagonizing his contemporaries in various other
ways, for he very often complains of hostility and persecution. He
mentions denunciations by Jews to Christian authorities”, which
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 12y
may perhaps be explained by the fact that he represented himself
as a prophet to Christians as well. He writes that he found among
them some who believed more in God than the Jews to whom God
had sent him first." In two places Abulafia tells of his connection
with non-Jewish mystics.” Once, he relates, he talked with them
about te three methods of the interpretation of the Torah (literal,
allegoric, and mystic), and he noted their agreement with one an-
other when conversing with them confidentially ‘‘and I saw that
they belong to the category of the ‘pious of the gentiles’, and that
the words of the fools of whatever religion need not be heeded, for
the Torah has been handed over to the masters of true knowledge.”
Another time he tells of a dispute with a Christian scholar with
whom he had made friends and in whose mind he had implanted
the desire for the knowledge of the Name of God. “And it 1s not
necessary to reveal more about it.’
These connections of Abulafia’s do not, however, testify to a
special inclination to Christian ideas as some scholars have assumed.”
On the contrary, his antagonism to Christianity is very outspoken
and intense.” He sometimes, indeed, intentionally makes use—among
many other associations—of formulae which sound quite trinitarian,
immediately giving them a meaning which has nothing whatsoever
to do with the trinitarian idea of God.” But his predilection for
paradox as well as his prophetic pretensions alienated from him the
Kabbalists of a more strictly orthodox orientation. And indeed he
acutely criticizes the Kabbalists of his times and their symbolism in-
sofar as it is not backed by individual mystical experience.” On the
other hand, some of his writings are devoted to the refutation of
attacks directed against him by ‘orthodox’ Kabbalists.” But ‘poverty,
exile, and imprisonment” were powerless to make Abulafia, a proud
and unbending spirit, abandon the standpoint to which his per-
sonaf experience of things divine had led him.
In the preface to one of his works, the main part of which has
been lost, he compares his mission and his place among his con-
temporaries with that of the prophet Isaiah. He tells how a voice
called him twice: ‘‘Abraham, Abraham” and, he continues, “I said:
Here am I! Thereupon he instructed me in the right way, woke me
from my slumber and inspired me to write something new. There
had been nothing like it in my day.” He realized only too well that
his gospel would make enemies for him among the Jewish leaders.
130 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Nevertheless he submitted to this “and I constrained my will and
dared to reach beyond my grasp. They called me heretic and un-
believer because I had resolved to worship God in truth and not
as those who walk in darkness. Sunken in the abyss, they and their
kind would have delighted to engulf me in their vanities and their
dark deeds. But God forbid that I should forsake the way of truth
for that of falsehood.”
Yet for all his pride in the achievement of prophetic inspiration
and his knowledge of the great Name of God, there was combined
in his character meekness and a love of peace. Jellinek rightly points
out that his moral character must be estimated very highly. When
accepting desciples to his Kabbalah he is extremely fastidious in his
requirements as to a high morality and steadiness of character and
it may be concluded from his writings even in their ecstatic parts
that he himself possessed many of the qualities he asked for in
others.” He who gains the deepest knowledge of the true essentials
of reality—so he says in one place—at the same time acquires the
deepest humility and modesty.*
It is one of the many oddities of the history of modern research
into Kabbalism that Abulafia, of all men, has sometimes been made
out to be the anonymous author of the Zohar. This hypothesis,
which still finds its supporters, was first advanced by M. H. Lan-
dauer, who—a hundred years ago—was the first to point to Abulafia
at all. He says: “I found a strange man with whose writings the
contents of the Zohar coincide most accurately down to the minutest
details. This fact struck me at once with the first writing of his
which came into my hands. But now that I have read many of his
works and have come to know his life, his principles, and his
character, there cannot exist any longer even the slightest doubt that
we now have the author of the Zohar.”" This seems to me an extra-
ordinary example of how a judgment proclaimed with conviction
as certainly true may nevertheless be entirely wrong in every detail.
The truth is that no two things could be more different than the
outlook of the Zohar and that of Abulafia.
4
I shall now try to give a brief synthetic description, one after the
other, of the main points of his mystical theory, his doctrine of
the search for ecstasy and for prophetic inspiration.“ Its basic
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 131
principles have been upheld with varying modifications by all those
among the Kabbalists who found in Abulafia a congenial spirit,
and its characteristic mixture of emotionalism and rationalism sets
its seal on one of the main trends of Kabbalism.
Abulafia’s aim, as he himself has expressed it, is “to unseal the
soul, to untie the knots which bind it.’”“ “All the inner forces and
the hidden souls in man are distributed and differentiated in the
bodies. It is, however, in the nature of all of them that when their
knots are untied they return to their origin, which is one without
any duality and which comprises the multiplicity.” The “untying”
is, as it were, the return from multiplicity and separation towards
the original unity. As a symbol of the great mystic liberation of the
soul from the fetters of sensuality the ‘“untying of the knots’ occurs
also in the theosophy of northern Buddhism. Only recently a French
scholar published a Tibetan didactic tract the title of which may be
translated: “Book on Untying Knots’’.“
What does this symbol mean in Abulafia’s terminology? It means
that there are certain barriers which separate the personal existence
of the soul from the stream of cosmic life—personified for him in the
intellectus agens of the philosophers, which runs through the whole
of creation. There is a dam which keeps the soul confined within
the natural and normal borders of human existence and protects it
against the flood of the divine stream, which flows beneath it or
all around it; the same dam, however, also prevents the soul from
taking cognizance of the Divine. The “seals,” which are impressed
on the soul, protect it against the flood and guarantee its normal
functioning. Why is the soul, as it were, sealed up? Because, answers
Abulafia, the ordinary day-to-day life of human beings, their per-
ception of the sensible world, fills and impregnates the mind with a
multitude of sensible forms or images (called, in the language of
mediaeval philosophers, ‘‘natural forms”). As the mind perceives all
kinds of gross natural objects and admits their images into its con-
sciousness, it creates for itself, out of this natural function, a certain
mode of existence which bears the stamp of finiteness. The normal
life of the soul, in other words, is kept within the limits determined
by our sensory perceptions and emotions, and as long as it is full of
these, it finds it extremely difficult to perceive the existence of spir-
itual forms and things divine. The problem, therefore, is to find a
way of helping the soul to perceive more than the forms of nature,
132 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
without its becoming blinded and overwhelmed by the divine light,
and the solution is suggested by the old adage “whoever is full of
himself has no room for God.” All that which occupies the natural
self of man must either be made to disappear or must be trans-
formed in such a way as to render it transparent for the inner
spiritual reality, whose contours will then become perceptible
through the customary shell of natural things.
Abulafia, therefore, casts his eyes round for higher forms of per-
ception which, instead of blocking the way to the soul’s own deeper
regions, facilitate access to them and throw them into relief. He
wants the soul to concentrate on highly abstract spiritual matters,
which will not encumber it by pushing their own particular impor-
tance into the foreground and thus render illusory the whole pur-
pose of mental purgation. If, for instance, I observe a flower, a bird,
or some other concrete thing or event, and begin to think about it,
the object of my reflection has an importance or attractiveness of
its own. | am thinking of this particular flower, bird, etc. Then
how can the soul learn to visualize God with the help of objects
whose nature is of such a sort as to arrest the attention of the spec-
tator and deflect it from its purpose? The early Jewish mystic knows
of no object of contemplation in which the soul immerses itself until
it reaches a state of ecstasy, such as the Passion in Christian mysti-
cism.
Abraham Abulafia is, therefore, compelled to look for an, as it
were, absolute object for meditating upon; that is to say, one capa-
ble of stimulating the soul’s deeper life and freeing it from ordinary
perceptions. In other words, he looks for something capable of ac-
quiring the highest importance, without having much particular,
or if possible any, importance of its own. An object which fulfills all
these conditions he believes himself to have found in the Hebrew
alphabet, in the letters which make up the written language. It is
not enough, though an important step forward, that the soul should
be occupied with the meditation of abstract truths, for even there
it remains too closely bound to their specific meaning. Rather is it
Abulafia’s purpose to present it with something not merely abstract
but also not determinable as an object in the strict sense, for every-
thing so determined has an importance and an individuality of its
own. Basing himself upon the abstract and non-corporeal nature of
script, he develops a theory of the mystical contemplation of letters
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 133
and their configurations, as the constituents of God’s name. For
this is the real and, if I may say so, the peculiarly Jewish object of
mystical contemplation: The Name of God, which is something
absolute, because it reflects the hidden meaning and totality of
existence; the Name through which everything else acquires its
meaning and which yet to the human mind has no concrete, par-
ticular meaning of its own. In short, Abulafia believes that whoever
succeeds in making this great Name of God, the least concrete and
perceptible thing in the world, the object of his meditation, is on
the way to true mystical ecstasy.
Starting from this concept, Abulafia expounds a peculiar discip-
line which he calls Hokhmath ha-Tseruf, 1. e. “science of the com-
bination of letters.” This is described as a methodical guide to medi-
tation with the aid of letters and their configurations. The indi-
vidual letters of their combinations need have no ‘meaning’ in the
ordinary sense; it is even an advantage if they are meaningless, as in
that case they are less likely to distract us. True, they are not really
meaningless to Abulafia, who accepts the Kabbalistic doctrine of
divine language as the substance of reality. According to this doc-
trine, as I have mentioned in the first lecture, all things exist only
by virtue of their degree of participation in the great Name of God,
which manifests itself throughout the whole Creation. There is a
language which expresses the pure thought of God and the letters of
this spiritual language are the elements both of the most funda-
mental spiritual reality and of the profoundest understanding and
knowledge. Abulafia’s mysticism is a course in this divine language.
The purpose of this discipline then is to stimulate, with the aid
of methodical meditation, a new state of consciousness; this state
can best be defined as an harmonious movement of pure thought,
which has severed all relation to the senses. Abulafia himself has
alreddy quite correctly compared it with music. Indeed, the systema-
tic practice of meditation as taught by him, produces a sensation
closely akin to that of listening to musical harmonies. The science
of combination is a music of pure thought, in which the alphabet
takes the place of the musical scale. ‘The whole system shows a fairly
close resemblance to musical principles, applied not to sounds but
to thought in meditation. We find here compositions and modifica-
tions of motifs and their combination in every possible variety. This
is what Abulafia himself says about it in one of his unpublished
134 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
writings: “Know that the method of Tseruf can be compared to
music; for the ear hears sounds from various combinations, in ac-
cordance with the character of the melody and the instrument. Also,
two different instruments can form a combination, and if the sounds
combine, the listener's ear registers a pleasant sensation in acknowl-
edging their difference. The strings touched by the right or left hand
move, and the sound is sweet to the ear. And from the ear the sensa-
tion travels to the heart, and from the heart to the spleen (the
centre of emotion), and enjoyment of the different melodies pro-
duces ever new delight. It is impossible to produce it except through
the combination of sounds, and the same is true of the combination
of letters. It touches the first string, which is comparable to the first
letter, and proceeds to the second, third, fourth and fifth, and the
various sounds combine. And the secrets, which express themselves
in these combinations, delight the heart which acknowledges its
God and is filled with ever fresh joy.’
The directed activity of the adept engaged in combining and
separating the letters in his meditation, composing whole motifs on
separate groups, combining several of them with one another and
enjoying their combinations in every direction, is therefore for
Abulafia not more senseless or incomprehensible than that of a com-
poser. Just as—to quote Schopenhauer—the musician expresses in
wordless sounds “the world once again,” and ascends to endless
heights and descends to endless depths, so the mystic: To him the
closed doors of the soul open in the music of pure thought which is
no longer bound to “sense,” and in the ecstasy of the deepest har-
monies which originate in the movement of the letters of the great
Name, they throw open the way to God.
This science of the combination of letters and the practice of
controlled meditation is, according to Abulafia, nothing less than
the “mystical logic’ which corresponds to the inner harmony of
thought in its movement towards God.” The world of letters, which
reveals itself in this discipline, is the true world of bliss.” Every let-
ter represents a whole world to the mystic who abandons himself
to its contemplation.” Every language, not only Hebrew, is trans-
formed into a transcendental medium of the one and only language
of God. And as every language issues from a corruption of the
aboriginal language—Hebrew—they all remain related to it. In all
his books Abulafia likes to play on Latin, Greek, or Italian words
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 135
to support his ideas. For, in the last resort, every spoken word con-
sists of sacred letters, and the combination, separation and reunion
of letters reveal profound mysteries to the Kabbalist, and unravel to
him the secret of the relation of all languages to the holy tongue.”
5
Abulafia’s great manuals, such as “The Book of Eternal Life,”
“The Light of Intellect,”* ““The Words of Beauty” and “The Book
of Combination’” are systematic guides to the theory and practice
of this system of mystical counterpoint. Through its methodical ex-
ercise the soul is accustomed to the perception of higher forms with
which it gradually saturates itself. Abulafia lays down a method
which leads from the actual articulation of the permutations and
combinations, to their writing and to the contemplation of the writ-
ten, and finally from writing to thinking and to the pure medita-
tion of all these objects of the ‘‘mystical logic.”
Articulation, mivta, writing, miktav, and thought, mahshav, thus
form three superimposed layers of meditation. Letters are the ele-
ments of every one of them, elements which manifest themselves in
ever more spiritual forms. From the motion of the letters of
thought result the truths of reason. But the mystic will not stop
here. He differentiates further between matter and form of the let-
ters in order to approach closer to their spiritual nucleus; he im-
merses himself in the combinations of the pure forms of the letters,
which now, being purely spiritual forms, impress themselves upon
his soul. He endeavours to comprehend the connections between
words and names formed by the Kabbalistic methods of exegesis.”
The numerical value of words, gematria, is here of particular
importance.
To this must be added another point: the modern reader of
these writings will be most astonished to find a detailed description
of a method which Abulafia and his followers call dillug and kefi-
tsah, “jumping” or “skipping” viz., from one conception to another.
In fact this is nothing else than a very remarkable method of using
associations as a way of meditation. It is not wholly the “free play
of association” as known to psychoanalysis; rather it is the way of
passing from one association to another determined by certain rules
which are, however, sufficiently lax. Every “jump” opens a new
sphere, defined by certain formal, not material, characteristics.
136 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
Within this sphere the mind may freely associate. The “jumping”
unites, therefore, elements of free and guided association and is said
to assure quite extraordinary results as far as the “widening of the
consciousness’ of the initiate is concerned. ‘The “jumping’’ brings
to light hidden processes of the mind, “it liberates us from the
prison of the natural sphere and leads us to the boundaries of the
divine sphere.” All the other, more simple, methods of meditation
serve only as a preparation for this highest grade which contains
and supersedes all the others.”
Abulafia describes in several places the preparations for medita-
tion and ecstasy, as well as what happens to the adept at the height
of rapture. The report of one of his disciples which I quote below,
confirms his statements. Abulafia himself says in one place™:
“Be prepared for thy God, oh Israelite! Make thyself ready to
direct thy heart to God alone. Cleanse the body and choose a lonely
house where none shall hear thy voice. Sit there in thy closet and
do not reveal thy secret to any man. If thou canst, do it by day in
the house, but it is best if thou completest it during the night. In
the hour when thou preparest thyself to speak with the Creator and
thou wishest Him to reveal His might to thee, then be careful to
abstract all thy thought from the vanities of this world. Cover thy-
self with thy prayer shawl and put Tefillin on thy head and hands
that thou mayest be filled with awe of the Shekhinah which is near
thee. Cleanse thy clothes, and, if possible, let all thy garments be
white, for all this is helpful in leading the heart towards the fear of
God and the love of God. If it be night, kindle many lights, until
all be bright. Then take ink, pen and a table to thy hand and re-
member that thou art about to serve God in joy of the gladness of
heart. Now begin to combine a few or many letters, to permute and
to combine them until .ay heart be warm. Then be mindful of their
movements and of what thou canst bring forth by moving them.
And when thou feelest that thy heart is already warm and when
thou seest that by combinations of lIctters thou canst grasp new
things which by human tradition or by thyself thou wouldst not
be able to know and when thou art thus prepared to receive the
influx of divine power which flows into thee, then turn all thy
true thought to imagine the Name and His exalted angels in thy
heart as if they were human beings sitting or standing about thee.
And feel thyself like an envoy whom the king and his ministers are
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 137
to send on a mission, and he is waiting to hear something about
his mission from their lips, be it from the king himself, be it from
his servants. Having imagined this very vividly, turn thy whole
mind to understand with thy thoughts the many things which will
come into thy heart through the letters imagined. Ponder them as
a whole and in all their detail, like one to whom a parable or a
dream is being related, or who meditates on a deep problem in a
scientific book, and try thus to interpret what thou shalt hear that
it may as far as possible accord with thy reason .. . And all this
will happen to thee after having flung away tablet and quill or
after they will have dropped from thee because of the intensity of
thy thought. And know, the stronger the intellectual influx within
thee, the weaker will become thy outer and thy inner parts. Thy
whole body will be seized by an extremely strong trembling, so
that thou wilt think that surcly thou art about to die, because thy
soul, overjoyed with its knowledge, will leave thy body. And be thou
ready at this moment consciously to choose death, and then thou
shalt know that thou hast come far enough to receive the influx.
And then wishing to honor the glorious Name by serving it with
the life of body and soul, veil thy face and be afraid to look at
God. Then return to the matters of the body, rise and eat and
drink a little, or refresh thyself with a pleasant odor, and restore
thy spirit to its sheath until another time, and rejoice at thy lot
and know that God loveth thee!”
By training itself to turn its back upon all natural objects and
to live in the pure contemplation of the divine Name, the mind is
gradually prepared for the final transformation. The seals, which
keep it locked up in its normal state and shut off the divine light,
are relaxed, and the mystic finally dispenses with them altogether.
Thé hidden spring of divine life is released. But now that the mind
has been prepared for it, this irruption of the divine influx does
not overwhelm it and throw it into a state of confusion and self-
abandonment. On the contrary, having climbed the seventh and last
step of the mystical ladder,” and reached the summit, the mystic
consciously perceives and becomes part of the world of divine light,
whose radiance illuminates his thoughts and heals his heart. ‘This is
the stage of prophetic vision, in which the ineffable mysteries of the
divine Name and the whole glory of its realm reveal themsclves to
138 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
the illuminate. Of them the prophet speaks in words which extoll
the greatness of God and bear the reflection of His image.
Ecstasy, which Abulafia regards as the highest reward of mystical
contemplation, is not, therefore, to be confused with semi-conscious
raving and complete self-annihilation. These uncontrolled forms
of ecstasy he treats with a certain disdain and even regards them as
dangerous. Rationally prepared ecstasy, too, comes suddenly* and
cannot be enforced, but when the bolts are shot back and the seals
taken off, the mind is already prepared for the ‘light of the intel-
lect’ which pours in. Abulafia, therefore, frequently warns against
the mental and even physical dangers of unsystematic meditation
and similar practices. In combining the letters, every one of which
—according to the book Yetsirah—is co-ordinated to a special mem-
ber of the body ‘“‘one has to be most careful not to move a con-
sonant or vowel from its position, for if he errs in reading the letter
commanding a certain member, that member may be torn away and
may change its place or alter its nature immediately and be trans-
formed into a different shape so that in consequence that person
may become a cripple.’” In the account I am going to quote at the
end Abulafia’s disciple also mentions spasmodic distortions of the
face.
Abulafia lays great emphasis on the newness and singularity of
his prophecy. “Know that most of the vision which Raziel saw are
based on the Name of God and its gnosis, and also on his new reve-
lation which took place on earth now in his days and the like there
was not from the time of Adam until his.”® The prophets who draw
from the knowledge of the true name, are at the same time, to his
mind, the true lovers. The identity of prophecy with the love of
God also finds its proof in the mysticism of numbers, and he who
serves God out of pure love, is on the right path towards prophecy.
That is why the Kabbalists with whom the pure fear of God turns
into love, are for him the genuine disciples of the prophets.”
6
In the opinion of Abulafia, his own doctrine of prophetic ecstasy
is in the last resort nothing but the doctrine of prophecy advanced
by the Jewish philosophers, more especially by Maimonides, who
also defines prophecy as a temporary union of the human and the
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 139
divine intellect, deliberately brought about through systematic
preparation. The prophetic faculty, according to this doctrine, rep-
resents the union of the human intellect at the highest stage of its
development, with a cosmic influence normally domiciled in the
intelligible world, the so-called active intellect (intellectus agens).
The influx of this active intellect into the soul manifests itself as
prophetic vision. Abulafia is concerned to prove the substantial
identity of this theory of prophecy, which was widely recognized
in the Middle Ages, with his own doctrine.” These rationalizations
cannot, however, obscure the fact that his teachings represent but
a Judaized version of that ancient spiritual technique which has
found its classical expression in the practices of the Indian mystics
who follow the system known as Yoga. To cite only one instance
out of many, an important part in Abulafia’s system is played by
the technique of breathing;” now this technique has found its
highest development in the Indian Yoga, where it is commonly
regarded as the most important instrument of mental discipline.
Again, Abulafia lays down certain rules of body posture, certain
corresponding combinations of consonants and vowels, and certain
forms of recitation,” and in particular some passages of his book
“The Light of the Intellect” give the impression of a Judaized treat-
ise on Yoga. The similarity even extends to some aspects of the doc-
trine of ecstatic vision, as preceded and brought about by these
practices.
For what is the reward of reaching this supreme stage of vision?
We are repeatedly told by Abulafia that the visionary perceives the
image of his spiritual mentor, usually visualized either as a young
or as an old man, whom he not only sees but also hears.” ‘The
body,” Abulafia says, ‘requires the physician of the body, the soul
the physician of the soul, to wit the students of the Torah, but the
intéllect (the highest power of the soul) requires a mover from out-
side who has received Kabbalah concerning the mysteries of the
Torah and a mover from inside, me‘orer penimt, who opens the
closed doors before him.’ Elsewhere too he differentiates between
the human and the divine teacher. If need be, one could manage
without the former: Abulafia assumes that his own writings may
possibly replace an immediate contact between disciple and
teacher,” yet by no means could one forego the spiritual teacher
who confronts man at the secret gates of his soul. This spiritual
140 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
mentor—in Indian terminology the Guru—personifies the intellectus
agens through the mythical figure of the angel Metatron, but he is
also, according to certain passages, God Himself as Shaddai.” Of
Metatron, the Talmud says “his name is like the name of his
master,” the Hebrew word for master also signifying “teacher.”
Abulafia applies this statement to the relation between the visionary
and his Guru, his spiritual teacher. Its significance is seen to lie
in the fact that in the state of ecstasy, man becomes aware of his
intrinsic relationship with God. Although he is apparently con-
fronted with his master, he is yet in some way identical with him.
The state of ecstasy, in other words, represents something like a
mystical transfiguration of the individual. This experience of self-
identification with one’s guide or master, and indirectly with God,
is mentioned several times by Abulafia, but nowhere does he write
about it with complete and utter frankness.“ The following pas-
sage, for instance, is taken from an unpublished fragment called
The Knowledge of the Messiah and the Meaning of the Redeemer:"
“This science [of mystical combination] is an instrument which
leads nearer to prophecy than any other discipline of learning. A
man who gains his understanding of the essentials of reality from
books is called Hakham, a scholar. If he obtains it from the Kab-
balah, that is to say from one who has himself obtained it from the
contemplation of the divine names or from another Kabbalist, then
he is called Mevin, that is, one who has insight, but if his under-
standing is derived from his own heart, from reflecting upon what
he knows of reality, then he is called Daatan, that is, a gnostic.
He whose understanding is such as to combine all three, to wit,
scholarly erudition, insight obtained from a genuine Kabbalist, and
wisdom from reflecting deeply upon things, of him I am not indeed
going to say that he deserves to be called a prophet, especially if
he has not yet been touched by the pure intellect, or if touched
[that is to say, in ecstasy] does not yet know by whom. If, however,
he has felt the divine touch and perceived its nature, it seems right
and proper to me and to every perfected man that he should be
called ‘master’, because his name is like the Name of his Master,
be it only in one, or in many, or in all of His Names. For now he
is no longer separated from his Master, and behold he is his Master
and his Master is he; for he is so intimately adhering to Him [it
is here that the term Devekuth is used], that he cannot by any
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 141
means be separated from Him, for he is He [“he is He” being a
famous formula of advanced Mos!cm pantheism]. And just as his
Master, who is detached from all matter, is called Sekhel, Maskil
and Muskal, that is the knowledge, the knower and the known, all
at the same time, since all three are one in Him,” so also he, the
exalted man, the master of the exalted name, is called intellect, while
he is actually knowing; then he is also the known, like his Master;
and then there is no diffcrence between them, except that his Mas-
ter has His supreme rank by His own right and not derived from
other creatures, while he is elevated to his rank by the intermediary
of creatures.”
In this supreme state, man and Torah become one. This Abulafia
expresses very deftly when he supplements the old word from the
“Sayings of the Fathers” about the Torah: “Turn it round and
round, for everything is in it” by the words: “for it is wholly in
thee and thou art wholly in it.”
To a certain extent, as we have seen, the visionary identifies him-
self with his Master; complete identification is neither achieved
nor intended. All the same, we have here one of the most thorough-
going interpretations of the meaning of ecstatic experience to which
rabbinical Jewry has given birth. Hence the fact that nearly all
Kabbalists who in everything else follow the steps of Abulafia, have
as far as I can see recoiled from this remarkable doctrine of ecstatic
identification. Let us take as an_instance a little tract called Sullam
Ha-Aliyah, ‘the Ladder of Ascent’’—i. e., ascent to God—written in
Jerusalem by a pious Kabbalist, Rabbi Jehudah Albottini, or Al-
buttaini one of the exiles of Spain. It contains a brief statement
of Abulafia’s doctrine, and its tenth chapter, which I once had
an occasion to publish, describes ‘“‘the paths of loneliness and the
prelifninaries of adhesion (devekuth)’; in other words, the theory
of ecstaticism.” But nowhere does it make the slightest mention
of those radical consequences of Abulafia’s methods and of the
images employed by him, although for the rest its description 1s
interesting and impressive enough.
The content of ecstasy is defined by the followers of prophetic
Kabbalism by yet another and even stranger term which deserves,
for the unexpected turn it takes, the special attention of the psycho-
logist. According to this definition, in prophetic ecstasy man en-
142 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
counters his own self confronting and addressing him. This occult
experience was estimated higher than the visions of light usually
accompanying ecstasy.” The Midrash says of the anthropomorphic
utterances of the prophets: Great is the strength of the prophets
who assimilate the form to Him who formed it,” that is to say who
compare man to God. Some Kabbalists of Abulafia’s school, how-
ever, interpret this sentence differently. The form being compared
to its creator, i. e., being of divine nature, is the pure spiritual self
of man departing from him during prophecy. The following fine
passage has been conserved by a collector of Kabbalistic traditions:™
“Know that the complete secret of prophecy consists for the prophet
in that he suddenly sees the shape of his self standing before him
and he forgets his self and it is disengaged from him and he sees the
shape of his self before him talking to him and predicting the future,
and of this secret our teachers said: Great is the strength of the
prophets who compare the form [appearing to them] to Him
who formed it. Says Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra: ‘In prophecy the
one who hears is a human being and the one who speaks is a human
being. ... And another scholar writes: ‘I know and I understand
with absolute certainty that I am neither a prophet nor the son of
a prophet, that the holy spirit is not in me and that I have no
power over the “divine voice”; for of all these things I have not
been found worthy, for I did not take off my dress nor did I wash
my feet—and yet I call heaven and earth to witness that one day
I sat and wrote down a Kabbalistic secret; suddenly I saw the shape
of my self standing before me and myself disengaged from me and
I was forced to stop writing!” This explanation of the occult char-
acter of prophecy as self-confrontation sounds like a mystical inter-
pretation of the old Platonic prescript: “Recognize thyself’, as
“Behold thy self.”
The state of ecstasy as described by Abulafia, frequently, so it
seems, on the basis of personal experience, also carries with it some-
thing like an anticipatory redemption. The illuminate feels him-
self not only aglow with a heavenly fire, but also as it were anointed
with sacred and miraculous oil. He becomes, as Abulafia puts it,
by playing upon the double meaning of the Hebrew word Mashiah,
the Lord’s anointed.” He is, so to speak, his own Messiah, at least
for the brief period of his ecstatical experience.
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 143
7
Abulafia calls his method “The Path of the Names,” in contrast
to the Kabbalists of his time, whose doctrine concerning the reali-
zation of the divine attributes it referred to as “The Path of the
Sefiroth.”“ Only together the two paths from the whole of the Kab-
balah, the Path of the Sefiroth the ‘rabbinical’ and that of the
Names the ‘prophetic’ Kabbalah. The student of Kabbalah is to
begin with the contemplation of the ten Sefiroth.” These, indeed,
during meditation are to become objects of quickened imagination
rather than objects of an external knowledge acquired by merely
learning their names as attributes or even symbols of God.” For in
the Sefiroth, too, according to Abulafia, there are revealed the
‘profundities of the intellectus agens’, that cosmic power which for
the mystic coincides with the splendor of the Shekhinah.” Only
from there is he to proceed to the twenty-two letters which represent
a deeper stage of penetration.
For what he calls the Path of the Names, the ancient Jewish Gnos-
tics, as we have seen, employed another term, namely Maaseh
Merkabah, literally translated ““The Work of the Chariot,’’ because
of the Celestial chariot which was supposed to carry the throne of
God the Creator. Abulafia, with his penchant for playing upon
words, introduces his new doctrine as the true Maaseh Merkabah—
a term which can also be taken to mean “combination”. The theory
of combining the letters and names of God—that is the true vision
of the Merkabah.” It is true that where he describes the seven stages
of knowledge of the Torah, from the inquiry into the literal mean-
ing of the word to the stage of prophecy, he draws a distinction
between prophetic Kabbalism, which is the sixth stage, and the holy
of holies to which it is merely the preliminary. The substance of
this final stage, in which “the language which comes from the active
intellect” is understood, may not be divulged even if it were pos-
sible to clothe it in words.” But as we have seen, Abulafia himself,
despite this solemn vow, has lifted a corner of the veil.
It remains to be said that Abulafia is far from despising philo-
sophical knowledge. Indeed, he even says in one place that philos-
ophy and Kabbalah both owe their existence to the active intellect,
with the difference that Kabbalism represents a more profound
manifestation of the spirit and probes into a deeper and more
144 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
spiritual region.” At the same time, however, he is definitely of the
opinion that certain philosophical problems are meaningless, ex-
cept insofar as they serve to lead the mind astray. It is interesting to
hear his comment on the dispute concerning the supposed eternity
or non-eternity of the universe, by and large one of the main issues
of Jewish philosophy in its struggle against pure Aristotelianism.
The fact that the Torah advances no proof for either contention
is explained by Abulafa by remarking that from the point of view
of prophetic Kabbalism, itself the crowning achievement of the
Torah, the whole question is meaningless. ‘““The prophet, after all,
demands nothing from the Torah except that which helps him to
reach the stage of prophecy. What then does it mean to him
whether the world is eternal or created, since its eternity can neither
advance his development nor take anything away from him. And
the same is true of the hypothesis that the world came into exis-
tence at a given moment.” Religious importance attaches solely to
that which contributes to man’s perfection, and that is above all
else the Path of the Names. Although Abulafia himself denies the
eternity of the world,” he is inclined to adopt a strictly pragmatic
attitude and to dismiss the whole argument as sterile.
In short, Abulafia is before all else what one might call an emin-
ently practical Kabbalist. It is true that in Kabbalistic parlance
‘Practical Kabbalism’ means something entirely different. It simply
means magic, though practised by means which do not come under
a religious ban, as distinct from black magic, which uses demonic
powers and probes into sinister regions. The fact is, however, that
this consecrated form of magic, which calls out the tremendous
powers of the names, is not very far removed from Abulafia’s method;
if the sources from which he drew the elements of his doctrine are
investigated more closely—a task which is outside the scope of this
lecture—it becomes plain that all of them, both the Jewish and the
non-Jewish, are in fact closely connected with magical traditions
and disciplines. ‘This is true both of the ideas of the mediaeval
German Hasidim, which seem to have made a deep impression
upon him,” and of the tradition of Yoga which in devious ways
had also influenced certain Moslem mystics, and with which he may
have become acquainted during his Oriental travels. But it is no
less true that Abulafia himself has decisively rejected magic and
condemned in advance all attempts to use the doctrine of the holy
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPITETIC KABBALISM 145
names for magical purposes. In countless polemics he condemns
magic as a falsification of true mysticism;“ he does admit a magic
directed towards one’s own self, a magic of inwardness—I think
that is the general name one could give to his doctrine—but none
which aims at bringing about external sensory results, even though
the means may be inward, permissible and even sacred. Such magic
is possible, according to Abulafia, but he who practices it is ac-
cursed.” Already in his first known work Abulafia maintains that
conjuration of demons, although as a matter of fact based on a
delusive fantasy, was just good enough to strike the rabble with a
healthy terror of religion.” Elsewhere he warns against the use of
the “Book of Creation” for the purpose of creating to oneself—
in the words of the Talmud—a fat calf. They who want this, he
says bluntly, are themselves calves.”
Abulafia has resolutely taken the path that leads inwards, and |
think one can say he has pursued it as far as anybody in latter-day
Jewry. But this path runs along the border between mysticism and
magic, and for all the irreconcilable difference that appears to exist
between the two, their interrelation is more profound than is us-
ually taken for granted. There are certain points at which the be-
lief of the mystic easily becomes that of the magician, and Abulafia’s
magic of inwardness, which I have just outlined, is one of them.
Although he himself escaped the danger of sliding insensibly from
the meditative contemplation of the holy names into magical prac-
tices aimed at external objects, many of his successors fell into con-
fusion and tended to expect from the inward path the power to
change the outer world. The magician’s dream of power and lord-
ship over nature by mere words and strained intention, found its
dreamers in the Ghetto also and formed manifold combinations with
the theoretical and practical interests of mysticism proper. Histori-
cally, Kabbalism presents itself almost invariably as a combination
of the two. Abulafia’s doctrine of combination (Hokhmath ha-
Tseruf) came to be regarded by later generations as the key not
only to the mysteries of Divinity but also to the exercise of magi-
cal powers.
In the literature of the 14th to 16th centuries on the Hokhmath
ha-Tseruf we find a blend of ecstatic and theosophic Kabbalism.
Thus for instance a writing of this character could even be ascribed
to Maimonides who appears here as a practical magician and thau-
146 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
maturge.” And thus instructions concerning meditation on the dif-
ferent possibilities of vocalizing the Tetragrammaton are given in
the very awkward book Berith Menuhah, “Order of Calmness’,
which was almost the only one of these books to be printed.” These
instructions concerning meditation describe the lights flashing up
in the soul of the devotee, but at the same time dwell rather exten-
sively on the magical application of the names of God. Yet in the
two great works of the Kabbalist Josef ibn Sayah of Jerusalem,
which were composed about 1540 and which we possess in manu-
script, both sides of this Jewish Yoga are brought into a system and
pushed to excess: meditation endeavoring to reveal ever deeper
layers of the soul and more of its secret lights, and magical appli-
cation of the forces of the soul thus revealed by inward meditation.™
Finally, it may be interesting to note, that in the writings of some
Kabbalists the Great Name of God appears as the supreme object of
meditation in the last hour of the martyrs. In a powerful speech of
the great mystic Abraham ben Eliezer Halevi of Jerusalem (died
about 1530) we find a recommendation to those who face martyr-
dom. He advises them to concentrate, in the hour of their last
ordeal, on the Great Name of God; to imagine its radiant letters
between their eyes and to fix all their attention on it. Whoever
does this, will not feel the burning flames or the tortures to which
he is subjected. “And although this may seem improbable to hu-
man reason, it has been experienced and transmitted by the holy
martyrs,”
8
Of the attractive power of these ideas and practices we possess a
very precious testimonial. An anonymous disciple of Abulafia’s
wrote a book in 1295, apparently in Palestine, in which he set forth
the basic ideas of prophetic Kabbalism.™ Discussing three paths of
“expansion”, i. e. of the progress of the spirit from corporeality to
an ever purer spiritual apprehension of objects, he has interpolated
an autobiographical account. In it he describes very accurately and
without doubt reliably his own development, as well as his experi-
ences with Abulafia and the latter’s Kabbalah. He does not name
Abulafia, but from the description he gives and the kindred ideas
he employs, there can be no doubt to whom he alludes. This book
is called Shaare Tsedek, ‘‘Gates of Justice.” Four manuscripts of it
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 147
are extant. But only two of them™ contain this autobiographical
account which obviously in the other two has fallen a prey to that
previously mentioned self-censorship of the Kabbalists who are ad-
verse to confessions of an all too intimate character concerning
mystical experiences, and before whom the author deems it neces-
sary to apologize for his candor.
I believe it will be a good illustration for what I have been say-
ing if 1 give the main parts of this account, which in my opinion,
is of extraordinary psychological interest.™
“I, so and so, one of the lowliest, have probed my heart for ways
of grace to bring about spiritual expansion and I have found three
ways of progress to spiritualization: the vulgar, the philosophic,
and the Kabbalistic way. The vulgar way is that which, so I learned,
is practiced by Moslem ascetics. They employ all manner of devices
to shut out from their souls all ‘natural forms’, every image of the
familiar, natural world. Then, they say, when a spiritual form, an
image from the spiritual world, enters their soul, it is isolated in
their imagination and intensifies the imagination to such a degree
that they can determine beforehand that which is to happen to us.
Upon inquiry, I learned that they summon the Name, ALLAH, as
it is in the language of Ishmael. I investigated further and 1 found
that, when they pronounce these letters, they direct their thought
completely away from every possible ‘natural form’, and the very
letters ALLAH and their diverse powers work upon them. They
are carried off into a trance without realizing how, since no Kab-
balah has been transmitted to them. This removal of all natural
forms and images from the soul is called with them Effacement.™
“The second way is the philosophic, and the student will experi-
ence extreme difficulty in attempting to drive it from his soul be-
cause of the great sweetness it holds for the human reason and the
completeness with which that reason knows to embrace it. It consists
in this: That the student forms a notion of some science, mathema-
tics for instance, and then proceeds by analogy to some natural
science and then goes on to theology. He then continues further to
circle round this centre of his, because of the sweetness of that
which arises in him as he progresses in these studies. The sweetness
of this so delights him that he finds neither gate nor door to enable
him to pass beyond the notions which have already been established
148 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
in him. At best, he can perhaps enjoy a [contemplative] spinning
out of his thoughts and to this he will abandon himself, retiring
into seclusion in order that no one may disturb his thought until
it proceed a little beyond the purely philosophic and turn as the
flaming sword which turned every way. The true cause of all this
is also to be found in his contemplation of the letters through
which, as intermediaries, he ascertains things. The subject which
impressed itself on his human reason dominates him and his power
seems to him great in all the sciences, seeing that this is natural to
him [i. e. thus to ascertain them]. He contends that given things
are revealed to him by way of prophecy, although he does not
realize the true cause, but rather thinks that this occured to him
merely because of the extension and enlargement of his human
reason . . . But in reality it is the letters ascertained through
thought and imagination, which influence him through their mo-
tion and which concentrate his thought on difficult themes, al-
though he is not aware of this.
“But if you put the difficult question to me: ‘Why do we nowa-
days pronounce letters and move them and try to produce effects
with them without however noticing any effect being produced by
themr’—the answer lies, as I am going to demonstrate with the
help of Shaddai, in the third way of inducing spiritualization. And
I, the humble so and so, am going to tell you what I experienced
in this matter.
‘Know, friends, that from the beginning I felt a desire to study
Torah and learned a little of it and of the rest of Scripture. But I
found no one to guide me in the study of the Talmud, not so much
because of the lack of teachers, but rather because of my longing for
my home, and my love for father and mother. At last, however,
God gave me strength to search for the Torah, I went out and
sought and found, and for several years I stayed abroad studying
Talmud. But the flame of the Torah kept glowing within me,
though without my realizing it.
“IT returned to my native land and God brought me together with
a Jewish philosopher with whom I studied some of Maimonides’
“Guide of the Perplexed” and this only added to my desire. I ac-
quired a little of the science of logic and a little of natural science,
and this was very sweet to me for, as you know, ‘nature attracts
nature. And God is my witness: If I had not previously acquired
ABULAFIA AND THE DOCTRINE OF PROPHETIC KABBALISM 149
strength of faith by what little 1 had learned of the Torah and the
Talmud, the impulse to keep many of the religious commands
would have left me although the fire of pure intention was ablaze
in my heart. But what this teacher communicated to me in the way
of philosophy [on the meaning of the commandments], did not
suffice me, until the Lord had me meet a godly man, a Kabbalist
who taught me the general outlines of the Kabbalah. Nevertheless,
in consequence of my smattering of natural science, the way of Kab-
balah seemed all but impossible to me. It was then that my teacher
said to me: ‘My son, why do you deny something you have not tried?
Much rather would it befit you to make a trial of it. If you then
should find that it is nothing to you—and if you are not perfect
enough to find the fault with yourself—then you may say that there
is nothing to it.’ But, in order to make things sweet to me until my
reason might accept them and I might penetrate into them with
eagerness, he used always to make me grasp in a natural way every-
thing in which he instructed me. I reasoned thus within myself:
There can only be gain here and no loss. I shall see; if I find some-
thing in all of this, that is sheer gain; and if not, that which I have
already had will still be mine. So I gave in and he taught me the
method of the permutations and combinations of letters and the
mysticism of numbers and the other ‘Paths of the book Yetstral.’
In each path he had me wander for two weeks until each form had
been engraven in my heart. and so he led me on for four months
or so and then ordered me to ‘efface’ everything.
“He used to tell me: “My son, it is not the intention that you
come to a stop with some finite or given form, even though it be of
the highest order. Much rather is this the “Path of the Names”: The
less understandable they are, the higher their order, until you arrive
at th@activity of a force which is no longer in your control, but
rather your reason and your thought is in its control. I replied: ‘If
that be so [that all mental and sense images must be effaced], why
then do you, Sir, compose books in which the methods of the na-
tural scientists are coupled with instruction in the holy Names?’
He answered: ‘Fer you and the likes of you among the followers
of philosophy, to allure your human intellect through natural
means, so that perhaps this attraction may cause you to arrive at
the knowledge of the Holy Name.’ And he produced books for me
made up of [combinations of] letters and names and mystic num-
150 MAJOR TRENDS IN JEWISH MYSTICISM
bers [Gematrioth], of which nobody will ever be able to under-
stand anything for they are not composed in a way meant to be
understood. He said to me: “This is the [undefiled] Path of the
Names.’ And indeed, I would see none of it as my reason did not
accept it. He said: ‘It was very stupid of me to have shown them
to you.’
“In short, after two months had elapsed and my thought had
disengaged itself [from everything material] and I had become
aware of strange phenomena occurring within me, I set myself the
task at night of combining letters with one another and of ponder-
ing
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1961)
Gershom Scholem