Introduction for Kabbalah and Catastrophe
Introduction
In the early fourteenth century in Spain, Joseph Angelet composed a kabbalistic commentary on the Torah titled Kupat ha-ruchlin. Only the portion on Genesis has survived, in a unique, 239-folio manuscript held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Medieval kabbalists rarely give many autobiographical details. In fact, a significant number of these texts are entirely anonymous.1 Angelet, however, offers a rare break into the first-person voice at the end of his commentary, stating that he completed it on the twenty-fifth day of the month of Av, in the Hebrew year 5071, which corresponds to the Gregorian year 1311 CE. He also, interestingly, says that this was the fifth year of the shemittah, or Sabbatical cycle, the thirty-third year of the Jubilee cycle, 1243 years since the destruction of the Temple, and “the sixth year since the exile of our brothers in France.”2 Angelet’s strategy for situating himself within the flow of Jewish history reflects the three modes of measuring time that developed during the rabbinic period. Time can be measured based on the duration since the creation of the world, or according to the cycles of Sabbatical and Jubilee Years, or since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.3 However, the marking of historical time within the broad sweep of world and Jewish history does not end, for Angelet, with the destruction of the Temple. Events affecting Jewish communities of his own day fit into a comprehensive linear historical time frame, as well as a recurring succession of repeated periods. As we will see in what follows, such a schema was of central importance to how many kabbalists between the early fourteenth century through the early sixteenth century understood the world and the place of Jews and Judaism in the course of historical time.
Premodern kabbalists were deeply invested in the meaning of the events of Jewish history. That interest did not end with the closing of the biblical canon or the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The experience of the Jewish people in exile, and the realities associated with their status as a politically disempowered minority, such as expulsions and outbreaks of violence, demanded explanation. Kabbalah was one lens that medieval Jews deployed as they peered back through the Jewish historical record, and as they attempted to anticipate the Jewish future. This book considers some of the ways that premodern kabbalistic texts provide insight into how Jews understood the Jewish historical condition. The complex theosophies and world views advanced in kabbalistic texts reveal an abiding interest in the meaning of Jewish history and the destiny of the Jewish people. Kabbalists did not live outside of history, and their interests were not confined to the timeless mysteries of the divine realm. Kabbalistic texts contain a vast trove of valuable primary evidence for learning about how premodern Jews engaged with their own history, and how they sought to shape it.
Christian Constructions of Jewish History
Covenantal theology is fundamentally about the relationship between divine providence and human history. Since antiquity, the conflict between Christianity and rabbinic Judaism has been deeply entangled with conflicting views regarding how to read the meaning of historical events. Was Jesus the promised messianic redeemer, or is the messiah yet to come? Does the mantle of biblical Israel pass to the Jewish people as their biological descendants who continue to perform the commandments revealed at Sinai, or does the life, death, and resurrection of Christ shift that legacy to the community of his faithful adherents? Is the exile of the Jewish people a sign of temporary divine punishment, or permanent divine rejection? Does the future entail the long-awaited arrival of the messiah and ascendancy of the Jewish people, or will it involve the triumphant return of Christ? The Jewish-Christian debate is, at its core, a conflict over the meaning of Jewish history.
For many Christian thinkers, as Robert Chazan notes, the evaluation of the role of Jews in the course of human history became increasingly negative over the course of the Middle Ages.4 Jewish historical suffering was understood as just punishment for their rejection of the true messiah. Jews were not regarded as historical actors; the postbiblical experience of the Jewish people was regarded as a cautionary tale. The wandering Jews5 were living reminders of the calamity that awaits all who refuse the message of Christianity and its understanding of the pivotal historical role of Christ as redeemer. The final resolution of the current period of history will entail, according to many medieval Christian exegetes, the disappearance of Jews and Judaism. In the meantime, the Jews persist as a vestigial people, present yet mired in the past, unable to recognize the new phase of history in which they live. The doctrine of supersession stipulates that Jews and their covenant with God had its moment in the past, which then came to an end with the advent of Christ. The Jewish people’s ongoing adherence to the laws of Moses and the rabbinic oral law was regarded by many ancient and medieval Christian thinkers as conclusive evidence that the Jews have been unable to play a meaningful role in the course of human affairs. Since the moment of their rejection of Jesus as their messiah, the claim goes, Jews have been frozen in time. In other words, Jews were regarded as the ultimate nonhistorical actors on the stage of human history. Their role is to serve as objects of a Christian gaze, living reminders that those who reject Christ will be banished from history, remain frozen in the past, and ultimately be deprived of the rewards of redemption in the future.
An important and instructive example of this view can be seen in the works of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), whose elaborate discourse regarding the role of Jews in human history had a significant influence on medieval Christian thinkers.6 As Jeremy Cohen has pointed out, Jews factor prominently in the world-historical schema constructed by Augustine in his De Genesi contra Manichaeos. He divides history into six dispensations, or ages, corresponding to the six days of creation mentioned in Genesis. The third age begins with Abraham, and the fourth with the kingdom of David. However, there was a decline at the end of that period, such that with the beginning of the fifth age, which involves the “advent of our lord Jesus Christ,” the events that entail the rise of redemption and divine grace for the rest of humanity bring about the decline of Jewish life and history. As Augustine described it:
And so, for the people of the Jews that age was, in fact, one of decline and destruction. . . . Afterwards, those people began to live among the nations, as if in the sea, and, like the birds that fly, to have an uncertain, unstable dwelling. . . . God blessed those creatures, saying “Be fertile and increase . . .” inasmuch as the Jewish people, from the time that it was dispersed among the nations, in fact increased significantly. The evening of this day—that is, of this age—was, so to speak, the multiplication of sins among the people of the Jews, since they were blinded so seriously that they could not even recognize the lord Jesus Christ.7
The Jewish experience of exile and political disempowerment is presented here as part of a divine plan for human history. The onset of the fifth age is immediately preceded by a period of Jewish sinfulness so severe that it blinds them to the truth of Jesus’s identity as messiah. The rise of the historical epoch of the Christian church involves the decline of Jewish historical fortunes. Their “unstable dwelling” in the realm of human affairs condemns them to live as a ubiquitous, yet subjugated people among foreign nations. Sacred history, for Augustine, includes Jewish collective misfortune as part of the broad sweep of successive ages encoded in Scripture through the seven days of creation. At the same time, he accounts for the persistence of the Jewish presence in Christian territory, and even the growth in their numbers since the death of Christ, through a reading of Genesis 1:22, in which God blessed the fish of the sea and fowl of the air (symbols for Augustine of the itinerant, homeless Jews) by saying “be fertile and increase.” Jewish life as a disempowered minority, and Jewish survival and persistence over the course of human history after the time of Jesus, are both understood in Augustine’s reading to be a fate foreordained in the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible.
Augustine buttresses his argument for the inevitability of the survival of the Jews with an interpretation of the mark of Cain.8 As recounted in Genesis 4:8–15, God condemns Cain to a life of toil and homeless wandering for murdering his brother Abel in a jealous rage. When Cain objects that his punishment is “too great to bear,” God places a mark upon him to indicate that anyone who kills him will bear a seven-fold punishment. In Augustine’s reading of this passage, Cain’s sin of fratricide and subsequent punishment represents the Jews’ betrayal and murder of Jesus, their own kinsman. Cain’s punishment to spend the remainder of his days as a “restless wanderer” (na’ va-nad) is, in Augustine’s view, a prophetic foreshadowing of the Jewish condition throughout history after their betrayal of Christ. Like Cain, they live as vulnerable wanderers throughout the course of sacred history. Yet also like Cain, Jews bear a distinctive and ironically protective signifier in the form of their observance of Jewish law and customs. God’s granting of this particular “mark of Cain” prevents them from completely disappearing. Jews, it would seem, have a role to play in God’s plan for humanity, and for this reason they require divine protection to ensure that their punishment as the vagabonds of history does not lead to their early disappearance.
The fact of Jewish survival is, for Augustine, yet another facet of the unique role that Jews play in human history because of their culpability for the death of Christ.
Now behold, who cannot see, who cannot recognize how, throughout the world, wherever that people has been scattered, it wails in sorrow for its lost kingdom and trembles in fear of the innumerable Christian peoples . . . ? The nation of impious, carnal Jews will not die a bodily death. For whoever destroys them will suffer sevenfold punishment—that is, he will assume from them the sevenfold punishment with which they have been burdened for their guilt in the murder of Christ. . . . Every emperor or king who has found them in his domain, having discovered them with that mark [of Cain] has not killed them—that is, he has not made them cease to live as Jews, distinct from the community of other nations by this blatant and appropriate sign of their observance.9
Jewish exile and Jewish religious life and cultural distinctiveness are understood here as signs of divine punishment. The scattered Jewish nation who “wails in sorrow for its lost kingdom” and who lives in fear of the power of their Christian rulers, will never die out altogether. They will persist, according to Augustine, and they will never be made to “cease to live as Jews, distinct from the community of other nations,” since it is their destiny to bear the mark of their shame as the killers of Jesus. This mark, significantly, is the practice of Jewish law itself. A fervent “Jewish exceptionalism” can be detected in the view that Jews alone play this uncanny historical role, guilty of deicide/fratricide, yet also protected by God and thereby indestructible. So important is the Jewish role in sacred history that, like Cain, those who try to destroy them will be punished sevenfold. The Jewish condition, in this view, is both grievously negative and historically essential. And yet, Jews themselves are not proactive agents on the stage of history; they are the subjects of history, suffering a fate long-since established by the sins of their ancestors and codified in biblical prophecy.
Augustine famously argued that Jews serve as a “witness”10 throughout history, conveying through their very being the truth of the Hebrew Scriptures, as well as the horrific fate that awaits those who follow their path by rejecting the message of Christianity. The subjugation of the Jewish people by Christian rulers fulfills what Augustine regards as a prophetically anticipated reality. As Augustine puts it, “Throughout the present era (which proceeds to unfold in the manner of seven days), it will be readily apparent to believing Christians from the survival of the Jews, how those who killed the Lord when proudly empowered have merited subjection.”11 The abject state of the Jewish people reflects their guilt, while their continued existence serves both as cautionary tale and confirmation of prophecy.
Jews, for Augustine, enable Christians to perceive biblical truths to which Jews themselves are blind. In one evocative image he argues, “For what else is that nation today but the desks (scriniaria) of the Christians, bearing the law and the prophets as testimony to the tenets of the church.”12 Like the insensible desks that hold books for their readers, the Jewish historical condition is properly understood, according to Augustine, only by the Christians who observe it. Jews provide valuable prophetic testimony by preserving and transmitting the books of the Hebrew Bible, but they are no more able to understand the meaning of those books than inanimate reading desks can understand the books that are placed upon them. In another remarkable image, Augustine argues that over the course of history, since the death of Christ and the destruction of the Temple, “the Jews inform the traveler, like milestones along the route, while themselves remaining senseless and immobile.”13 Just as the markers or signs that direct a traveler along a roadway do not themselves move through space, Jews, as signifiers in the historical drama of humanity, do not move forward through time. Instead, their subjugated condition merely marks the way for others. The Jews themselves are frozen in time.
In the Christian reading of Jewish history established by Augustine, Jews exist both within and outside of history—they serve a necessary purpose for Christians without progressing through history themselves. By refusing to abandon their law and accept Jesus as their messiah, Jews collectively have become trapped in a bygone era. As Miriamne Krummel describes it, “According to Augustine’s reasoning, Jews ceased to be physically possible and transformed into portable signifiers at the moment when Jewish belief was simultaneously invalidated and retained to service Christian formulations of time and temporality. Augustine’s image of the temporally frozen Jew effectively weakens the independent foundation of Jewish temporality and its backstories on which Christianity was built.”14 In Augustine’s construction of a Christian theology of Jewish historical fate after the time of Jesus, Jews are simultaneously historically meaningful and blind to the meaning of history. The truth of Christianity creates, in Krummel’s felicitous phrasing, “the temporally frozen Jew” who does not move forward through time, who lives as the subject of Christian power, and whose historical fate can only be understood through a Christian gaze. And as Krummel has also argued, the attempts to create a “universal” Christian way of marking time further marginalized Jewish historical memory. Even the Jewish calendar was superseded.15
Once Jews have finished serving their historical purpose of helping to spread Christianity to the world through their function as witnesses, what destiny can exist for the Jewish people if not to disappear? As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has observed, “In the Christian view . . . history was historia sacra, the history of the Church, which only embraced the believers—those who accepted the Gospel and therefore entered the domain of Grace. The Jews, in their stubbornness, had taken themselves out of history when they refused to accept the Gospel. Significantly, Christian authors also claimed that history would reach its fulfillment only when Jews returned to it: that is, when they accepted Christianity as the truth of the Gospel.”16 That is to say, Jews can enter history only by leaving Judaism. To remain Jewish is by definition to remain frozen in the past.
Medieval Jews and Jewish History
Christian readings of Jewish history in the Middle Ages were deeply influenced by Augustine’s legacy. Jewish historical misfortune was regarded, by both Jews and Christians alike, as theologically significant. While Christians regarded Jewish history as a sustained confirmation of Christianity, Jews developed their own strategies for understanding Jewish historical experience, and for situating it within a long timeline that culminates in redemptive triumph.17 The so-called “argument from history,” or the suggestion that the negative events of Jewish life since the time of Jesus demonstrate that the Jewish covenant with God has ended, featured prominently in medieval Jewish-Christian polemics.18 Robert Chazan has observed that “medieval Jews argued with deep conviction for the unbroken and unbreakable continuity of their historical experience as the true people of Israel. This perception of the Jewish past, present, and future colored every aspect of medieval Jews’ perception and representation of self and other.”19 Jews, like their Christian counterparts, were deeply invested in understanding the meaning of Jewish history. The genres and discursive modes in which they wrote were not often what might be regarded today as historical writing. They tended to speak less with the voice of the chronicler, and more commonly as the exegete. This is due to the fact that, as Chazan notes, “medieval Jews saw themselves and their neighbors in highly archetypical paradigms, in terms drawn from the vast reservoir of biblical and rabbinic imagery. . . . Biblical events are assumed to serve as precedents for subsequent Jewish experience.”20
How did medieval Jews engage with what we might call medieval Jewish history? Were they interested in the particulars of the events that happened to Jews throughout the world since the end of the Talmudic period? Or were they more focused on the timeless matters of the law and the mysteries of the eternal Godhead?21 As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has famously argued in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, medieval Jews engaged very little in historiography, or the chronicling of specific events, aside from a temporary period in the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492 when a number of Hebrew books of this sort were composed.22 For the most part, Jewish historiography has been a largely secular and modern phenomenon, while in the Jewish Middle Ages, “there was much on the meaning of Jewish history; there was little historiography.”23 That is to say, the absence of a particular mode of historical writing—historiography—does not imply a lack of historical memory. Yerushalmi’s point is simply that Jewish views regarding the meaning of Jewish history were expressed in other modes, such as biblical commentary or homiletical exposition. As he notes elsewhere, “We possess, in all branches of Jewish literary creativity in the Middle Ages, a wealth of thought on the position of the Jewish people in history, of ideas of Jewish history, but comparatively little interest in recording the mundane historical experiences of the Jews since they went into exile.”24
This claim has been the subject of robust scholarly debate in the decades since the publication of Yerushalmi’s influential book.25 Amos Funkenstein has argued that “with or without historiography proper, creative thinking about history—past and present—never ceased. Jewish culture was and remained informed by an acute historical consciousness, albeit different at different periods.”26 Halakhic discourse entails its own unique brand of historical consciousness, according to Funkenstein. He notes that these sources reflect “clear distinctions of time and place throughout: distinctions concerning customs and their context, exact knowledge of the time and place of messengers and teacher of the halacha, the estimated value of coins mentioned in sources, the significance of institutions of the past.”27 While this might not constitute historiography in the formal sense, Funkenstein maintains that it certainly is a kind of engagement with history. An examination of the many different kinds of texts produced by medieval Jews reveals that they were not only aware of their historical reality—they were fascinated and perplexed by it. That is to say, “their existence was to them a source of perpetual amazement . . . it remained always in need of explanation.”28 The various discourses produced by medieval Jews thus reflect not only an attempt to give meaning to Jewish history, but also to account for the past and ongoing realities of Jewish life and “the perception of the distinctness of Israel.”29
In evaluating Yerushalmi’s distinction between history and memory, Robert Bonfil suggests that conventional historical texts and those that fall into what might be termed “Jewish memory,” or the attribution of meaning to events of the collective Jewish past, might not be so different after all. He has observed that when medieval Jews sought “to reflect upon extraordinarily tragic events and the bearing they have upon their own self-perception . . . [they] need not necessarily express their reactions in historical writing. Such reflections could be assigned to the realm of memory, making liturgy, homiletics, halakhah, or theology the appropriate channels of literary expression. And yet, as far as interest in past events is concerned, I personally feel unable to grasp that there is a substantial difference between memory and history.”30 The fact that medieval Jews composed a far greater number of scriptural commentaries than historical chronicles did not mean that they were uninterested in Jewish history or current events in the world around them. It merely suggests that they wrote in a different register. The intellectual context in which Jews functioned used the Bible as a primary discursive reservoir of meaning; Jewish law was the unquestioned blueprint governing Jewish life; and rabbinic texts were understood to be authoritative legal guides. In such a cultural setting, engagement with Jewish history was not absent—it was merely expressed in the idiom appropriate to the context. The issue facing medieval Jews, according to Bonfil, was “how to find a proper formula for Jewish history regarding both contents and literary genre.”31
What exactly did Jews remember? What history called out for meaning? While there were many facets of Jewish history that engaged the attention of medieval Jewish writers, the overarching context of exile, or galut, demanded explanation.32 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has observed that for Jews in the Middle Ages, “it is impossible to discuss the topic of ‘Jewish memory’ without emphasizing the crucial role of the idea of exile in its construction.”33 The importance of this phenomenon is something upon which premodern Jews and contemporary scholars of Jewish history largely agree. The condition of living as a dispersed minority without political autonomy has in fact been a crucial factor in Jewish history and the development of Jewish identity. And as noted above, Christian thinkers since Augustine have regarded the presence of the Jews in exile as a theologically significant confirmation of Christianity. For medieval Jews, as well, Jewish exile entailed a critical theological dilemma. Did the exile of the Jewish people imply that they have been abandoned by God? What was the cause of the exile, and how can it be corrected? Why is the messiah so delayed? Is it simply the result of Jewish transgression, or is there a more complicated dynamic at play? The combination of Christian weaponization of Jewish historical suffering, together with the theological dilemmas that Jews faced when trying to square their own history with notions of covenantal promise, created a strong incentive for Jewish thinkers to respond to the challenge.
And respond they did. Medieval Jews, including kabbalists, were far from silent on these matters. They addressed many questions about the workings of human history in relation to divine providence. The misfortunes of Jewish history were key features of the medieval Jewish-Christian debate. Jews could not avoid the Christian claims regarding the historical fate of the Jewish people; it permeated the culture and architecture of the societies in which they lived. Images of the royal and dignified Ecclesia and the blindfolded Synagoga who could not perceive her own place in history gazed down upon them from cathedral walls, and reminders of their minority status under the rule of the Christian majority were constant. Any alternative perspectives on the meaning of Jewish history that they might articulate, even if they were drawn from ancient, pre-Christian sources, could not help but be a rejection of Christian theology and historia sacra.
Jews and Christians shared some basic assumptions regarding history. Both, for instance, regarded the present as a painful transitional period leading up to a messianic redemption. Where they differed was in the meaning of the present in relation to the biblical past and the covenantal promise. Was the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish people a sign that God had abandoned them?34 At stake in the attribution of meaning to the events of the past and present for medieval Jews was the looming specter of Christian claims to be the true inheritors of the legacy of Israel and the divine promise of redemption. This supersessionist orientation of Christianity toward rabbinic Judaism entails the sweeping claim that all Jewish history since the death of Jesus has been nothing but an affirmation of the truth of Christianity and a rejection of the Jewish people by God.
Jewish and Christian readings of history are in many important respects both a form of what Funkenstein refers to as “counterhistory.” He observed that “counterhistories form a specific genre of history written since antiquity. . . . Their function is polemical. Their method consists of the systematic exploitation of the adversary’s most trusted sources against the grain. . . . Their aim is the distortion of the adversary’s self-image, of his identity, through the deconstruction of his memory.”35 Neither Jews nor Christians could escape the fact that claiming the legitimacy of their own place in history necessarily meant rejecting the core claims of the other. And while Jews feature far more prominently in Christian discourse than Christians do in Jewish Scripture or rabbinic literature, Ram Ben-Shalom has demonstrated persuasively that “many medieval Jewish sources reveal an interest not only in Jewish history but in Christian history too. There was an awareness that the Middle Ages was a period in which historical events of significance to Jews took place and important Jewish figures lived.”36 The cultural dynamics were such that Jews could not and did not simply immerse themselves in the world of ancient texts and ignore the theological implications of the postrabbinic historical experience of the Jewish and Christian peoples. For example, Ellen Haskell has demonstrated how Zoharic literature is replete with both subtle and overt countertheologies directed toward Christianity.37 Through the novel idiom of Kabbalah, the thirteenth-century Jews responsible for the creation of Zoharic literature created, in Haskell’s words, “a hidden space from which they contested Christendom’s dominance.” The subversive strategies at play in the Zohar thus “challenged the public Christian transcript of Jewish subordination and upheld their own versions of Jewish identity and self-definition.”38 In what follows, I explore how late medieval kabbalists deployed kabbalistic ideas in the service of reimagining the meaning of Jewish history. Jewish exile and Christian dominance demanded an explanation. As we will see below, Kabbalah was one way that premodern Jews sought to provide it.
Medieval Kabbalah and Historical Memory
Gershom Scholem has exerted tremendous influence over the academic study of Kabbalah and the ways that these texts have been understood by historians and other researchers working in related fields. Scholem tended to regard premodern Kabbalah as a factor that worked within Jewish history, rather than as a repository of Jewish historical memory. At one point he describes his interest in studying kabbalistic sources as motivated by a recognition that kabbalistic texts reveal “forces which vitalized and sustained the Jewish people as a living body throughout the peregrinations of our history.”39 Yet, at the same time, he suggests that kabbalistic texts are of value to scholars seeking to understand how Jews in earlier periods understood their own experience.
Wherever you touch, it is as if you touch gold, if you but have eyes to see. There is opened up here a world of profound personal and human experience, combined with the historical experience of the nation. Daring ideas were formulated with great clarity or in allusive language; the very soul of an entire period speaks to us through these obscure and halting symbols, and through its strange customs and ways of life we have come to understand the terrors of life and death of pious Jews.40
Scholem was more interested in seeing Kabbalah as an agent of Jewish history than as a resource for understanding Jewish theories for the unfolding of historical events in their own time. In particular, he regarded the kabbalistic texts written before the expulsion from Spain as uninterested in history and more focused on the mysteries of the emergence of the world from God. Kabbalistic images and ideas that were created during this period, were, according to Scholem, “in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.”41 It was only after the expulsion that Kabbalah “triumphed because it provided a valid answer to the great problems of the time. To a generation for which the facts of exile and the precariousness of existence in it have become a most pressing and cruel problem, kabbalism could give an answer unparalleled in breadth and depth of vision. The kabbalistic answer illuminated the significance of exile and redemption and accounted for the unique historical situation of Israel within the wider, in fact cosmic, context of creation itself.”42
Hannah Arendt, in an essay written in 1948 discussing, among other things, Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, critiques Jewish historians of the previous century for ignoring “all those trends of the Jewish past which did not point to their own major theses of Diaspora history, according to which the Jewish people did not have a political history of their own.” She observed that in the gaze of those historians, “Jews were not history makers but history-sufferers.”43 Arendt praises Scholem for redeeming Jewish history and revealing the ways that Jews have been historical actors, who, ironically, through the Kabbalah, have contributed to key aspects of modernity. She accepted Scholem’s thesis that the messianic movement of Shabbtai Zvi was an essentially kabbalistic phenomenon, and that through its failure it generated Jewish modernity. Arendt cites with interest Scholem’s description of how kabbalists transformed Jewish law into theurgic actions, such that “every mitsvah became an event of cosmic importance. . . . The religious Jew became a protagonist in the drama of the World; he manipulated the strings behind the scenes.”44 Arendt understands this as part of the historical appeal of mysticism, both past and present. In her view, “These speculations appeal to all who are actually excluded from action, prevented from altering a fate that appears to them unbearable and, feeling themselves helpless victims of incomprehensible forces, are naturally inclined to find some secret means for gaining power for participating in the ‘drama of the World.’”45
Scholem’s insights were a significant step in bringing Kabbalah into greater contact with the study of Jewish historical memory, and Arendt is certainly correct in observing that Scholem’s work with kabbalistic sources provided an important corrective to historians who reinscribed the Christian view of Jews as the passive subjects of history. Yet Scholem still relegated kabbalists before the time of Luria to the murky realm of mystical speculation disengaged from the historical realities of Jewish experience.46 Such an assumption about what is—and is not—present in kabbalistic texts might account for the fact that kabbalistic sources are absent in most studies of medieval Jews.47 It would seem that kabbalistic compositions have been regarded as devoid of historical consciousness, specificity of place and time, and engagement with the predicament of Jewish collective experience. Kabbalah has been taken perhaps too literally as an esoteric discipline addressing arcane matters of the transcendent divine realm, accessible only to the most expert of kabbalists (and, by extension, the most skilled of contemporary scholars). This has resulted, ironically, in a scholarly perception of medieval kabbalists that is similar to the medieval Christian perception of Jews; they are regarded as living outside of history.48 Kabbalah, as a mode of discourse, is perceived as disengaged with the lived historical experiences of Jewish people. In this book, I argue that the project of making sense of the meaning of Jewish history was an important aspect of premodern kabbalistic discourse. Below I consider some of the ways that the texts they produced in the fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries constructed a comprehensive explanatory model for understanding Jewish history.49 I also show that Kabbalah was more than a compensatory delusion. The very act of producing, consuming, and preserving kabbalistic discourses about the meaning of Jewish history is itself a way of engaging history. By developing elaborate new images and strategies for ascribing meaning to Jewish history, kabbalists developed new modes for imagining viable Jewish identities within the realities of premodern Jewish life.
It should be stated at the outset that I do not argue that the events of history can be used to explain or account for the creation of kabbalistic ideas. The Crusades did not create the Zohar any more than the expulsion from Spain created Lurianic Kabbalah. The intention in what follows is instead to better appreciate how kabbalistic discourses were used by premodern Jews to understand the events of Jewish history. When viewed from that perspective, the texts composed in the centuries that fall between the completion of the main body of the Zohar in the late thirteenth century and the rise of the kabbalistic community of Safed in the mid-sixteenth provide particularly interesting evidence for how ideas from earlier kabbalistic compositions—the Zohar prominent among them—were creatively redeployed in the service of thinking through the meaning of Jewish history during the difficult final two centuries of Jewish life in much of Christian western Europe.50
Texts from this period are often regarded as less creative and original than those produced during the mid-and late thirteenth century, and as a result, they have received less scholarly attention. For example, many monographs and articles have been dedicated to the study of the Zoharic corpus, but only one book (a doctoral dissertation from 1980) has been written about the Sefer ha-peli’ah and Kanah, and no monograph has ever been written about the Sefer ha-temunah and related literature, both of which were composed in the fourteenth century. The tendency in the field to dedicate more attention to the study of medieval kabbalistic texts which went on to enjoy popularity in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, such as the Zohar, has resulted in a significant lack of scholarly attention to the many less famous texts produced in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. While Spain was the center of kabbalistic creativity during the second half of the thirteenth century, we find kabbalistic texts from a growing range of geographical locations during the following two centuries, including the Byzantine Empire, Italy, Germany, eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. While many of these texts were less well known than some of the earlier compositions from Spain, they are no less interesting when considered from the perspective of what they can tell us about how Jews during that time used Kabbalah to make sense of their own experience of Jewish history.
As noted above, medieval Jews could not avoid Christian claims regarding the meaning of Jewish history, nor could they avoid the need to account for the tragedies that occurred over the course of their exile. Biblical and rabbinic theodicies tended to regard the misfortunes of the people of Israel as divine punishment for transgressing the law. Kabbalists engaged with these questions by adding an additional discursive layer. Medieval Jewish experience, as they saw it, connected with the biblical past and was contiguous with the long history of the Jews through concealed divine forces, known only through the kabbalistic tradition. The correspondence of the hidden attributes of God (known as the ten sefirot, or ten divine luminous emanations) with earthly events reflects, in their view, the fact that the true driving force of history and human affairs is to be found in the secret divine realm. Such knowledge, they claimed, was revealed only to Jews, and could be found in the traditions preserved by the kabbalists. Implicit in this is the suggestion that the standard cannon of rabbinic Judaism was not adequate to account for the present conditions of medieval Jewish life. Kabbalah provided medieval Jews with a new explanatory model for understanding Jewish history, Jewish suffering, and the fate of the Jewish people in the future. Medieval kabbalistic ideas were projected back onto biblical and rabbinic Judaism in a fanciful act of transformative memory. As Eitan Fishbane has noted, the fictional attribution of kabbalistic knowledge to the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and the other rabbinic characters of his time as represented in Zoharic literature creates a new Jewish history that is “‘remembered’ through the lens of medieval fiction.” The Zoharic narrative that details the secret conversations of famous rabbis from the founding era of rabbinic Judaism is, in fact, a discursive device that, Fishbane suggests, “irreversibly recasts cultural memory, and the imagined world becomes—for all intents and purposes—the enduring truth of the culture, a representation of the real.”51 In remembering a new, kabbalistic Judaism, medieval kabbalists were able to regard themselves as the inheritors of an authentic revelation from antiquity that explains the divine plan for history.
Jonathan Z. Smith has observed that religious myths are not timeless, ahistorical engagements with universal themes. Religious discourses, he argues, provide a mechanism for people to engage with their “situation” in a particular time and place in which people encounter an “‘incongruity’ between cultural norms and expectations and historical reality.”52 The realities of postrabbinic Jewish history were hard to reconcile with the expectations associated with Jewish self-conceptions of divine election and covenantal legacy. Chazan has noted that the misfortunes of Jewish history were underscored in Christian polemical discourses as a primary reason why Jews should abandon their religion and adopt Christianity.53 This led medieval Jewish authors, including kabbalists, to search for meaning in the catastrophes of Jewish history, since “the pain of catastrophe is mitigated considerably by understanding; it is profoundly exacerbated by a sense of meaninglessness.”54
The historical consciousness reflected in medieval kabbalistic texts evinces a greater interest in finding meaning in tragedy than it does in understanding the periods of calm and prosperity. Salo Baron famously argued that medieval Jewish life, and Jewish history in general, should not be regarded as merely a succession of moments of oppression.55 Despite the expulsions, outbreaks of violence, legal and social restrictions, and church-backed anti-Jewish polemicizing, Jews found ways to flourish in many places throughout the Christian West in the Middle Ages. A “lachrymose” history of premodern Jewish life, he argued, creates an incomplete picture of Jewish history. Nonetheless, many medieval Jewish thinkers—kabbalists among them—could not avoid the significant theological dilemma posed by the conditions of Jewish life. The basic claim of the covenant—that Jewish acceptance of divine law and performance of the commandments will be reciprocated by divine protection and messianic redemption—was difficult to reconcile with the realities of Jewish historical experience in the medieval Christian West. Even those Jews who lived in moments of relative security did so with the constant awareness that their fate was contingent. Moreover, they were acutely aware of the misfortunes of Jews in other regions, past and present. In the passage cited from Joseph Angelet at the start of this introduction, he does not measure time in relation to positive events. For him, the orienting events of Jewish history are the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews from France. While Baron’s caution against an overly “lachrymose” history of premodern Jewish life is certainly sound advice for contemporary Jewish historians, we must also be open to the fact that many medieval Jews embraced a narrative of decline in Jewish historical fortune. As Adam Teller has observed, “When pre-modern Jews thought about themselves and their place in the world, they did so not in liberal, but in lachrymose terms.”56
One strategy deployed by medieval kabbalists is an inversion of history. This is slightly different from Funkenstein’s idea of “counterhistory,” in that it both responds to the historical claims and consciousness of the Christian other, and it seeks to reorient the meaning of historical reality itself. While the main contours of Christian assertions regarding the meaning of Jewish history could not go unaddressed, countering Christian claims alone was insufficient to address the problems raised by Jewish history and medieval Jewish experience. Tragic events, such as expulsions, violence, and the generally declining state of Jewish life in western Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, required more than a rejection of the Christian narrative. The historical reality itself was a problem, and Kabbalah provided one attempt at a solution. When refracted through the prism of the kabbalistic imagination, Jewish history appears in the inverse. Exile, oppression, misfortune, and tragedy are placed within a vast historical time frame, and recast as necessary, virtuous suffering that actively moves history forward. The setbacks in Jewish history are reimagined as markers of forward progress that only Jews can see. In the kabbalistic world view, Jews are transformed into the agents of history, and the non-Jewish nations of the world the unwitting pawns. Kabbalists claim that by adhering to Judaism and persisting through the traumas of Jewish experience, Jews secretly move history toward its final, triumphant conclusion.
The negative aspects of Jewish life in exile are not, in this view, a sign of divine abandonment, or proof that history is off track. Through a variety of strategies, kabbalists found ways to imagine an inverse of Jewish history; even negative events are depicted as elements of a divine plan nearing its culmination in a grand reversal of fortune. For them, Jewish suffering is neither an unfortunate byproduct of history, nor is it a meaningless accident created by unrestrained human free will. For the kabbalists, Jewish suffering on the stage of history is one of the ways that Jews secretly exert their power and move history toward its culmination. Each collective trauma is reimagined by the kabbalists as a mechanism for Jews to purify their souls and complete the final, necessarily painful steps of the present historical era. Soon, they assure their readers, history will come to an end and Jews will be rewarded. But until then, Jews are not waiting passively. For the kabbalists, Jewish perseverance through painful historical setbacks is the secret central drama of the divinely designed historical process. In the kabbalistic view, Jewish endurance of subjugation and oppression at the hands of their enemies is the way that Jews push history forward. The “history-sufferers” are transformed into the agents of history who ironically exert their agency through suffering.
In the chapters below, I explore some of the ways that premodern kabbalists crafted discourses of Jewish historical experience. The first chapter considers the basic strategy evident in medieval kabbalistic sources for making sense of negative historical events in Jewish history. The establishment of historical time begins with the sin in the garden of Eden, which created the conditions for history. Free will, in the form of the evil inclination and the capacity to freely choose, set the stage for transgression, which in turn threw the divine world out of balance. Since then, the kabbalists claim, the flow of divine energy has been warped. The nations of the world have been empowered, while the Jewish people, as a result of ongoing transgression, have been cut off from the divine realm that was intended to grant them earthly dominance. This chapter considers how kabbalists describe the hidden theosophical undercurrents that account for the tragedies of Jewish historical experience and the reality of national disempowerment. These sources demonstrate how such discourses served to alleviate the “terror” of history, which is the fear that all events are arbitrary and hold no meaning. Despite the many undeniably negative aspects of the Jewish historical legacy, kabbalists claim that there is a divine plan and purpose revealed in the esoteric tradition, and known exclusively by Jews. The goal envisioned for Jews as actors in the world is to serve their role faithfully while enduring history, so that they can bring history to an end.
Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the meaning of Jewish experience in the context of exile among the nations. A surprising number of texts are explicit in naming Christians and Muslims as the people who have been empowered by God to rule over Jews during the present historical moment, and they provide a number of ways to understand the meaning and purpose of this particular fate. Kabbalists from this period created a number of narratives to ascribe meaning to human history during the interim between the expulsion from Eden and the arrival of the messiah.
Chapter 3 expands the discussion of kabbalistic notions of history by exploring the doctrine of shemittot, or cosmic Sabbatical cycles. This idea, which was particularly popular among kabbalists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, suggests that the present world has a defined duration of seven thousand years, and that there are seven such worlds of the same duration, comprising forty-nine thousand years in total. This macrohistorical model was deployed by kabbalists to give meaning to their present reality by situating it within a vast sweep of time covering multiple worlds. Imagining other realities in this successive multiverse provided an occasion for understanding the comprehensive divine plan behind all of cosmic time, and the relatively brief moment of pain that constitutes the present eon.
The fourth chapter moves from the history of the cosmic order to that of the individual Jewish soul by exploring the ways that reincarnation is related to the question of historical memory and meaning. Each lifetime is, like the cosmos, only one in a series. Jewish identities of the past and future are bound to one another through the rebirth of souls. According to these sources, the suffering that Jewish individuals experience over the course of multiple lifetimes serves the historically vital purpose of purifying Jewish souls in order to enable messianic redemption and usher in the end of history. Reincarnation is also a tool used by God to guide history on its course, returning specific souls into the world at the right time and in the proper place in order to bring about the intended order of historical events. The persistence and reiteration of the soul across time is, for the kabbalists, yet another indication that God has not abandoned the Jews to the arbitrary winds of history.
Messianic redemption was a question that no medieval Jew could avoid when thinking about the meaning of their history, and kabbalists were keen to point out that their secret tradition offered new ways of understanding the ultimate destiny of the Jewish people at the end of days. Chapter 5 addresses kabbalistic discussions of history’s meaning in relation to its anticipated end. The prominence of descriptions of the world after redemption and calculations of dates for the arrival of the messiah indicate just how important these kabbalists felt it was to orient historical time toward its conclusion, and to give some sense of where the present falls on the full historical timeline. Even though the present world will be followed by others, the endpoint that the kabbalists offer as hope for their Jewish readers is not that of the absolute end of being, but more specifically, the end of history and the chain of events driven by human free will. The rebalancing of divine powers that kabbalists maintain will happen at the end of days will bring an end to the channeling of energy to the nations of the world, which in turn will re-empower the people of Israel. But the world of Jewish dominance will not be one in which Jews simply switch places with their oppressors. In the messianic future envisioned in these sources, the dominance of the Jewish nation will happen in a balanced, static world, which is to say—after history ends.
The final chapter brings many of these points together through an examination of the ways that kabbalistic texts, especially those composed during the generation of the Spanish expulsion, describe the role of kabbalistic discourse itself in helping to shape Jewish history. In an intriguing double move, a surprising number of kabbalists depict the writing and sharing of kabbalistic texts as a way for Jews to survive exile and mend the broken course of history. The physical weakness of the Jewish people is compensated, in their view, but the power of their words. The very act of unveiling history’s secrets is itself regarded as a form of power that Jews wield in shaping human affairs. The partnership with God that kabbalists claim for Jews through the practice of Jewish law is also manifested in the composition and dissemination of kabbalistic books. This final chapter demonstrates that kabbalists not only produced extensive discourses regarding the meaning of history; they were also explicit regarding the role that they believed their own particular genre of literary production could have in sustaining Jewish identity in exile. Such claims render explicit the argument made throughout this book—that kabbalistic texts have much to tell us about how premodern Jews sustained a meaningful sense of self in the face of history’s challenges.
Notes
1. As Garb has observed, the development of autobiographical egodocuments is a hallmark of early modern Kabbalah. See Garb, A History of Modern Kabbalah, 6–7.
2. Bodleian Opp. 228, 239a. See Felix, Perakim be-haguto ha-kabbalit, 29n21. Angelet also mentions the exile of the Jews of France in Livnat ha-sappir, BL Add. 2700, 413b. See Asulin, “R. Joseph Angelet and the Doctrine,” 23n120. Elsewhere in that same work, he mentions that in the ninth month of the year 5785 (1324/1325 CE), he observed a destruction of a Jewish “sanctuary” and the plunder of their property. Isaac Baer suggests that this is likely a reference to inquisitorial violence in Saragossa, see History of the Jews, 13–14, citing the printed edition of Livnat ha-sappir, 65b–66a. Carlebach discusses a sixteenth-century Hebrew chronograph in which the exile of the Jews of France is mentioned as part of a long list of historical events that are intended to situate the reader in time. See “Seeking the Symmetry of Time,” 145. The anonymous early sixteenth-century Kaf ha-qetoret, 665, also mentions the exiles of “France, Ashkenaz, and England.”
3. See the illuminating discussion in Goldberg, Clepsydra, 204–8.
4. Chazan, From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism, xiv.
5. See, for example, Hasan-Rokem and Dundes, The Wandering Jew; Pedaya, “The Wandering Messiah and the Wandering Jew.”
6. On Augustine’s views on Jews and Judaism, see, for example, Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law. See also the helpful review of literature by Jeremy Cohen, “‘Slay Them Not’: Augustine and the Jews in Modern Scholarship.”
7. De Genesi contra Manichaeos I.23, PL 34:190–193, cited from Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 25.
8. See, for example, Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 260–89. On the application of this image to Jews in medieval Christian discourse, see Resnik, Marks of Distinction.
9. Contra Faustum 12.12–13, pp. 341–42, cited from Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 28. See also, Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 270–72.
10. Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 24–54; idem, “Alterity and Self-Legitimation,” 34–40; Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 290–352.
11. Augustine, Contra Faustum 12.23, p. 351, cited from Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 29.
12. Augustine, Contra Faustum 12.23, p. 351, cited from Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 29.
13. Augustine, Sermo 199.I.2, PL 38:1027, cited from Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 36.
14. Krummel, The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, 8–9.
15. See ibid.
16. Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory between Exile and History,” 536.
17. On the strategies employed by medieval Jewish polemicists to account for the length of Jewish exile, see Berger, “The Problem of Exile,” 189–204.
18. See Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity, chapter 8.
19. Chazan, “Representation of Events,” 40.
20. Chazan, “Representation of Events,” 42.
21. Arnaldo Momigliano, for example, maintained that Jews were not interested in the meaning of historical events. See Idel, “Arnaldo Momigliano and Gershom Scholem”; Raz-Krakotzkin, “History, Exile, and Counter-History,” 124–25.
22. See Myers, “Of Marranos and Memory.”
23. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 31. See also the Yerushalmi’s conversations with Sylvie Anne Goldberg reflecting on this subject collected in Transmitting Jewish History, and the studies collected in Carlebach, Efron, and Myers, Jewish History and Jewish Memory.
24. Yerushalmi, “Clio and the Jews,” 613 (emphasis in the original).
25. For a useful overview of the debates surrounding medieval Jewish historiography, see Ben-Shalom, Medieval Jews and the Christian Past, 1–11; Haverkamp, “Historiography,” 836–59; Miron, The Angel of Jewish History; Gribetz and Kaye, “The Temporal Turn,” 347–51.
26. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 11. On this debate, see Myers and Funkenstein, “Remembering ‘Zakhor.’” Yerushalmi later suggested that he “had no intention of saying or even insinuating that Jews had no historical consciousness in the Middle Ages,” and that he simply wanted to make “a clear distinction between historical consciousness and the way it is expressed.” In other words, medieval Jews were perfectly aware of history, but they did not write as historians. Yerushalmi claims that he and Funkenstein were able to come to an understanding about this many years later. See Transmitting Jewish History, 2.
27. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 17. See also, Urbach, “Halakhah and History.”
28. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 2.
29. Ibid., 11.
30. Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes toward History,” 10 (emphasis in the original).
31. Ibid., 28.
32. See the classic study by Yitzhak F. Baer, Galut. For a general study of this theme in kabbalistic texts, see Elior, “Exile and Redemption in Jewish Mystical Thought.” On exile in thirteenth-century kabbalistic sources, see Brown, “On the Passionality of Exile.”
33. See Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory between Exile,” 531; idem, “History, Exile, and Counter-History,” 126–27.
34. Raz-Krakotzkin, “Jewish Memory between Exile,” 534–35.
35. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 36. See discussion in Biale, Jewish Culture between Canon, 44–45. David Biale has written extensively on the theme of counterhistory, but in a sense different from Funkenstein, in that a counterhistory is a form of historical writing in which the historian reconsiders or “transvalues” historical facts and sources that had been marginalized by earlier historians. See ibid., 46, as well as Kabbalah and Counter-History, in which Biale describes Scholem as a counterhistorian who created a new place for neglected kabbalistic texts in Jewish history. On the inclusion of the genre of apocalypses such as Sefer Zerubavel and Sefer toldot Yeshu in Funkenstein’s conception of counterhistory, see Biale, “Counter-History and Jewish Polemic.”
36. Ben-Shalom, Medieval Jews and the Christian Past, 5.
37. See Haskell, Mystical Resistance.
38. Ibid., 5.
39. Scholem, On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism, 78.
40. Ibid.
41. Scholem, Major Trends, 20. Or as he puts it elsewhere, kabbalists writing before the Spanish expulsion were, “on the whole more concerned with creation than with redemption,” ibid., 245.
42. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 20.
43. Arendt, “Jewish History, Revised,” in The Jew as Pariah, 96.
44. Scholem, Major Trends, 30, cited in Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, 97.
45. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, 99.
46. See Huss, Mystifying Kabbalah, 58–59.
47. The works of Yitzhak Baer are a notable exception. See his insightful comments in “The Function of Mysticism.”
48. Yerushalmi offered the valuable insight that “if Jews in the Middle Ages wrote relatively little history, that does not point to a flaw or lacuna in their civilization, nor, as has sometimes been alleged, that they lived ‘outside of history.’” Transmitting Jewish History, 130.
49. Here I follow Garb’s periodization, with the early modern period of Kabbalah beginning in the mid-sixteenth century with the school of Isaac Luria. See Garb, A History of Modern Kabbalah, 1–2; 5–8.
50. While the main emphasis in this book is on texts composed between the early fourteenth century and the generation of the expulsion from Spain, earlier sources are also occasionally cited when helpful for understanding later texts.
51. Fishbane, The Art of Mystical Narrative, 24.
52. Smith, Relating Religion, 48n63.
53. See, for example, Chazan, “Jewish Suffering.”
54. Ibid., 1.
55. See, for example, Baron, “Newer Emphases in Jewish History.” On Baron’s caution regarding the lachrymose approach to premodern Jewish history in relation to his own understanding of the unrealized benefits of emancipation for European Jews, see Engel, “Salo Baron’s View.”
56. Teller, “Revisiting Baron’s ‘Lachrymose Conception,’” 439. See also, Birnbaum, “From Europe to Pittsburgh.”